Continue reading »]]> I wanted to update WordPress to 3.2 but hit a snag. Unfortunately 3.2 requires an update to PHP 5.2 which isn’t in stock CentOS. So I followed the instructions here to update to PHP 5.2 using the CentOS Testing repos. However I use eAccelerator which was built for 5.1 so before I could update the PHP packages I had to remove the eAccelerator RPM so I could update the PHP packages without breaking things:

sudo rpm -e php-eaccelerator

Then updating the PHP packages worked fine. But I was without eAccelerator. A kind soul had created packages for 5.2 on x86_64 but I need i386 packages. Thankfully the src RPMs were also posted. So a few minutes later I had my i386 RPM. If you are in need of the eAccelerator packages for PHP 5.2 on i386 here it is. Install it like so:

sudo rpm -ivh php-eaccelerator-5.2.10_0.9.6.1-1.i386.rpm

Everything appears to be back to normal. Performance tidbit – page generation time is 37% faster with eAccelerator.

Continue reading »]]> 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

Continue reading »]]>

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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> I decided to try come out of my cocoon and try all the social networking sites. Of course there are quite a few and the attempts to unify all of these sites haven’t been successful. So for your enjoyment, as I know you all are very interested in my life, I have started using these sites and have pulled the most recent content into my sidebar. Just refresh the page to see the latest on my life.

Twitter will tell you what I am/was doing plus perhaps some random thoughts. I can update twitter via SMS on my cell, the twitter web page, or a dashboard widget I’ve installed.

Flickr will contain recent pics from my iPhone and iFlickr on a regular basis. Occasionally it will contain pics from a real camera as well but for convenience, the cell phone is always at my side.

Last.fm will display recent music I’ve been listening to – once I finish the integration. I have to build up some stats before activating the sidebar widget but expect it to appear in the next day or so…

I use del.icio.us for all of my bookmarking. Following my bookmarking you can see the subjects I’m currently interested in or researching. I still need to add a sidebar widget for recent bookmarks.

I’m going to try to stay active with my social networking for awhile to see if I/you like it. Eventually I may get bored and stop updating but for now it is maintaining my interest.

Continue reading »]]> Went to burn the new Fedora 8 DVD ISO to a disc today. Opened up Toast, selected the image file, and clicked record. Got a simple “No recorder found” error. Couldn’t figure out what it was.

My first thought, one of those SoBs at work wanted to put one in their Dell. Perhaps Josh or Chris P [1]. Opened up System Profiler just to confirm – yup my Macbook Pro still has the superdrive locked safely inside. It was just a little paranoia. Following the same logic I pretty much eliminated Garden Gnomes [?] [?!] from Harry Potter as the source of the malfunction. Only one option remained; I had to look at the other running programs down in my dock.

As lunatic as the idea sounded it actually revealed the culprit. A leftover RHEL 4 VM running in Fusion. Flipping to the window quickly confirmed my beliefs. Fusion had taken control and RHEL had opened what I now consider to be the worst interface for DVD burning I have ever seen. And I’m taking into account command line apps like mkisofs and cdrecord under consideration here too. Anyways, Fusion had passed control of the device directly to the guest and the host could no longer access it, a perfectly valid requirement. I simply laughed at my stupidity – I should never have been running RHEL 4 in the first place [4].

Just thought I would share.

Continue reading »]]> I’m doing a major upgrade of WordPress and was doing it in a sandbox. Unfortunately it needed to upgrade the database table structure. I really didn’t feel like copying and renaming tables and shit so I upgraded the main table structure and made my sandbox active. Sorry for the horrific interface hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Update: Fixed the final annoying bug. It was a problem on the single post view wherein the quicktag.js scripts were referencing a broken quicktagsL10n variable. The variable is now defined in script-loader.php but the manner in which it is being referenced no longer appears valid. The end result was early termination of a DIV tag and it was very painful to track down. I just commented all references to that internationalization variable out of quicktags.js.

Continue reading »]]> I, like every other red-blooded human, hate red light & speed cameras. I’ve never been hit by one personally but I do consider them revenue generating machines. In Maryland tickets from a red light camera don’t even count as a moving violation so how can you claim otherwise? I was very interested to see the new Dutch “indestructible” speed camera:

Road Rage is Futile at Gizmodo

Two interesting things, note the $100,000 dollar camera. Thats a lot of tickets at $25 a pop to pay for that thing. Second, as indestructible as it is a simple can of paint can render it useless. Not that I’m encouraging this type of activity, I’m just suggesting we all drive around with cans of paint in our trunks until the government understands how we feel.

Continue reading »]]> I don’t usually post crap I receive in email but being in the security industry I found this pretty damn funny. Also I think that all this threat level stuff is a crock of shit:

EUROPEANS HEIGHTEN THREAT LEVELS

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved”.
Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross”. Londoners have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz began in 1940 and tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance”. The last time the British issued “A Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

Also, the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert l evel from “Run” to “Hide”. The only two higher levels in France are “Collaborate” and “Surrender.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France’s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.

It’s not only the English and French who are on a heightened level of alert. Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout Loudly and Excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.” Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”

The Germans also increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.” They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose”.

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

And on a lighter note-
The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy….