The Graduate School of Education and Information Studies has given us server space to host a MediaWiki version of the Informatics Wiki that has been on PBwiki. Wow, that sentence sounds funny with all the wikis.

I’d like to get upset at MediaWiki naming conventions a bit. This forced capitalization of article titles and usernames drives me crazy. I really hate seeing my username as Tkeswick instead of tkeswick. It’s just ugly. I typed it all lowercase on purpose, because I wanted it that way. Whoever came up with the idea that people would like their usernames to be automatically capitalized didn’t think it through.

I first noticed this sort of thing when using Google Docs & Spreadsheets a while back. Still, I notice that on the documents I have shared with other users, the first letter of their email address account name is capitalized which just looks bad and inconsistent to me, especially when people use the convention like me of first initial, last name. The last name does not get capitalized. Why capitalize the first initial if the last name will not be capitalized as well. It ought to just remain in the same format that the user types it in without introducing all this mixed-case ugliness.

Today in the San Francisco Chronicle is a little tiny feature about a photoset on Flickr that my friend Jessica created. The only reason that it became a set was because I mimicked one of her photos and then Tamiko caught on. I’m only bitter now because my photo wasn’t included in the ones that were featured.

John Curley, who put together the little blurb, seemingly didn’t bother contacting anyone involved. Excellent journalism skills.

OG bedhead:

UPDATE: After emailing John Curley he called me an “unsung hero” so all is forgiven.

technorati tags:sfchronicle, bedhead, flickr

Blogged with Flock

I woke up this morning to find about 18 emails in my Gmail Inbox that were spam. I had caught a blurb on Slashdot yesterday about a new wave of spam but didn’t think it would get to me. It did. The way it seems to be working is they paste a bunch of text from a novel of some sort and then attach an image with the spam message in it.

It bothered me so much at first that I considered scrapping my Google Account under this name. I’ve gone years on this account without getting much spam. The funny part is that as soon as I stopped giving the address away on even sites I semi-trusted and started using Bloglines disposable email addresses for every sign up form, I started noticing more spam in the Spam Folder. I’m sure the spammers sell lists to each other and that is why it is growing.

The good news is that Gmail seems to learn quickly. After marking all of those messages as spam and then a couple more that trickled in this morning, Gmail placed one in the Spam Folder on its own. There is hope.

technorati tags:email, gmail, spam

Blogged with Flock

Tonight I watched a bootleg copy of X-Men 3. I don’t feel bad about it. I would have rented it at some point anyway.

I subscribe to Netflix. I can get any movie or TV show in the mail at any time. Downloading a movie or a TV show is simply a more efficient means of me getting what I normally would have received in the mail anyway.

Now, I’ve been a Netflix customer for many, many years. I’m on the plan where I get to have four DVDs out at once. The turnaround time for me getting movies is about three days. I mail one back and two days later a new one arrives. Theoretically I could stagger my DVD rentals so that I would have a new one coming in every single day. I don’t do this for a few reasons, but mainly because there is not that much stuff I want to watch.

My understanding of the movie rental business is that the rental companies buy each copy of a DVD from the studios for hundreds of dollars because they are expected to recoup their expenses with many rentals. The movies are already paid for and my monthly bill to Netflix takes care of me paying them. I’m paying for at least one DVD per day by that logic and the studios have my money in their pockets.
I certainly do not download and watch that many shows or movies in a month. Even if my method of getting my Hollywood entertainment doesn’t conform to the industry’s preferences, the ones who are in the business to profit are still coming out ahead with me.

I do not really see any problems with my way of thinking about this, but I would love to hear another take on it.

technorati tags:netflix, filesharing, downloading

Blogged with Flock

On Saturday I attended the first ever WordCamp. Based on the notification emails going out about it, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Only 15 hours before it was slated to start, Matt sent out a message saying that more than a dozen sessions still needed discussion leaders. It made me wonder what we were in for.

The event actually turned out fairly well I thought. I mostly stayed in the Main Hall for the sessions in there. The Second Room seemed to be discussions for more advanced users.

My only criticism about WordCamp would be the organization of the sessions. It would have been nice to let us know as users which ones were geared towards different experience levels. I heard people say that too much of the technology-speak was over their heads. Next time an effort should be made to distinguish different types of users. Have more sessions for the people who know only the basics–and clearly tell us which sessions are for whom.

Anyway, here is very short synopsis of what I got out of the sessions that I sat in on:

Widgets Showcase, Andy Skelton - Widgets are cool. They make your sidebar easy to configure.

Blog Promotion and Writing a Compelling Blog, Prince Campbell - Write about other people so they will want to come read your blog. People care about themselves the most; play to that.

State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg - WordPress needs help with support. Work on it is constant and enthusiastic.

Blog Architecture, Aaron Brazell - I didn’t get anything out of this session, but it wasn’t necessarily Aaron’s fault. The conversation became dominated by nonsensical audience members’ questions.

WordPress as CMS, Mark Jaquith - This session showed me the potential WordPress has in making all kinds of great sites that are not blogs. I really hadn’t thought about it before.

Blogs and Journalism, Om Malik - He basically said bloggers aren’t journalists unless they put in the effort to do fact-checking and follow-up phone calls. They are separate spheres.

SEO & WordPress, Neil Patel - I learned that SEO means search engine optimization. The worst things you can do are sleazy tricks. Search engines are smart.

