Walt-O-Matic

In Bruce Schneier’s CRYPTO-GRAM, he includes a reprint of a fantastic article entitled The War on Photography.

Excerpt:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber…

As a photographer, I have been stopped by security guards, questioned why I was photographing a building, and probed who I was working for. Bruce explains while not only is this nonsense, but a waste of resources and money.

The article’s short. Take a moment to read it. It brings common sense back to the equation.

I’m a photographer, and if I take a picture of something, it’s because I like it and want to preserve it for others to enjoy too.

This morning I woke up to an email, it basically read this:

You received this email because you have created an account on Beyond.com. This is a one-time mailer. If you have any questions, please contact us.

I’m thinking to myself, “what?!?” Actually, I’m thinking something quite a bit more colorful.

Then there’s another message from Customer Service.

Then there’s another message with my username and password.

…right.

After deciding it isn’t some email spammer trying to get me to some foreign national site, I login. And what do I find? Someone had screen scraped an old copy of my resume and contact information and made an account for me.

At this point, I figure that anyone with any common sense should completely discount beyond.com’s credibility completely. Here’s why.

First, if any arbitrary user is able to make up accounts for someone else, then clearly the database of provided by beyond.com can’t be trusted. I know my information was wrong, so clearly any potential employer looking for candidates would actually be wasting their time — it isn’t an accurate representation out there. But more over, this represents bad business and security practice if someone other than the actual person can create an account.

Second, let’s assume that such a thing isn’t possible. The alternate conclusion is that beyond.com is scraping the web, making accounts, in an attempt to build a database to give the appearance they are more than they really are. Will some suckers sign on and “correct” the information? Perhaps. But I suspect many others will ignore it. Again, this is really not helpful for anyone trying to use beyond.com for candidates.

Bottom line, either side of the coin — something is wrong. Very wrong.

And, of course, removing that profile is painful and obscure. The help files toss around words like ‘deactivate’ rather than ‘delete’. Such things should make users of beyond.com question the marketing metrics of beyond.com as well.

To me, and in my personal opinion, beyond.com isn’t worth the pixels its printed on. In fact, it sucks.

REVIEW: Walt gives Beyond.com two thumbs down.

A while ago, I thought it might be fun to conduct an experiment and rank anything and everything that Amazon showed me. In fact, the rank wasn’t necessarily even important, I just wanted to see what would happen as recommendation after recommendation was ticked off. Would Amazon’s suggestions get better? Would it run out of suggestions? Would it result in an overflow message?

Well, I ranked over 10,000 items over the course of several months, ranging from computer books to perfume. What I found was that in the short term you could get Amazon to run out of things to recommend you. In the longer term, it got a little better recommending things, though the categories get broader, and if you stumble into a new kind of category, it leaps at the chance to have options again to show you. And, finally, nothing spectacular happened numerically when I crossed five digits.

That said, every so often, Amazon makes some amusing recommendations choices. However, this time it was the presentation that was amusing unto itself that I took a snapshot.

Know those split-books you had as a kid, where the page was divided? You’d get half an animal on top, and half an animal on the bottom. Allowing you to make a giraf-o-potamous, an elepha-gator, or a kanga-mander.

Amazon selected two products and presented them split-book fashion. Order, it turned out, was important:

It’s the top of a woman from 2002, and the bottom of another from 2007, put together it looks like one woman standing behind two cut outs on the product recommendation page. I couldn’t help but give each half five stars for creativity.

Just spent a few minutes circling trying to get Verizon news groups working. Here’s how I did it, you’ll need a news reader - OS X users, go try Unison.

First, I went to Verizon’s start page, http://start.verizon.net/, and discovered I could not login. Since I don’t use Verizon’s email or web services, I had no clue what my username and password was.

Calling 888-553-1555 and asking for Verizon FiOS Internet Technical Support (a 24/7 service) got me through to someone who was easily able to tell me my username and reset my password to an obscure string of characters. He then helped me log on to the web page and change my password, to which I did.

At that point, I made the mistake of hanging up and attempting to connect to the Usenet on my own. It didn’t work.

I called back, and again got someone who was quite helpful, and through some minor experimentation figured out what was going on.

