internet

What Not To Do When You Lose Your Mobile

Maybe this is just a pet hate that is exclusively mine, but there’s something that really gets on my nerves and it’s happened under one of the two scenarios below at least three times within the last month. It’s as if the very second you let people loose on social-networking site Facebook they immediately lose all common sense.

Here’s the scenario: you lose or break your mobile phone – I’m sure it’s happened to us all at some point or another – and as if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re stupid enough to not keep a backup of your contacts (virtually every phone can do this now, so there’s no excuse for the vast majority of people). Well, fair enough: like I said, this could happen to anybody, although you’re already due a talking-to by me about keeping your information backed up, and if it’s been stolen I’d quite like to know what information you had about me on there at the time. But in the most part you have my sympathy… so far.

How’re you going to get all those carefully-collected numbers back in your phone? Well, here are two wrong ways to do it. I’ll explain why later:

Send a bulk Facebook message out to everybody you know.
Create a Facebook group.

So why are they wrong?

Bulk Facebook Messages

The first and biggest reason that either of these methods are wrong is pretty fundamental, though: you’ve lost my mobile number, that’s your problem, so why don’t you make some of the effort to fix it. My mobile number is on my Facebook profile. I put it there so that you wouldn’t ever have to e-mail me if you wanted it. It’s there because improving connectivity between and sharing personal information with friends is entirely what Facebook is for. So next time you misplace your address book – which you failed to back up – why don’t you do some of the leg work and actually go to my profile and look it up for yourself.

If you can’t see it on my profile, it’s invariably because I’ve used Facebook’s (now-quite complex and powerfu) privacy tools to hide it from you because I don’t want you to have my mobile number. So there you are. If you’re on my Facebook friends list you should never, ever need to send me a Facebook message to get my mobile number.

Secondly, sending a bulk-Facebook message is wrong because it almost always leads to retards “following suit” like this:

$\'Broken Mobile - Need Numbers\' message on Facebook$

I don’t mind getting James’ new mobile number over a Facebook message. That’s fine. I shan’t be responding, because he ought to be bright enough to get my mobile number for himself, considering it’s only one-click away. But by bulk-sending it to everybody he knows, he’s underestimated the stupidity of his other friends. About 50% of the people he sent it to sent their mobile numbers back to the list by using “Reply All.”

Reply All is the only option available, and so a new Facebook user could conceivably make this mistake. But then a handful of James’ other friends make the same mistake, having seen one of them do it already. Wait, did I miss something? Are these people all patients at some mental hospital that James used to volunteer at, or something?

I don’t know who any of these people are, aside from the fact that they’re James’ other friends. I’m only permitted to read the profile of one of them, and he isn’t sharing his mobile number with me there, so I can only assume that they don’t want me to have their number. But then they’ve just turned around on that idea and given it to me. What?

I’m half-tempted to set up a handful of fake Facebook accounts just so that I can send a message back to each of the idiots like this:

I Need All Your Mobile Numbers

Between You, An Identity Thief, A Stalker, Somebody You’ve Never Met, Their Ex-, Every Man, and His Dog.

I’ve lost my mobile (again!) and can’t be bothered to look up your numbers on your profiles or contact you individually. Please use the “Reply All” form below and tell me and all the other people in the list above exactly how to contact you and harass you whenever we get bored.

Facebook Groups

The other, even more irritating way that people handle this self-inflicted (let’s face it, paper and pen is a backup if there’s no other way) tragedy is by creating a Facebook group exclusively for the purpose of re-harvesting their friend’s numbers. I’m sure you’ve all seen this happen at least once.

And it happens a lot: log in to Facebook and search for “lost mobile” in the Groups list. You won’t ever find out how many idiots do this, because Facebook only lists the first few hundred results. But there are lots. Lots and lots.

The first thing that’s wrong with this approach is an issue which I’m sure I’ll be one of very few people to care about, but it’s not the biggest problem: Facebook “Groups” are, by definition, according to Facebook’s own documentation, collections of “people with similar interests” and “places for discussion.”

