Paul O'Flaherty

Twitter Can’t Remember Lists?

I’ve been running into the phenomenon of people who are not on Twitter lists showing up in the results when the lists are clicked.

Have a look at the screenshot below and you will see what I mean. None of the people above @John_C are on the “Daily Shite Authors List” yet there they are on the list page, clear as day.

I’ve also been seeing something similar happen when I view my @ replies, where there are results that quite plainly are not replies to me in any way, shape or form.

FYI Inquistr: Auto Refresh Is Intrusive, Makes You Look Shady

Trust me the numbers are fine!

It’s a rare occasion that I break away from reading an excellent post to write a post of my own. Usually I wait until I am finished, have digested it and then put fingers to keyboard.

My friend, Steven Hodson, wrote what has so far, been an excellent post called “The return of the LP and the future of book publishing” for the Inquisitr, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read it all because I was rudely interrupted by The Inqusitrs need to auto refresh their pages.

I don’t run into this problem too often and normally Inquisitr posts aren’t lengthy enough for me to ever encounter it but I have to ask why sites make their pages auto refresh?

For those of you who don’t know you can make any web page automatically reload after a set period of time by putting a small piece of code in the header like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="900" />

Inserting code like this is good for only two things:

1. Updating a page that pulls some sort of dynamic content and would otherwise require the user to hit refresh.
2. Artificially inflating your page view numbers.

FYI: Unless it’s for point number 1 all it does is piss people off.

What People Don’t Get About The iPad

Service or Computer?

Let me preface this post by saying that I will not be buying an iPad (not in the foreseeable future anyway). I own an iPod Touch and that is the end of my Apple affiliation.

I’ve been reading all the complaints about the iPad: No flash, no multitasking, it’s just a big iPod Touch, it’s a fanny pad sanitary towel in disguise etc…

What nobody seams to realize is that the iPad, just like its baby brethren the Touch, is not a computer (not in the traditional sense), it is a service.

It’s much like a TV. You can turn it on and watch or play what you like, but that’s it. You can watch channel 1 or channel 27 and you can install more channells (applications) when you take a bigger sattelite or cable subscriptions(the App store).

The iPad is not meant to be a desktop, laptop, netbook replacement.

It’s a stylish little one trick pony for people who like to be locked in and like to do one thing at a time.

Do You Know Where Chuck Norris Is?

Where am I?

A bit of a laugh for Saturday. I just couldn’t resist posting this!

Go to Google.

Type “Where is Chuck Norris” into the search box.

Hit the “I’m feeling lucky!” button.

Enjoy

SourceForge: Nobody Is Asking Why Now?

Bound by the law?

Sourceforge is now blocking access to sites from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

In all the commentary I am seeing, nobody has asked the very simplest and perhaps most obvious of questions: Why now?

These terms have been in place for nearly 7 years now. (The Entities list has existed since 1997)

Lets forget for the minute that one hell of a lot of the software hosted by Sourceforge is developed with the help of, or even entirely by, people living outside the U.S.

Lets also bear in mind that SourceForge has claimed that this is because of the “transfer and export of certain technology” to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list, yet doesn’t give any details about what this technology is?

Surely everything on SourceForge can’t contain dangerous technology? Why not just restrict the programs which contain those technologies?

Not to mention the fact that everybody knows that any idiot, never mind some evil axis human overlord wannabe wouldn’t be able to use a proxy or Tor to get past the IP filtering!

Or is there something more at play here?

Google and China perhaps? Did the U.S. government pay SourceForge a call and “politely” remind them that these laws exist? Maybe because the government wants to show that it is willing to enforce it’s laws and send a subtle hint to China that the hacking of U.S. companies and theft of their I.P. might get them added to these lists?

I find it very hard to believe that the guys at SourceForge have had a sudden moment of conscience and, out of the blue, decided to comply with laws that have existed for almost 12 years and to their own terms and conditions which they have ignored for the past 7 years.

When Will The Web Stop Being U.S. Centric?

I’ve given out before about the fact that America and American internet users are not the end all and be all of the web.

In fact, if every single internet user in North America were to shuffle off this mortal coil simultaneously then the internet would loose less than 1/7th (one seventh) of its user base.

