In a social networking site that is truly extensible and robust we wouldn’t feel the urge to move on. Restarting on a shiny new site or culling or pruning your “friends” on an existing site wouldn’t be necessary. But we have been misled. Social networking doesn’t have to be all or nothing. We shouldn’t feel constricted in how we express ourselves on a given site. And to exacerbate the issue, some of us are misleadingly tied to our online social networks. For example, some people feel obligated to update their profiles constantly or to accept friendship/relationship requests (regardless of their relationship to the requester), particularly those that rely on the Internet to construct their professional persona [0]. The bottom line: these social networking sites [1][2] continue to fail us as a society.

Why do so many exist? Why do so many fall by the wayside as we progress? Why does each and every attempt at social networking eventually fall to its successor?

The answer to the first question is simple - new social networking sites crop up because of need or because of fad. No one site has all the required features for its user base. Why do social networking sites fail as time progresses? Well, some would argue the maturity level of the user base has changed. Or, more often these days, perhaps the site’s interface is more Web 2.0 friendly, and everyone wants to be on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Your friends jump ship, you jump ship. Finally, the user’s social network constructed on the site changes. As you mature, you leave one social network for a new social network. For example, the mass migration from Friendster to MySpace and now to facebook. Still others would argue the usage of the site is tied to user interface: this argument being that facebook is more “mature” than MySpace. The end result of this interface maturity is the same as others. Some people leave, others follow. Some even suggest a class bias between the sites, thus alluding to the fact that as one’s class changes, so does their social network (and thus the social networking site to which they should belong)[3]. Finally, perhaps we are merely sheep, following one another from one social network to another.

Regardless of the specifics, the users of these sites inevitably leave, thus forsaking their previously well-developed social network on MySpace for a new social network they must construct on facebook. And this is doubtfully an isolated incident - as soon as facebook’s yet-unheard-of young competitor, social.blah.org.net.com.dontcare, appears on the scene, another mass migration will occur. Or perhaps the reason for this migration is the users of these sites are leaving to shed - shed previous acquaintances, previous friendships, previous lifestyles.

This mass migration from social network to social network is merely a side effect. It is tied to the way those websites create implicit relationships. They ask, “Did you know this person?” while forgetting to ask, “How would you like to know this person NOW?” Life experiences previously allowed us to prune our network based on lifestyle changes. You grow, you change, your relationships change, perhaps you even shed relationships - that is the natural evolution.

Current social networks inhibit this natural pruning and the evolution of real-life social networks[4]. This is no longer the case with the rise of facebook and MySpace. But perhaps you don’t want to “shed.” Perhaps you like your old friends, but not in “that way.” Perhaps you would like tighter control of how your information is sent to your social networks, or more specifically, how your “social flows” are constructed. While such pruning of social networks has been proposed[5], it is not effective in that it is not driven by you, but by simple inferences about the populous as a whole. And besides, who says you actually want to “prune?” Perhaps you’re just lacking fine-grained control.

Only you can define how you want your social flows to actually work in the present, and in the future. Or rather, you should be able to define your social information flows and the social networking site should support you in doing so. And eventually your social networking site should create these flows for you, based on your existing flows. You shouldn’t have to rely on some coarse-grained all-or-nothing approach. Such is the case with current social network sites.

You add a friend, you remove a friend. That is all you can do. They can read everything, they can write to everyone. Coarse-grained filters aside, they are similar to you in that they lack controls over what information flows to whom, or more precisely, how they socialize in general. You are in or you are out. There is no in-between on current social networking sites. There are filtering tools in facebook[5], but for the most part they are coarse-grained with respect to the filtering of content, not quite capable of expressing how your information is shown to your social network.

In addition to the coarse-grained nature of social information flows, there is the problem of duplicated information being presented, cluttering the consumable information on individual sites [6]. This often results from people wanting to share information with multiple social networks, a side effect of wanting to maintain multiple online personas. Some people create multiple personas to communicate with multiple distinct social groups online. For example, my Twitter network and my facebook network are distinct. Yet at the same time, most of the information I’m posting makes it to both networks. Thus, people following me on Twitter and facebook must consume the information twice, once on Twitter, once on facebook.

To reiterate, social networking sites currently provide coarse-grained control over who sees what parts of your profile [7]. They aren’t totally living in the dark ages. The downside to the current approach is still the fact that is remains all or nothing. There exists no middle ground in which you can control which information flows to which person. Sure you can set up groups, but who wants to go through all of that work?