I’ve never joined one of these “I’ve lost my mobile!” groups, because:

I’ve never lost my mobile.
Even if I had, I wouldn’t realy say I have an interest in lost mobiles. I have no intention to discuss what having lost a mobile is like, or even what my friend having lost their mobile is like. And I’m pretty sure that isn’t what they want, either.

Not only is creating a Facebook group a mis-use of the service – this isn’t what groups are for! – but they suffer from all the same problems as Facebook bulk-mailing all your friends (i.e. if they reply, they all see each others’ numbers) but even worse. Most people create these groups but don’t make them “secret,” so anybody can join. Want a few hundred numbers to sell to an SMS-spammer? Just browse Facebook for awhile. Worse still, these groups don’t disappear until (after) every single member has left. So your phone number, which you stupidly put in the group description (if you’re the idiot who lost your phone) or on the wall of the group (if you’re one of their even-bigger-idiot friends), will be visible to pretty much any Facebook user, indefinately. Give yourself a pat on the back. I suggest using an ice pick.

What Little Timmy Should Have Done

Never let it be said that I’m overly negative when I criticise morons. I’m more than happy to educate them and I won’t even demand the right to use a heavy, blunt object to help the knowledge sink in.

Here’s what you should be doing in order to show off your uncommon sense. You can start today!

Back Up Your Mobile Phone

Just stop and think for a moment what your mobile phone is worth. I don’t mean the cost the insurance company will pay when you drop it in a pint of cider a week on Friday, I mean the value of the data inside it. How long would it take you to put all those numbers back in? If you’re a heavier user of the geekier features of modern phones: what about all the photos, e-mails, text messages, music, and the carefully-tweaked settings that make the icons have a purple background and that Crazy Frog video ringtone?

Most modern mobiles can be connected to a PC by a cable (which sometimes comes free with the phone) or by Bluetooth, and free software (often from the phone manufacturer’s website) will let you make a backup copy of everything on your device. It’ll take seconds, and doing it as infrequently as four or five times a year will save you a universe of hassle. Just look for a feature that will enable you to read all the data from the screen of your PC if you need to – for example, if your replacement phone isn’t compatible with the data from your broken old handset.
Pretty much every mid- or high- end Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson handset and some LG and Siemens handsets support a technology called SyncML (there are links to lists of compatible phones at the bottom of that page). Using this technology and a free on-line provider like many of these ones, you can back up your entire address book to a safe online repository over the Internet. Sure, if you’re on Pay-As-You-Go you’ll pay a few pence to do an Internet upload, but isn’t it worth it even if you just consider that the price of insuring your data?
Even if you’re using an ancient handset, consider keeping a paper backup (little black books are very affordable) or a typed-up list in a spreadsheet (Google Docs provides a free online spreadsheet). Or, if virtually all of your friends are on Facebook or another social networking site that allows the exchange of contact details, encourage them to keep their mobile numbers on their profile; suitably locked down to “friends only” (or even just to specific friends), of course.

What To Do When It All Goes Wrong

Everything goes tits-up from time to time. Suppose you lost your phone in a house fire that destroyed the PC the backups were on, too. Or maybe your phone got stolen and the new “owner” was so malicious he used your SyncML connection (if you’d saved your password on the phone) to overwrite all of your online backups with pictures of Lolcats. Or perhaps you didn’t keep backups at all (so long as you promise to keep backups next time, it’s not so bad – we all have to learn the hard way once, I’m sure, how important backups are). What should you do?

First: take responsibility. There is always something you could have done to keep a better backup. Therefore, it’s your job to do as much of the legwork of getting your numbers back as you can. Don’t make it your friends’ problem. Go through your friends’ Facebook profiles and retreieve as many phone numbers as you can before you start bothering them.

