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Student Gets Restraining Order Over Facebook Photo

The Associated Press reports a composite nude posted to facebook has earned a UNH student a restraining order:

A University of New Hampshire student got a temporary restraining order against another student who combined an image of her face with an explicit photo of another woman’s body, then posted the composite on his Facebook page.

A judge ordered Owen Sanborn, of Laconia, to stay at least 100 feet away from the woman and barred him from posting her “likeness or name on any Internet site,” pending a final hearing.

The woman’s lawyer, Bryan Gould, said the posting was the latest episode in a series. Social networking sites like Facebook can encourage stalking-type behavior, he said.

“It’s sort of a way for someone like this to sort of test the waters, and that’s what makes it dangerous,” Gould said.

Google To Psyc Profile Users!?!

There it is in The Guardian: Internet giant Google has drawn up plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games. Yep, “do no evil” Google has filed a patent on the process of building psychological profiles of its users for sale to advertisers. Details […] » about 400 words

RedHat 5 SELinux Gets In My Way

Ack, my WordPress suffers connectile dysfunction on a fresh install of RedHat 5! Not only did I get the above message, but dmesg was filling up with errors like this: audit(1179258445.529:38): avc: denied { name_connect } for pid=3332 comm=“httpd” dest=3306 scontext=user_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:mysqld_port_t:s0 tclass=tcp_socket It turns out that I was getting stung by SELinux, which is […] » about 200 words

Customer Relations Done Right

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. Her photos are amazing, and it’s clear a lot of people agree. That’s the easy part. Then two problems arose: First Rebekka discovered that somebody was selling her photos for profit, and she posted about it. The community was shocked, and angry. And then, and […] » about 600 words

WordPress 2.2 Out

WordPress 2.2 is out and available for download now!

I’m excited because this version includes widgets (by default), some XML-RPC hooks to edit pages (so you don’t need my hacks), a switch to jQuery from Scriptaculous (Matty got me excited about this), full Atom support (enough of the different versions of RSS!), and the ability to set your MySQL character encoding (go UTF-8!).

If that isn’t enough, 2.3 is planned for release in September.

PlasticLogic’s Flexible E-Paper Display

Plastic Logic is a developer of plastic electronics – a new technology for manufacturing (or printing) electronics. The Plastic Logic approach solves the critical issues in manufacturing high resolution transistor arrays on flexible plastic substrates by using a low temperature process without mask alignment that is scaleable for large area, high volume and low cost. […] » about 200 words

People Ask Me Questions: Web Design Software (or is it Website Management Software?)

The question:

What’s a good user-friendly Macintosh web development program? A friend called. She’s thinking of buying Dreamweaver, but is afraid it will be overkill. She found Frontpage to be easy and needs something similar.

My answer:

If the intent is to design individual pages on an unknown number of sites, then I don’t have a recommendation.

If the intent is to build a site (or any number of sites), then I’d suggest looking at WordPress. It’s an open source CMS, and there’s a hosted version that makes it easy to try out at WordPress.com.

What I didn’t say, well, it was buried in my answer, was that I see a big difference between designing a page and building a site. The tools are very different.

WordPress Strips Classnames, And How To Fix It

WordPress 2.0 introduced some sophisticated HTML inspecting and de-linting courtesy of kses. kses is an HTML/XHTML filter written in PHP. It removes all unwanted HTML elements and attributes, and it also does several checks on attribute values. kses can be used to avoid Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Buffer Overflows and Denial of Service attacks. It’s a […] » about 300 words

It’s Not About Technology, Stupid

Inside Higher Ed asks Are College Students Techno Idiots? Slashdot summarized it this way: Are college students techno idiots? Despite the inflammatory headline, Inside Higher Ed asks an interesting question. The article refers to a recent study by ETS, which analyzed results from 6,300 students who took its ICT Literacy Assessment. The findings show that […] » about 300 words