A novel proposal is in the works. One that allows you true flexibility in constructing your online social network. One that doesn’t represent an all-or-nothing approach to social networks. One that doesn’t leave you questioning your own social network members and how they interact with you. Instead of a wide-open network that exchanges all information to all people, you will be able to create your own network and define how the information flows between the people or groups in your social network. Finally, you will be able to define your own social matrix, and you will be able to evolve your social matrix as your life changes. You won’t have to shed or prune friends [8]. This network will be able to learn or make inferences about your socialization style. And it will eventually learn how you socialize based on numerous aspects of your life.

Thanks to Vitak, Brandon, Josh, and Justin, for the inspiration for this post. Oh, and IPAs.

[0] About Spencer
[1] Facebook
[2] MySpace
[3] Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
[4] Scott Brown on Facebook Friendonomics
[5] The Future Of Facebook’s Feed Is Granular Filters
[6] Eliminating Cross Posting in Social Networks
[7] 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
[8] Pruning Social Networks Using Structural Properties and Descriptive Attributes

A few things all of us are probably interested in:

• SSD Write Amplification:
  
  
  http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2329594,00.asp
  
  
• Journaling and write performance in ext4:
  
  
  http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/01/ssds-journaling-and-noatimerelatime/

The bottom-line as far as wear and tear: vfat is basically the same as a journaled FS from a wear-leveling standpoint, both are worst case. Thankfully vfat, being the worst case, forced the manufacturers to deal with the problem early. So all those outlandish claims I made about the world being flat and NTFS on thumbdrives are unfounded. Ted’s evidence does not speak to the amount of effort it takes to create an NTFS thumbdrive in Windows, however

The past few days people in Linux blogosphere have been bringing back up the noatime/nodiratime mount options. These options disable the updating of file and directory access times. On many standard systems when you read file a “last read,” or access time, timestamp is written to disk. Disabling the writing of access times can provide performance increases in some conditions. Probably in a lot of conditions. Disabling the writing of these access times can be accomplished with the noatime and nodiratime mount options on a typical FS on a Linux system. Well in OS X and hfs+ nodiratime doesn’t exist but noatime does.

These options are old news to some. I had used them in Linux in the past - heck I think it was even in the standard Gentoo install docs - but I had never them a second thought since I moved to OS X. If you know me personally you know I can’t leave something untweaked. And those recent discussions got me to thinking…

Be forewarned, I haven’t gone to great lengths to explain the concepts of the notes below so if you’ve never seen a terminal this isn’t going to be comprehendible.

I wanted to mount my filesystems with the noatime option in OS X to disable the updates to access times for files. Problem is that, at least in 10.5, OS X no longer honors /etc/fstab for system disks, only for automount disks.

After wrestling with it for awhile I gave upon trying to find a location where I could specify mount options for system disks. I decided to just remount the disk later with the correct options. I created a StartupItem entry to remount the disk. I created a directory:

# mkdir /Library/StartupItems/spencer_boot

Then I created the StartupItem plist. Pretty straight forward.

# cat /Library/StartupItems/\
spencer_boot/StartupParameters.plist

{
Description = “Spencer’s Boot Script”;
Provides = (”spencer_boot”);
OrderPreference = “None”;
Messages =
{
start = “Starting Spencer’s Boot Script”;
stop = “Stoping Spencer’s Boot Script”;
restart = “Restarting Spencer’s Boot Script”;
};
}

Now I needed the shell script that would be run on boot.

# cat /Library/StartupItems/spencer_boot/spencer_boot

#!/bin/sh

. /etc/rc.common

case “$1″ in
start)

ConsoleMessage “Starting Spencer Boot: remounting root fs noatime”
mount_hfs -o noatime /dev/disk0s2 /

;;
esac

exit 0

This solved the problem for the root fs but I also use Filevault. If you don’t use Filevault you can stop reading here. How would I go about this? Same problem as before, no where to add mount time options. Additionally the fs is mounted upon login, not boot. So our previous method of creating a StartupItem won’t work. We’re going to have to do it later after it has been mounted - again.