Second: get numbers in a sensible way. If you have a few close circles of friends, it’s pretty trivial nowadays to Bluetooth/MMS/Infared hundreds of contacts from phone-to-phone, and this can be a great way to get yourself re-connected. Call up Barney, and say “Hey, Barney; let me buy you a pint tonight and take a copy of everybody in your address book – I’ve been an idiot and I didn’t keep a backup before I lost my phone the other week.” Barney’ll drink his pint and press some buttons on his phone while saying things like, “Do you know Robin? Marshall? Lily? Have you met Ted?” and these people will magically appear in your address book.

There’s almost certainly be people you can’t re-get the numbers for in this way, but you can still be sensible about it. Send messages individually to those few people and ask for their numbers, but not before double-checking that you actually need them. If you can’t think of a reason you’ll ever call them within the next year, why are you carrying around their number anyway? Unless they’re somebody you’d call “in an emergency” you can always look them up when you need them. That way, you won’t spend you entire time with a number in your phone that could go out of date (people change numbers all the time) and you’d never know until you came to phone them, six years down the line, and you’d have to look them up anyway. Save yourself (and them) the bother and keep them out of your book. It’s a liberating experience to tidy up your contacts list.

And finally: if you get a new mobile number with your new phone, drop a text message to everybody who might want to know it, but make sure you say who you are because you won’t be in their address book with your new number, yet. The number of text messages I’ve got in my life from a number unknown to me that read “Hey there! This is my new number! Bye!” is staggering.

Some people are just too stupid to be allowed mobile phones.

ICANN Invent A Whole Universe Of Mess

In case you hadn’t heard/didn’t care, ICANN have authorised the creation of arbitrary privately-controlled top-level domains. So what does this mean?

Well, the happy hippy theory fun about it all is that suddenly there’s the capacity for pretty much anybody (well, anybody with a particularly deep wallet, and – for now – a demonstrable business plan) to set up their own top-level domain. A top-level domain is the bit at the end of a domain name, like .com, .net, or .org. The idea is that this will increase the number of providers from whom you, as a consumer, can choose to purchase your domain from, as well as giving you more choice – someday, I’ll probably get the opportunity to buy dan.q, for example, or scatman.dan.

Of course, it’ll take a long, long time before people start understanding that these things really are domain names. There’s still a certain stigma attached to not being a .com, because many web users will guess the dot-com domain names first. The success of the “no www.” campaign has been hampered mostly because people do think, in general, that web site addresses have to start with www. and have to end with .com, .co.uk, or another one of a handful of extensions they’re familiar with. If Jo Public sees e.mail written on an advertisement without (or perhaps even with) a http://, www., or both, in front of it, they won’t have a clue that what they’re looking at is a domain name. And how often do you actually use a .biz or a .mobi, and they’ve been around for a while now?

A bigger problem, though, is the capacity for phishing attacks. Apart from their ability to sue my arse off, what’s to stop me becoming the registrar for .microsoft, .paypal, or .natwest. If I sent a large spam attack out suggesting that people get a critical update from https://www.windowsupdate.microsoft/, I’ll bet that at least 50% of the people who click the link will go on to download whatever malware I want them to and become part of my zombie network.

It’ll only take one such event – and perhaps less – for ICANN to start being very, very careful about who it gives top-level domains to. And with all of the applications they could potentially get, they’ll quickly get bogged down in administering the top-level domain system. There’ll be backlogs of months or even years on new top-level domains, a lack of trust of them, and people will still continue to play with .coms for decades to come.

It’ll all work out in the end, I’m sure (although I anticipate a punch-up between ICANN and New.net – which ICANN will win, of course – in the near future). But I’m just not sure we should be letting the unwashed masses loose on their own TLDs quite yet.

Firefox 3 “Download Day”

Downloaded your copy of Mozilla Firefox 3 yet to help them make the world record? I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the early betas and I’ve got no qualms about recommending it wholeheartedly. The awsomebar is simply that: awesome, the speed and memory usage have become far better than the previous version, and the care and attention that have gone into the little things – like the fact that it now asks you if you want to save passwords after you’ve seen if they were correct, not before – really do make this the best web browser I’ve ever used.

