Advogato blog for dmarti

MLP: webkit is your friend

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:04:30 GMT

Off to SCALE tomorrow and still getting some slides together for the Git panel. I wanted to include some screenshots of ikiwiki-powered web sites, and this came in surprisingly handy: wkthumb. Wrapper script: thumbnailer. (example).

Did I mention: Hey, kids! ☞ Git Panel ☜

More random links piling up to get that cleaned out before SCALE:

Things You Really Need to Learn by Stephen Downes

GIF 2.0? Christopher Blizzard explains the HTML5 video problem.

Chicken heaven must be a crowded place.

Hey Japanese Whaler Dudes, Stop Your Pathetic Whining (via ElementalMom)

Tripod.com founder Bo Peabody: Facebook And Twitter Will Always Be Crappy Businesses. (Not convinced? Cory Doctorow explains further.)

Best Linux book for getting started?

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:06:34 GMT

Got a question through Aardvark, now part of Google. What's the best book for getting started with Ubuntu? (Ubuntu may or may not be the best distribution for getting started. To decide on that, you need to figure out where you're going to go with support questions, and find out what the helpful people there run.)

Anyway, I try to take anything that I post to someone else's web site and put a version here, too. Other people's web sites go away or change their policies.

As far as I know, Mark G. Sobell's A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux is still the best for learning the fundamentals, such as the shell and setting up network services. You'll need to look at the online docs for items that have changed since the book came out.

Bonus link: Why the Economics of The Aardvark Acquisition Make Sense by Stephen O'Grady. (Startups launch. Established companies make things that are "Five Years Away".

Hogs

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:04:26 GMT

As we all know, swine are intelligent and thoughtful animals. They're omnivores, and resourceful rooters. It turns out that the same qualities make them excellent bloggers. Lately, the hog blogosphere (hogosphere?) has been full of complaints about the new privacy policy at Hormel. Apparently, hogs are concerned that the company's new technology, Hormel Buzzsaw, has an inadequate and dangerous privacy policy.

The problem is that the hog is not the customer at Hormel. The hog is an ingredient. Now, the hogs probably have a point about the unfairness of their situation, since they can't choose who's going to eat them, but people can choose what companies they're going to tell about themselves.

If someone is giving you something for "free" on the Internet, you're not the customer. Someone else is the customer, and you're the product. And if you're part of the product it's a waste of time to think like a customer. There's some information I'm willing to give away, such as links to my favorite place for burritos or blog entries promoting my upcoming conference panel, Feb. 20 in Los Angeles. But mail? No, that's mine.

Avoiding "free" services doesn't mean that you have to pay entirely in cash, of course. As Rick Moen suggested, the information and software is out there so that you can develop the skills to do it yourself. You know how some stores near the US/Canadian border will take both countries' money? Network services are like that, only you have three ways to pay: money, skill, and privacy.

git push to Google Buzz

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:32:11 GMT

Oooo, shiny, Google Buzz. But who needs yet another communications medium to post to? What you want to do is write something, git commit, git push, and everyone gets your stuff the way he or she wants. Brad Fitzpatrick explains how to connect your blog or some other feed to Google Buzz.

Then, naturally, you maintain your blog in ikiwiki, and it all works. At least, it should. This is a test.

Speaking of git, if you're coming to SCALE, don't miss "Git Tips and Tricks." Yes, we've got Shawn Pearce and Jason Haslup confirmed, and I'm working on one more. (bonus link: more SCALE announcements)

MLP: DNS, git, money

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:10:20 GMT

BIND? nscd? Google Public DNS? Unbound? Rick Moen explains DNS in The Village of Lan: A Networking Fairy Tale

Make music, not debt: Free Pick Machine! (via thereifixedit.com)

Moving Your Money Can Have a Real Effect on Big Banks

Boy Scientist Sent for Counseling

The Era of Black Boxes by Hovik Melikyan (via Bruce Schneier)

"We view git as the SCM solution of the future at Eclipse and hope to have it up and running for as the main SCM repository for as many projects as possible by the end of 2010." -- Mike Milinkovich (via Shawn Pearce) (the Eclipse Foundation needs to hire a paralegal who knows Git, though.)