CentOS 5 Released

At work I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but my personal stuff is served from machines running CentOS. Both distros were just bumped to version 5, bringing with them support for current components of the LAMP stack. I care because I want Apache 2.2.4, and while it’s pretty easy to get MySQL & PHP 5 […] » about 300 words

DeWitt Clinton On The Birth of OpenSearch

OpenSearch is a common way of querying a database for content and returning the results. The idea is that it brings sanity to the proliferation of search APIs, but a realistic view would have to admit that we’ve been trying to do that since before the development of z39.50 in libraries decades ago, and the […] » about 900 words

David Halberstam On Competition

Speaking at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism last month, David Halberstam struck the chord of competition journalists must struggle with. As a newspaper man who started at the smallest newspaper in Mississippi and worked his way up to the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Vietnam War, he […] » about 300 words

MySQL Error 28: Temp Tables And Running Out of Disk Space

Bam: MySQL error 28, and suddenly my queries came to a stop. Error 28 is about disk space, usually the disk space for temp tables. The first thing to do is figure out what filesystem(s) the tables are on. SHOW VARIABLES LIKE “%dir%” will return a number of results, but the ones that matter are […] » about 300 words

Miles Hilton-Barber Flies Blind From Britain To Oz

I learned of it last night on The CBC’s As It Happens: Miles Hilton-Barber, blind since age 30, has flown from Biggen Hill, south of London, to Gosford, outside Sydney, by ultralight in a journey that took almost two months. Aviation regulations required he take a sighted co-pilot, but in the As It Happens story […] » about 300 words

PHP Libraries for Collaborative Filtering and Recommendations

Daniel Lemire and Sean McGrath note that “User personalization and profiling is key to many succesful Web sites. Consider that there is considerable free content on the Web, but comparatively few tools to help us organize or mine such content for specific purposes.” And they’ve written a paper and released prototype code on collaborative filtering.

Vogoo claims to be a “a powerful collaborative filtering engine that allows Webmasters to easily add personalization features to their Web Sites.”

Remixability vs. Business Self Interest vs. Libraries and the Public Good

I’ve been talking a lot about remixability lately, but Nat Torkington just pointed out that the web services and APIs from commercial organizations aren’t as infrastructural as we might think. Offering the example of Amazon suing Alexaholic (for remixing Alexa’s data), he tells us that APIs are not “a commons of goodies to be built […] » about 400 words

Nukerator, We’re Nukrawavable

Will, Cliff (both above), and I recorded this song in one take in late 1999. Though, calling it a “take” is overstating it. We were beyond silly drunk and lacked any talent for the task, but we had a mic in front of us, a guitar, and a willingness to open our mouths and let […] » about 800 words

NCAA Set To Ban Text Messaging Between Recruiters And High School Students

College sports are big business, so recruiting student athletes is big business. The NCAA limits the times coaches and recruiters can call or visit athletes, but text messages are all fair game. For now. The Chronicle of Higher Education explained in an October 2006 story: Before Chandler Parsons committed to play basketball for the University […] » about 300 words

Are We There Yet? Still Waiting For Decent iPod Car Integration

Even Bob Borchers, Apple’s senior director of iPod worldwide product marketing, calls most iPod car setups an “inelegant mess of cassette adaptors and wires.” Indeed, while Apple aparently doesn’t want to get into the car audio business, they do want to improve the in-car iPod experience: What Apple really wants you to buy is a […] » about 700 words

Please, Not Another Wiki

Ironic secret: I don’t really like most wikis, though that’s probably putting it too strongly. Ironic because I love both Wikipedia (and, especially, collabularies), but I grit my teeth pretty much every time I hear somebody suggest we need another wiki. Putting it tersely: if wikis are so great, why do we need more than […] » about 500 words

Claims of Prior Art In Verizon/Vonage Patent Infringement Case

Vonage has been saying Verizon’s patent claims are overly broad for some time, but now people have dug up some prior art. One of the patents Verizon is complaining about is #6,104,711, what they call an “enhanced internet domain name server.” In short, it’s all about linking phone numbers to IP numbers, and Jeff Pulver […] » about 300 words