Go download it already.

Abnib Quotes

It only occurred to me the other week that there are lots of people who would probably want to know about Abnib Quotes – people, even, that are quoted on it – that don’t. And that’s probably my fault for not blogging about it.

So yeah – there’s an Abnib Quotes. It replaces the long-defunct RockMonkey wiki quotes pages, and it’s got cool Web 2.0 features like tagging and voting and Facebook integration and all that bollocks, and you, yes you, should be using it. If you haven’t already, go take a peep. If you haven’t in a while, go vote on the dozens of new quotes that have appeared since you last visited, and don’t forget that you can subscribe to the feed and get updates in your favourite newsreader.

The Danville Public Service Announcement

I don’t visit Facebook often. In fact, I usually only log on once or twice a month to clear out the billions of requests to install applications (and block those applications) that people don’t seem to have noticed that I never accept, or to check up on a mis-placed phone number or e-mail address for some infrequently-contacted friend. But in any case, I’m not up-to-date with what’s commonplace on Facebook any more. But this unusual bulge in my list of friends amused me for a moment:

$Dan\'s musical facebook friends$

That’s four friends, in a row, who all set their “statuses” to something resembling the lyrics of a well-known song. Kieran may well be the colour of the wind, of course, but he’s still a ginger. I’m not in a position to comment on Owen’s body odour, and I’m doubtful that Adam is the one and only (although it’s genuinely possbile that there’s nobody he’s rather be). And Gareth’s apathy is… well, pretty much standard.

But it doesn’t seem so regular that a block of people adjacent to one another on my seemingly-randomly-sorted (I assume there’s some kind of clever hashing going on at the back-end for speed, or something) would all independently (none of them know one another, to the best of my knowledge) choose to have their statuses inspired by songs. Nobody else on my friends list is demonstrating this.

Perhaps I’m seeing patterns where they don’t exist, like seeing the face of Jesus in a balding dog’s back, or something. Just thought I’d share.

It’s been a busy week or so. Last Wednesday I went out to the first night of the Ship & Castle‘s real ale festival with Penny and Ele, on account of the fact that (a) Yay! Dozens of cask-conditioned beers! and (b) I hadn’t seen much of either of them for an aeon or two. The pub was completely packed, but that didn’t stop us from sampling a good selection of the beers and ciders on offer. Once one became available, I stole a stool to sit on.

Now it seems that some strange wizard must have enchanted that stool on some previous visit to the pub, with a mysterious spell of popularity, because it suddenly appeared that every fucker in the pub wanted to talk to me. The folks I knew (one or two more turned up), the folks I barely knew (“I’m sorry, but I can’t remember how I’m supposed to know you?” territory)… even strangers seemed to know who I was or, failing that, want to. Two people said “hey, you’re that guy with the blog,” as if that in some way cuts it down in this town (abnib disagrees). One woman waved as if I’d known her for years but I can’t place a name to her face. Another chap – his flirtatiousness outdone only by his drunkeness – almost coerced a blush out of me with a particularly charming compliment. And it just kept on going, and going…

When the pub finally kicked us out (and we’d added Lizzie to our party), we hunted for another pub but without success, and so we scooped up beer and wine and took the party to the living room of The Cottage, where we talked all kinds of bollocks, drinking and listening to music – and joined for awhile by Tom, who came in looking drunk and stained with ash, drank half a bottle of beer, urinated in the back yard, and left again – until it was getting close to 4am and I thought it really ought to be time for bed, considering my planned early start at work the following morning. How Penny survived (she started work even earlier) I haven’t a clue.

A major difference between being in your late twenties and being in your early twenties, in my experience, is not one of having less energy for a late night (or early morning) of drinking, but one of responsibility. As a 27-year-old, I’m quite aware that I can still survive an all-night party (although it’s getting harder!). But when somebody spontaneously suggests something like “Let’s stay up and party and watch the sun rise,” instead of saying “Yeah!” I say, “Hmm… I’ve got work in the morning… maybe…” It’s easy to be made aware of this distinction when you’re in a student town, as I am, and it’s easy to be made to feel even older than I am. On the other hand, it helps to give every opportunity to pretend I’m less aged than I actually am.