• Some Verizon literature states the server is newsgroups.verizon.net, it is not. The correct news server is news.verizon.net, and you can ping it. The IP address I got was 199.45.49.11.
• Be sure that you don’t enter verizon.com - that will not work. You want dot net.
• Even though I had changed my password, it had not propagated - to access the Usenet, I needed my old password, the one the tech person read over the phone.
• Your username does not include @verison.net at the end of it, don’t type that. It was a bad habit my previous ISP started.
• The news server does not support SSL, stay with port 119.

The tech support person also mentioned there was a page for setting up newsgroups with Verizon FiOS online.

From what I can tell, Verizon has very good news group article retention.

Ever wonder how Google Images seems to zero in on images so well?

I just stumbled into the Google Image Labeler, and it’s addictive.

Google shows you a random image, and you enter in as many keywords as you can think of in real time. Meanwhile, a partner you’ve been paired up with does the same thing. When you match one of your terms, you progress to the next image.

You’re given a finite amount of time to do as may as you can, scoring points as you complete match after match. A score board is kept so you can see your ranking, as well as compete for the top titles.

So, while you’re playing this game with a mystery person on the net, you’re actually seeding Google with image tags, the ones where you both match are given validation that two independent people looking at the same image came up with the same tag.

Clever. And fun!

While browsing through the preferences of NetNewsWire, I noticed in the preferences there was a way to blog a entry of an RSS feed. To do this, the application shelled out to another application to do the heavy lifting.

That application was MarsEdit, a tool that was supposed to make blogging as easy as writing an email.

Problem was, when I went to open my blog in MarsEdit, I ran into a bit of a problem. MarsEdit was inserting %7E in the url, which is obviously the safe hex representation for the tilde sign. (Note, it’s tilde, with an ‘e’, not tilda.)

Look at your web browser’s URL for just a second. You should see something that looks like this: http://www.wwco.com/~wls/blog/

The tilde is a short hand notation that says to use my home directory. The default install of Apache allows this, because user home pages are in physically separate locations from the actual site’s webpages.

MarsEdit was trying to do the safe thing, by encoding something that should always work. And, Apache did the right thing by going to the right web page. Problem is, WordPress does the wrong thing — it reads the URL as-is and doesn’t realize %7E is the same as ~.

MarsEdit is not the only application that does this, many others do: it is the correct behavior. Even links from Digg, will do this on occasion.

I failed to find a decent solution to fix the problem, too. Discussions on the WordNet site seemed to ignore the fact that this was a problem, pointing people to Apache’s pages. Solutions that worked for others, didn’t work for me. Remember, Apache was delivering content, specifically WordPress content, and WordPress couldn’t deduce the entry to show, so it showed it’s own 404. This further supports the problem being WordPress’s.

I tried some mod_rewrite tricks, and those didn’t work. I even tried muddling inside the functions of WordPress, but it seemed that no matter where I made my changes, they either didn’t take or something broke. The page selection code was happening far to upstream, and I was getting bitten by it.

So I resorted to the final hack I knew would work. All WordPress requests go to the index.php file to start with, and it is Apache’s REQUEST_URI which is correctly preserving the encoded string. So, I figured before any other script of function could get its hands on it, I’d change that string.

Inside the <?php … ?> tags, I added this one line:
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = preg_replace( "/%7[Ee]/", "~", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] );

This simply substitutes the %7E back into a tilde, so WordPress gets a familiar string to work with.

This solved my problem instantly. It’s ugly, but it works.

Please if you suffer from this problem because you’re using WordPress in your home directory, make a little notice to the authors, but while you’re at it, express some gratitude too at what a nice system they’ve made.

So, you’ve ordered your free copy of Ubuntu online, and you’ve installed it. Now you want to do something more than browse the web and use office. Here are some spiffy resources:

1. What does Ubuntu give you on the desktop, a quick one page synopisis.
   
2. Some actual printed books:
   - The Official Ubuntu Book
   - Beginning Ubuntu Linux: From Novice to Professional
   - Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook
   
3. The online Ubuntu Desktop Guide, my personal favorite. Start here!
   

Take a quick gander at my web gallery. To be honest, I don’t know what you’ll find up there at any given moment. The reason? I’m having too much fun playing with it!

The album is hosted by Picasa Web Albums, and I already know what you’re thinking: you use Flicker or PhotoBucket. Well this is different.

Much different.

Goggle’s free Picasa, software will scan your system for photos. You can browse them super fast, present slide shows, crop, strighten, fix red eye, correct color, correct contrast, correct brightness, and apply a ton of effects. You can email, print, order prints, make collages, export, and blog. But you can now automatically upload as a Picasa Web Album. And it’s fast.