<redacted> I did have some other information here but after review I wasn’t happy with advocating the “hack” I’m using. But the gist of it is to run something like this: /sbin/mount -u -o noatime,nosuid,nodev /dev/disk1s2 /Users/spencer/ after the volume is mounted. This happens after you enter your password. So a good place would be login items if you can figure out how to run mount as root from a user’s startup scripts.</redacted>

After you login and the system has completely finished running your startup apps open a terminal and type “mount”. You should see “noatime” listed as a mount option for you system and Filevault disks.

spencer_boot shell script
StartupParameters.plist for the spencer_boot StartupItem
remount_filevault for noatime in Filevault volumes

My favorite BASH shell completion of all time is hostname completion for all of my favorite commands:

SSH_COMPLETE=( $(cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | \
cut -f 1 -d ‘ ‘ | \
sed -e s/,.*//g | \
uniq | \
egrep -v [0123456789]) )

complete -o default -W “${SSH_COMPLETE[*]}” ssh scp sftp rsync nmap traceroute ping nslookup dig host nmap nc

I find most of the hosts I ssh into I use for basic network diagnostics. So performing completion for traceroute, ping, etc based on the contents of known_hosts works great. Just add it to your .bashrc.

Update: 2008/11/04

I’ve modified it to support completion of SVN commands leveraging the hostnames expanded during the SSH completion above:

SVN_COMPLETE=( $(svn -h|grep -e '^ '|awk '{ print $1; }') $SSH_COMPLETE )
complete -o default -W "${SVN_COMPLETE[*]} ${SSH_COMPLETE[*]}” svn

Adding these may lengthen your shell exec tasks.

I test at work. I work from home. But I will not test from home. Fix it yourself. (trademark pending).

I was trying to connect to RHN from Yum/up2date in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. I kept getting fatal invalid SSL cert errors. The strange part - out of all of the machines I tested it was only occuring on a single RHEL 5 laptop. The really strange part - it was happening on the host as well as inside a guest in a VM running in VMware Player.

If you get this:


[root@rhel5-vm ~]# yum search openoffice
Loading “rhnplugin” plugin
Loading “installonlyn” plugin
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 85, in main
base.getOptionsConfig(args)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 199, in getOptionsConfig
errorlevel=opts.errorlevel)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 134, in doConfigSetup
self.plugins.run(’init’)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/plugins.py”, line 153, in run
func(conduitcls(self, self.base, conf, **kwargs))
File “/usr/lib/yum-plugins/rhnplugin.py”, line 88, in init_hook
login_info = up2dateAuth.getLoginInfo()
File “/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/up2dateAuth.py”, line 139, in getLoginInfo
login()
File “/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/up2dateAuth.py”, line 98, in login
li = server.up2date.login(systemId)
File “/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/rhnserver.py”, line 64, in __call__
raise up2dateErrors.SSLCertificateVerifyFailedError()
up2date_client.up2dateErrors.SSLCertificateVerifyFailedError: The SSL certificate failed verification.


Check the date/time on the machine. Mine was a VM syncing w/ a host clock with a bad CMOS battery. Caused it to think it was 2005 and the cert wasn’t valid yet. Also explains why it happened in both host and guest.

Ran into a problem with Exchange. I created a server-side rule to place spam messages in a folder that didn’t exist. All spam was instead going to the root folder, the folder above my inbox. Well if you use Entourage to access Exchange you will not be able to access this folder. If you go into Outlook Web Access (OWA) you can navigate to the root user folder by clicking on “Folders”.

Unfortunately by this point I had like thousands and thousands of messages. There is no “Delete All” option in OWA. Craptacular. So moving on I mounted the server via WebDAV in finder (cmd+k). The URL to mount will look something like:
http://exchange.servername.com/exchange/username

If this folder is large navigating to it in Finder will be a horrific experience. Open Terminal.app and navigate to the mountpoint.

~/> cd /Volumes/username

Once again, if the folder is large rm *.EML will not work as the wildcard expansion done by bash will exceed the length of the command-line itself (32K by default IIRC). Try this:


/Volumes/username> SRC=./*.EML
/Volumes/username> for i in $SRC; do rm "$i"; done


This will cleanup most, if not all, of the mess. Some files will not be removed due to escape characters and escaped escaped characters etc. Open the folder in Finder and delete the rest. There are def. more elegant ways to handle this from a scripting standpoint but this was quick and worked.