So then Thursday was the anticipated long day at work, followed by a quick dinner before a rush up to the Arts Centre to see Steeleye Span, on JTA‘s recommendation. Steeleye Span are a “proper” folk rock band: y’know, they’ve had every single member replaced at some point or another and still keep the same name, like Theseus’s ship, and they’ve written songs that they don’t play any more, but that other folk bands do. That kind of definition. They were pretty good – a reasonable selection of songs from the usual slightly saucy and sometimes unintelligble varieties that they’re known for, and a particularly strong finish to the concert with a rousing sing-along rendition of All Around My Hat (which, I later discovered, they played as an encore the last time my dad saw them, about a decade or more ago – I guess that’s the third characteristic of a “proper” folk rock band: that your parents have seen them perform, too).

By now, I was getting to a point where I was tired enough to not be making much sense any more when I talked (as if I ever do), and I slept well, although not for long, because I had to make an even earlier start at work on Friday morning to make sure I got everything I needed to get done done before travelling up North in the evening.

So yeah: Friday evening we travelled up to Preston and had pizza with my folks, and then on Saturday morning I found myself taking my sister Becky‘s place in the BT Swimathon. She’d been suffering from a lung infection for a week or more, now, and had to pull out, so – despite having barely swum at all for several years – I pulled on my trunks and a swimming cap and contributed 1750m to the team effort. And then dragged my body out of the pool just in time for Claire and I to rush off to Formby for her godmother’s funeral, which is what we’d actually come up to the North-West to do.

$Dan\'s Swimathon 2008 medal$

Oh yeah, and I got a medal, which I’ve been wearing ever since.

I can’t say much about Claire’s godmother’s funeral, because I only met her once, and then only briefly. Her husband – she’d been married for 52 years; they’d been teenage sweethearts – was quite obviously finding her death difficult, yet still managed to deliver a beautiful and moving eulogy for his dear departed wife. Apart from the religosity of the service (not to my taste, but I suppose it wasn’t really there for me anyway) it was very good, and the church building was packed – this was obviously a popular woman.

Her body seems to be going “on tour”: she’s having a second service – the actual funeral – in Norfolk today. I wonder if it’ll be as full. Not many people get two funerals. Perhaps the popularity will wane after the first. On the other hand, you might get groupies… seems to be what Claire’s doing, as she’s down in Norfolk now and presumably went to the second funeral, too.

Later, we found ourselves in Manchester. We’d hoped to go guitar-shopping (Claire’s looking for a new one), but ended up there just barely in time to eat some noodles and go to meet my family, and each of my sister’s boyfriends, at the Odeon IMAX cinema to see Shine A Light, the Rolling Stones concert film/documentary. The film was… better than I would have expected, and the resolution of the IMAX filmstock really showed during long pans and high-detail closeups on the band in concert, although I wasn’t particularly impressed with the editing: too many cuts, too much crossing the line, and (on a huge screen) almost nauseating thanks to the bumps and bounces the cameras made. It was also a little too-much concert and not-enough documentary, perhaps because the band have never really interviewed very well. In one old BBC clip, Keith Richards is asked what has brought the band it’s initial success, and he simply shrugs. In another – in the early 1970s – Mick Jagger‘s only answer about the band’s future is “I think we’ve got at least another year left.”

$Dan\'s mum is the superstar at Mario Party 8$

A few games of Mario Party 8 with my family later (one of which, amazingly, my mum won!), and we were back on the road. Claire dropped me off at Birmingham New Street station so I could catch a train back to Aberystwyth, as I needed to be back at work this morning, and she carried on to Norfolk to visit her dad and to attend the other half of her godmother’s funeral.