Hint: make sure you go to Tools / Options.., select File Types, and turn on all the file types, like GIF and PNG, in order to get everything on your system.

OS X users aren’t left out at all, given that Apple’s iPhoto, does the above as well, Google gives you a plug-in that makes iPhoto export to a web album. They also give you an uploader, in the event you just have a folder with pictures.

The web album does all the rest, however — thumbnail browsing, photo selections, order organizing, downloading, publishing, printing, and notifications. Yes, you even get RSS feeds, so people subscribing to your photo album will know when you’ve updated without you having to send an email.

It’s interactive. It’s awesome.

This is a great tool for any digital photographer who wants to go from camera shoot to web pages in a very short period of time.

Walt gives Google Picasa Web Albums a thumbs up!

Seems that there’s an interesting limited print edition of Supercollider.

At the con, it’s $5.

Online it’s $8.

Now shipping and handling is weird.

For one copy, shipping and handling is $1.
For two copies, shipping and handling is $3.

Unless I’ve zarfed the math, that means having them mail you two separate postings is CHEAPER than putting two magazines in the same sleeve.

After reading a Digg story about Google Pages coming back online, I went to sign up, but got a kind letter that they were swamped and not taking additional users at the time.

But this morning I got a nice letter from Google stating they’d finally activated my account and to give it a try.  So, I put together a simple web page.  http://walt.stoneburner.googlepages.com/

The interface provides a simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor in a web environment, which is pretty impressive when you think about it. It’s the kind of be-prepared-to-be-blown-away thing you’ve come to expect from Google.  In fact, Google’s recent blast of web innovations may have made you so desensitized that you look at this one and go “so?”

You get the standard stuff you might expect that you’d see from Google Mail: images, links, bold, italic, bulleted lists, colors, fonts, sizes, justification, with the addition of headings, subheadings, minor heading, and the ability to edit the page’s HTML (nice).

What impresses me is that Google seems to have done all this site design by using Cascading Style Sheets in a very clever and clean way.  You provide the content, and Google provides the presentation.  They’ve got a number of themes and layouts, all independent of your page’s content.

At the moment, doing a view source on a Google generated page reveals a very clean looking, and nicely indented, piece of crisp HTML.  The CSS is readable, and the content is well marked up with DIV tags.

Anyone who’s looked at Google’s other pages knows they compact and often obfuscate their web code.   Consequently the first thing I did with a basic page was save the source for later study.  If anyone can teach us about the web, it’s Google.

Creating new pages is almost like making a Wiki, you give a page title and it figures out where to store the page internally.  It’s also got a nice page management system, where you can edit changes to pages and then publish them.  This way no one catches your site in mid-progress.

In the looking-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth category, there are two potential concerns for Google Page users.

One, because Google Pages is releated to your GMail account, there’s a lot of buzz in the tech news about GMail addresses being easy to harvest.  Take my page, for instance, and it’s easy to figure out my GMail address is walt.stoneburner@gmail.com.  This actually doesn’t bother me, because Google does an amazing job at filtering spam.  Plus, I’ve grown to learn that you can’t hide your email address, because anytime you send an email, or your friends mail you a evil survey, they’ve just published your address all over creation and who knows how many times it will get forwarded because people are too lazy to strip off message headers.  (Please people, stop hitting Reply-All and start trimming out stuff that isn’t content; and while you’re at it, stop including large images in emails - it isn’t necessary.)

Two, this begs for the potential of external advertising to be added to your pages.  So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening.  I’m a big believer that any page I write should have only the content I put there.  Further more, if I happen to participate in Google’s AdSense, then I want my advertisements generating revenue for me.  Now, given that Google knows who I am and what my AdSense account is, there’s no technical reason they couldn’t do this already, assuming I wanted to do that.  But as it stands right now, the point seems entirely moot, given that I haven’t seen a lick of advertising appear in content I’ve made.  I classify this decision as supportive of Google’s “Do No Evil” stance.  Thank you, Google, for making this a non-issue.

I see Google Pages as a means that people can quickly set up simple web pages and get quick results.  It’s not a be-all end-all solution, nor was it intended to be from the looks of it.

For more serious depth, without the hassles of learning HTML, one should delve into Nvu, or, if you got the money for it, invest in DreamWeaver.

So, while I don’t know if I’ll use Google Pages myself for any serious work, it certainly is a good place to send people who just want to slap-dash a a few pages together.