Just finished updating WordPress to 2.5 from 2.3.3. Ran into a few problems. Normally I diff the old version of WP to the new version and just apply the generated patch to my “custom” install. Somewhere along the line I must have deleted extraneous files like license.txt because the patch failed to apply because some files listed in the diff didn’t exist in the directory I was applying it to… this is the first time this method of non-destructively updating Wordpress had failed me. I could have edited the patch by hand but it was 100K lines so I wasn’t particularly interested in this method.

So I finally ended up actually following the upgrade instructions, deleted wp-admin and wp-includes, and copied all the files from 2.5 into my existing install. The database update took about 1 second to complete. The upgrade was technically complete at this point but of course it wreaked havoc with my theme.

One thing about the Wordpress theme architecture is that if a failure occurs in a custom theme it kinda falls back to the default theme, this is due to CSS I guess. Problems with a theme, like my Binary Blue bastardization, also show up in the strangest ways.

For example, my last.fm plugin’s cache directory got blown away. The plugin could no longer find the image cache and was throwing a (fatal?) error to Apache’s logs. The site was being styled by what looked like a combination of the default classic and my own customized Binary Blue theme. What I do to fix this is an utter hack, I move the default theme out of the way and symlink the directory of my theme to wp-content/themes/default. Then when things go wrong it is still pulling from my theme. Then I go back and fix the actual problem.

The upgrade is complete. It took me about 30 minutes to migrate total. But I am more concerned about “corner cases” this time since my traditional method of just merging in the diff between releases failed. I also haven’t stress tested all of the widgets and plugins. Overall I would suggest upgrading. The experience was worse than usual, but not terrible.

I just noticed when writing this post that the “Preview this Post” feature in WP 2.5 must pull from the auto-saved draft. When I click preview I don’t see the content that hasn’t been saved yet. Small potatoes, remind me to open a bug.

Update (4 hours later): I figured out why my theme was getting butchered into some combination of the default and my own - I had some absolute URLs in my header.php where I forgot to use the template path variables.

I know the idea of robots in space sounds cool but lets think this through.

First of all the robot is fucking huge, “11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet and a height of 12 feet”. It doesn’t have legs but with arms like that you don’t actually need appendages on the bottom half. Plus when you’re in space legs aren’t especially useful. I hope they programmed “I will crush you pesky human fly” into it’s voice synthesizer.

Second, robots will take over the world. It is just a matter of time. I had come to grips with that. But now we’re handing them space on a silver platter. Brilliant.

Third, they named the thing Dextre and call it Dexter. Dexter, as in the socialized sociopathic serial killer from the book and more recently Showtime. Thats right, they named the ginormous metal machine of death after a serial killer. If you’re going to create a peaceful, human loving robot you name it Buny or Elff or some other cute variation on something “nice”. If you’re going to create robots bent on obliterating humans, a la Dextre, then this might be an acceptable naming convention. Also note that Dexter the serial killer is nice and gets along with people - right up until he kills them. So don’t trust this Dextre lest you fall into a similar trap.

Fourth, last week we, the US, are telling China and the international community as a whole we’re not trying to militarize space. This week we’re launching Terminator’s great grand pappy. Sounds like militarization to me.

Finally, this (selective) quote from astronaut Garrett Reisman troubles me: “we’re worried it’s going to go run amok and take over the space station or turn evil”. If astronauts are worried than I’m worried.

Updated 2008-03-16 to add pictures of our destructor.

It’s been three years since we upgraded the hardware that hosts our various sites. I contacted my provider (Crucial Paradigm) and got some competitive offers. Stefan, my friend in Berlin that I split the server with, and I agreed on the following specs:

• Athlon 64 x2 4000 (2 cores @ 2.1GHz, 512K L2 each)
• 4GB RAM, 160GB SATA, 100Mbps
• CentOS 5
• Apache, BIND, MySQL, Postifx, Spam Assassin, ClamAV, Cyrus IMAP
• SELinux enforcing

Once again this is going to be a dedicated, remote, hosted server. A few days later and they contacted me with the login information. I’m going to describe the move from a high-level. I’m not going to go through the individual config file modifications or how to dump a Cyrus database.

Read the complete article »

I’m visiting Australia for business. This is only my second trip down here but last time I was relegated to Surfer’s Paradise and Brisbane. Great, beautiful beaches but it was still a beach. This time I’m down in Canberra (then Melbourne, then Sydney) and was lucky enough to visit over Australia Day (American’s think the Fourth of July).

Believe it or not this was all burnt to a crisp back in 2003.