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MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

College Students Use, Love, Are Aware Of The Limitations Of Wikipedia

How Today’s College Students Use Wikipedia For Course-Related Research: Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility. 52% of respondents use Wikipedia frequently or […] » about 200 words

Scott Smitelli On Hacking YouTube’s Content ID DRM System

Scott Smitelli uploaded a total of 82 test videos and received 35 Content ID emails in the name of science: testing YouTube’s Content ID system. He reversed the audio, shifted the pitch, altered the time (without changing pitch), resampled (pitch and time), added noise, messed with the volume, chunked it up into pieces, and fiddled with the stereo fields. In the end, he found both amusing and frustrating results.

He did his tests about a year ago. Google appears to have caught on and disabled his YouTube account, who knows if they’ve addressed some of the holes in the system he found.

Social Media Usage Stats

Retrevo claims to help electronics shoppers decide what to buy, when to buy, and where to buy it,” so their recent survey on social media addition is probably more significant as link bait than as serious research. Despite my concerns about confirmation bias, I’m as amused as anybody by the numbers. 8% of adult respondents say […] » about 200 words

Addressing Hateful And Libelous Internet Speech In The Post Juicy Campus Era

Juicy Campus is gone, but other sites have taken its place as a hub for anonymous slander around college campuses. Intentional or not, the conversation at these sites tends toward abusive, with successive commenters attempting to one-up each other with each insult. Students targeted by the abuse and defamation have little easy recourse. Some sites […] » about 1000 words

URL Path Bug In WordPress.com Video Server

You’ve got to both respect Automattic for releasing their internal code as open source while also giving them a break for not assuring that it works for anybody else. One of their projects, the WordPress.com Video Server is a sophisticated WordPress plugin that handles video transcoding and offers a bit of a YouTube in a box solution for WordPress.

The bug I found is that the code assumes WPMU is running in subdomain mode, rather than subdirectory mode. This assumption causes an ajax request to go to the wrong URL and return the wrong data. The patch simply applies WordPress’ plugins_url() function that debuted in 2.6.

Rock Out With A Cardboard Record Player

The physical, analog nature of vinyl has long appealed to the DIY crowd. This cardboard record player capitalizes on that to create a direct mail marketing campaign that people appear to actually enjoy receiving. From the description at Agency News: Grey Vancouver created a portable record player from corrugated cardboard that folds into an envelope. […] » about 200 words

The Cost Of IE’s Non-Compliance

Google this month dropped Internet Explorer 6 support in Google Apps and YouTube, and others are lining up at idroppedie6.com. Still, even newer versions of IE suffer from poor standards support, and there are doubts about the just announced IE9. To put this in perspective, BillforBill.com is adding up the costs of all the workarounds […] » about 100 words

WordPress Bug In setup_postdata()

WordPress is built around the Loop, and all the cool kids are using multiple loops on the same page to show the main post and feature other posts. The problem is: WordPress doesn’t properly reset the $pages global for each post. If the post in main loop (or default query) is paged, then all the other posts will show the same paged content as in the main post. I started a ticket and submitted a patch, but in the meantime you might have to unset( $GLOBALS['pages'] ) in your custom loops just before calling the_post().

Consumer Society and Citizen Networks Logo

Consumer Society and Citizen Networks “aims at promoting access of citizens to information on product safety, consumer rights protection, and to results of independent testing, as well as promoting wide public discussion of challenges facing the consumer society in Ukraine.” Their logo, however, is pure genius: Some sketches from logolog showing how it came together: » about 100 words

Christian Madrasas

From the March 2002 Newsletter of The North Texas Skeptics:

In the madrasa, the religious school, I watched and listened as the instructor related his view of the world to the students and the others present. Politics, personal relationships, nations, and the physical world were interpreted in the light of the speaker’s religious teachings. Hinduism and Buddhism were lumped together with that quaintly American religion called New Age. Pagan symbols invoke demons to do dirty work for cultists, and evolution is the root of much of this evil, the students were told. The speaker eventually got around to the Muslims. They, too, were worshipping a pagan god. Muslims! What kind of madrasa was this?

The author, John Blanton, apparently showed up for a special lecture by Richard Stepanek of the Alpha Omega Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Watching Valentine’s Rose Fade

The Georgia O’Keefe view, above, or the still life view, below: This isn’t so much about Valentine’s Day as it is about finally getting setup to do time lapse video like this. More to come at maisonbisson.com/timelapse. » about 100 words

Casey Bisson

What The Critics Are Missing About Apple’s iPad

It’s doubtful that anybody reading this blog missed the news that Apple finally took the wraps off their much rumored tablet: the iPad. Trouble is, a bunch of folks seem to be upset about the features and specs, or something that made the buzz machine go meh. It’s just a bigger iPhone, complain the privileged […] » about 400 words

Organizational Vanity, Google Alerts, and Social Engineering

As more and more organizations become aware of the need to track their online reputation, more people in those organizations are following Google alerts for their organization’s name. That creates a perfect opportunity for scammers to play on that organizational vanity to infect computers used by officers of the organization with malware that can reveal […] » about 300 words

Apple’s 1997 Netbook

A post on thomas fitzgerald.net serves to remind us that Apple released their first netbook in 1997: the Apple eMate 300: …next time you see people ranting about an Apple netbook, remember that Apple had something similar long before anyone even uttered the phrase “netbook.” The device ran Netwon OS 2 with a 20-30 hour […] » about 100 words