Plugin Showcase, Niall Kennedy, et al - I was getting really tired at this point. I didn’t write down the address for the coolest plugin I saw: one that gathers all the info on the web about a commenter on your blog and displays it in a box on a mouseover. Oh well.

After all that I went to dinner with some friends and some people I had just met. I went up with Elea and Melinda, met Lauren, an Internet acquaintance, and her friend Anna, and was good to catch up with Will again. I didn’t take too many photos during the day, but by far the best one was at dinner. I don’t even need to say any more.

technorati tags:wordcamp

Blogged with Flock

A little while ago I posted on my MySpace blog about Mozy, a cool little online backup company. I’ve been quite impressed by their service so far.

Well, the people who work there started a blog. The posts so far are funny, a tad sarcastic, and even informative.

My favorite part so far has been the little jabs at the government in a post about encryption:

We’re a little unique here in that we give our users the option to provide their own private key (a passphrase, a picture, a music file –whatever) which is hashed to generate a 448-bit key for encryption.This key is stored on their PC, and we don’t have access to it – it’stored on the PC and is never transferred to our servers – which means that we can confidently protect data from both kid sisters and government agencies.

When debating which aluminum foil brand to wrap their hard disks in they recognize the threat posed by the government and cooperating corporations:

This is a tough one. On the one hand, you’ve got Reynolds – which is an old standby. On the other hand, perhaps it’s safer to use a more generic brand, like from Target. Reynolds is made in Virginia, which is home to all sorts of government agencies, and who knows how they’ve meddled with the manufacturing process of this aluminum foil. But the Target brand is manufactured in Minneapolis, which was the home of the Cray supercomputer, and everyone knows they were in cahoots with the government, specifically the NSA.

I hope they continue in this vein. I will love it.

Technorati Tags: mozy, blog

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While at work at another school the other day I became frustrated with the effort required to keep up to date with all of my friends’ sites and various other sites on the web that I read. I had access to a computer so I began checking out feed readers. I tried out the interface or at least looked at the website on many of them. I was using FeedBurner as a reference because they give a whole slew of options for subscribing to feeds when you pull one up at the site.

In the end, I settled with Bloglines. It is a web-based feed reader that is incredibly easy to work with. Although I initially resisted feed readers in general because I didn’t like having to click into different folders and having to view each feed separately, I may come around because Bloglines makes it so easy. My prior preference was for aggregators in the fashion of LiveJournal Friends pages or the feed aggregator built into Flock. When I install the Bloglines Toolkit for Firefox it makes life so easy by putting a “Subscribe to this Page” option in the context menu and putting a notifier in the browser window. I know right away when something new is published.

A feature that I just explored last night has proven quite useful already. Bloglines allows you to set up unlimited numbers of email accounts with them, which is particularly useful for subscribing to mailing lists. Mailing list subscriptions will never flood my email account anymore, and I don’t have to worry about being spammed.

I know Jessica started using Bloglines yesterday when I was telling her about it, and I noticed that Jacob uses it. I recommend it to anyone who tries to stay on top of many different sites.

Check out my subscriptions here. Subscribe to me here.

technorati tags: bloglines, feeds

Many people get up in arms about technology companies keeping records of their users information and accuse them of being Big Brother.

The distinction that must be remembered is that in a ‘Big Brother’ scenario, lack of choice is implied. If a user voluntarily gives up his or her information to a company for safe-keeping or whatever other purpose, there is no coercion involved. The government is the entity capable of coercion. They are the true ‘Big Brother’.

So when PayPal customers put their trust in the company to safeguard their data and personal financial information, PayPal has incentive to honor that trust in order to retain customers. But when the IRS goes after PayPal seeking customer records, users may get confused about who the bad guy is. They may be upset if PayPal gives up the information, and rightfully so, if it is without a fight, but it must also be understood that the company is faced with a threat from the government if it does not cooperate. The government is the aggressor, PayPal and its customers are the victims.

On a related note, that is what excites me about the prospect of a consortium of Google, eBay (owner of PayPal), and Amazon bidding on large portions of the wireless spectrum in order to bring the internet to more people, or at least be a different choice for the rest of us between the duopoly of Comcast and AT&T. In my view, this could only be good for customers because of competitive reasons as well as the possibility that AT&T is already in bed with the government.

Technorati Tags: google, ebay, amazon, paypal, government, irs, bigbrother, at&t

As most people know who might ever read this page, I work in schools as a substitute teacher. Every once in a while I get lucky and there is a computer in the classroom that doesn’t require a logon or, like this one, has only Windows 98 which is easy to get around.

When I’m at school I need to pass the time once I get the kids to work. I often like to read the news and my friends’ sites. Today I tried to go straight to the sites of Jessica, Jacob, Akiko, and Elea but with no luck and got the message:

The page you requested has been blocked because it contains a banned word.

The funniest thing was that I was able to get directly to Andy’s site, which has the subheader “Andy ‘Bad Motherfucker’ Smith”.  His site was blocked at a different school the other day.

…I hope this post doesn’t help the DoJ in reviving the Children’s Online Protection Act by pointing out flaws in filters…

I just found it amusing that in my Spam box on Gmail there was a Picasa newsletter. Picasa is owned by Google. Does this mean they might be spreading themselves too thin? I hope not. I still think they put out great products for free.

technorati tags: google, picasa