Just compare the numbers for 2009 as posted by Royal Pingdom and ask yourself why people look to America and the U.S. market for everything when even the European market has almost double the users?

1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).

18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.

738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.

418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.

252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.

179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.

67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.

57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.

20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Privacy Isn’t Binary. It Isn’t Yes Or No

Tell or Don't!

You’ve got  real life friends so you know that privacy is never a simple “yes or no”, “tell or don’t tell” matter.

There are things that you tell your spouse or best friend that you wouldn’t tell anybody else. There are things you would say to some friends and not to others. When you are out a party there may be pictures that you would let your friends and your brothers see, but would result in a serious ear bashing from your mother.

I’ve always been a strong proponent that our online activity is an extension of our offline activity. That online relationships mirror the dynamic and complex relationships that exist in our offline lives.

Believing that, I find it counter-intuitive to have social networks like Facebook push us further and further into a binary way of thinking about privacy. Essentially boiling privacy down to a “post it or don’t” issue. Forcing us to treat all of our online “friends” as equals.

As much as we may not like to admit it in front of our friends, we know that even our offline, real life, friends are not equal in our eyes. That is why the terms “best friend” and acquaintance exists.

Instant messaging clients, with the exception of ICQ (or at least it used to be when I actually used it), do the same thing. We are either online or off. Visible or invisible. Not a case of  visible to some and not to others. We’ve all put our phone on silent from time to time to “ignore” that call from a friend or family member. Or simply turned it off. While we might not want one person to know we are online, or available to talk, we might and sometimes do desperately need other people to know we are available to talk and that we want to talk. Skype are you listening?

With social networks, instant messaging and almost every other form of online communication pushing us into a binary way of thinking about privacy, we have to ask ourselves if that is what we really want? Would we stand for it, or be able even to successfully get through our lives if privacy in real life was dual choice only?

Tell everyone, or tell no one?

Shouldn’t we be pushing for finer grained control and groups rather than simply eradicating privacy? Or do we want  everyone to be burdened with a lot more secrets and worries that they would never be able to get off their chest and for confidentiality to cease to exist?

Remove Lady Gaga from Google And Other Search Tips

Search Better!

It can be very frustrating to click through page after page of results on Google to to find the result you were searching for.

Contrary to belief of many “non-geek” types the issue is not with Googles result but rather with how we search for them. A lot of us search for just one word when we search, I know I do, and the differences between searching for “car”,  “honda”, “red car” and “red honda civic” are substantive.

If you tried searching Google for the terms above I’m sure you’ve already figured out that the more descriptive you are the better the results will be, but being descriptive is not the “end all and be all” of efficient searching.

Google (and most other search engines) accept a lot of search commands, or operators, which you can employ to further narrow the results.

For example, earlier today Sara was searching for “romance” while researching material for Everyday Love Stories. Much to her chagrin she kept getting results involving Lady Gaga, so I suggested using the “minus” operator to remove Lady Gaga from the results (now if only that would work from the air waves).

romance -”lady gaga”

There are a lot of operators which work on most of the major search engines such as: wildcard (*), OR, phrase search (“phrase”) etc…

If you you want to make your searching more efficient and by extension your day more productive a good place to start is Google Search Basics help page which lists a lot of the operators and explains their usage.

Happy searching.

A Good Place To Host Podcast MP3’s

That’s all I’m missing to start podcasting again.

With a little help from Sara, I spent tonight getting my podcasting rig working and set up for properly recording podcats over Skype (or any input) and it looks a heck of a lot better than it does in the picture below now that I’ve tidied all the cables away.

Once I’ve located a good place to host the MP3’s for the show, then I’ll start cranking out the podcasts again.

Any recommendations for a good host?

Getting the gear set up

WWWBing.com – No That’s Not A Typo

I love it. Patrick McAuliffe from Kerry (check the whois) registered wwwbing.com and has it redirecting to Google.com.

Simple, genious and I love it.

I am wondering two things though:

First, how did Microsoft not own that already? I thought it would be obvious to most people that when you own a major search engine (or any site) that you also buy as many of the typical typos variations as possible.

Second, how long before Microsoft tries to get a hold of it and take it down?