Short web comic: The Invaders

Ben Adida: Don’t Hash Secrets.

Should I delete this?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:10:20 GMT

Someone sent me a copy of the great science-fiction story "Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling. (review). The story is about an alternate economy and information sharing, but it's not labeled Creative Commons and doesn't have any permissions attached to it. As far as I know, this story does have the first example of one person making a copy of free software for another. But I did a web search and haven't found a copy that's licensed for redistribution.

I own (bought new if it matters) the paperback story collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future in which it appears, so I have paid for a copy. But I didn't pay for this copy. Did someone commit copyright infringement by sending it to me? Probably. If I had typed in a copy myself, would it be permissible, as space or format shifting? Sure. But should I delete this copy?

(I wonder what would be involved in starting a company that sells legal DRM-free copies of science fiction stories. "WOULD YOU BUY IT FOR A QUARTER?" would be a good name for a company like that.)

QoTD: Simon Johnson

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:10:08 GMT

"Have we really reached the situation where the Senate as a body and individual Senators – accomplished men and women, who stand on the shoulders of giants – must bow down before financial markets and high-ranking executives who are really just talking their book?" — Simon Johnson

MLP: web this and that.

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 00:07:29 GMT

Meagan Fisher: "a website’s design should begin where it’s going to live: in the browser."

Good look at a network of comment spam crews: Internet Crime Gangs Manipulate Public Opinion (via John Robb). These aren't just going for traffic, they're actually disparaging a business with privacy complaints.

How to plot a point on a Hilbert Curve.

Go Lego A/V Guy!

Playing with Web Storage. Try Pedro Ladaria's text editor demo, and see the HTML5 compatibility table to see where it works.

And the "apt-get install" of the week: sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf. That's a simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt. Fully scriptable and make-friendly, and you can feed it a user stylesheet to tweak the format for print without changing the original HTML. Just what I needed.

Webspam feeds?

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:06:14 GMT

So here's the basic idea. You have a web site with a bunch of user-generated links that may or may not be spam. These links can come from anywhere: comments, wiki edits, trackbacks, referers. Meanwhile, on some other site, a page on your site could be the target of a spam link. (For example, somebody makes an account, and puts a bunch of crap in his or her profile page.)

So you want to find the spammy links on your site, and you want the rest of the webmasters in the world to clean up the spammy pages on their sites.

So what do you do? Well, when you clean up, you post the URIs that you don't like to a link reputation clearinghouse. (You can also post the good URIs that appear on your site as good, to help the clearinghouse decide that you're a legit user, and to help prevent them from showing up as spam.) You might report to more than one clearinghouse, since they all accept basically the same HTTP POSTs. All easy to automate as part of the moderation process in your CMS if you want.

The clearinghouse does some digestion (naturally, spammers are going to try to clobber the clearinghouse with bogus reports, and naturally, some links are going to be reported the wrong way by mistake.) Each clearinghouse does its own digestion and reputation magick internally.

Then the clearinghouse generates RSS feeds by domain. You subscribe to one or more feeds from one or more clearinghouse services, and when you see a possibly bad page on your domain, you check it out. You can pick and choose among clearinghouses, since some will end up doing better digestion than others.

Big web sites that host a lot of user-generated content might want to run their own clearinghouses. Another logical place to put a clearinghouse is at a site that does link sharing or URL shortening. Individual webmasters might subscribe to just one clearinghouse, and clearinghouses might subscribe to each other.

Here's a simple, easy-to-use clearinghouse: Aloodo. Right now it's seeded with good and bad links from this site, along with a few other public sources. There's also a simple way to query the good and bad lists, so, for example, you can check out a new user's profile page and forum postings before deciding whether to make them public. If you have a webspam problem, let's talk about how this could be useful to you—either as a customized subscription or as an in-house install.

QoTD: John Gruber

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:04:20 GMT

"Why would I publish content using a technology that I personally block by default? I truly hope to see Flash fade as the de facto standard for embedded web video, and I’m willing to put my markup where my mouth is." -- John Gruber