My journey back to Aberystywth was pretty horrendous. Trains are cancelled between Shrewsbury and Aber right now, and replaced with a bus service, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been on a less pleasant bus journey in my life. Five-seats wide, I was squished into falling half-off my uncomfortable seat even sat next to somebody as small as Matt P (who I’d happened to bump into on the journey). There was barely any knee-room, and the air conditioning only had two settings, neither of which was particually pleasant but for reasons of completely different extremes.

We finally got back to Aber just in time to join in at Geek Night, where Ruth, Penny, and Rory were just finishing a game of Carcassonne. JTA arrived, too, and the six of us played the largest game of Settlers of Catan I’ve ever played. We also managed to have a couple of games of Hypercube Hop, Ruth’s dad’s first board game published under his new Brane Games label. For those of you that missed it, I’m sure there’ll be an opportunity to give it a go at some future Geek Night.

Then today I posed for topless photos for Ele. But that’s another story and I’ve got to go and eat dinner so I’ll leave it at that.

My April Fools

I’ve always had a thing for big, overcomplicated April Fools’ gags. Traditionally, we’d always play pranks on Penbryn Halls at the University, but it’s not so easy these days to gain access to halls of residence, now that they’ve installed door locks that don’t open by themselves when you so much as breathe hard on them, so I thought it was time to broaden my sights.

I work for a company based in the Aberystwyth Technium on the marina. A few weeks ago, the Technium management had arranged for the installation of a new fence and automatic car park barriers, to allow the building to better control who has access to the offices’ car parking spaces (car parking spaces being a particularly valuable commodity in Aberystwyth). These barriers haven’t come online yet, but apparently they will “soon” (which is regional-government-speak for “someday, maybe”).

Car Parking Gates at the Aberystwyth Technium

Early on the morning of 1st April, I put out an e-mail to all resident companies at the Technium, spoofed so that it appeared to come from Technium management and emulating their writing style and the way that they typically send out bulk messages to the tenants.

Annwyl pawb ,

The key fobs for the new car park barrier system need to be ordered via an online application form . The application needs to be filled in as your key fobs will be uniquely linked to your vehicle.

The application form is only available online at http://www.techniumnetwork.info/aberystwyth/carparking/

Once you have applied, central office will send out the key fobs to us in a week or two. Please fill in the form as soon as possible so that the key fobs all arrive at the same time.

Diolch

Sion

Sion Meredith
Gweithredydd Technium Aberystwyth
Technium Aberystwyth Executive

<snip>

The techniumnetwork.info domain name is one that I’d picked up the day before for the best part of 49p on a special offer with a registrar – the real Technium website is at www.technium.co.uk, but I figured that people wouldn’t pay attention to the domain name: even the tenants here probably don’t spend much time, if any at all, on the Technium website. I stole the stylesheet and layout for the official website and adapted it to my purposes: there’s a mirror up now at http://techniumnetwork.scatmania.org/aberystwyth/carparking/ if you want to see for yourself.

Spoof website for the car parking key fob scam

The site begins by looking like a genuine application form, asking for all of the key details – your personal and company information, basic details of your car – and slowly starts over many, many pages of forms to ask sillier and sillier questions. “What colour is your car?” is a drop-down with “Red” and “Other” as the only options. “What noise does your car make?” is accompanied by options like “Vroom!” and “Brum-brum.” Later questions ask whether or not your car is capable of transforming into a giant robot and challenge you to correctly identify road signs that have been altered in comedic ways.

The trick worked, and many of the tenants were fooled… some of them well-past the point at which they should have thought the form was genuine; and almost all of them believed, even when they realised that the form was a joke, that it had been set up by the Technium themselves. It was only when one tenant decided to pass a copy of the e-mail on to the real Sion Meredith that the building management heard anything about it, and, sadly, put a stop to it by sending out an e-mail to say that it was all a joke, and not one by them.

After he’d worked out it was me that was behind it… I’d taken steps to make it obvious to anybody who bothered to check up on it, so as to maximise the understanding that it was, in the end, just a joke: the last thing I wanted was some humourless bureaucrat to see this gag (which did, of course, involve feigning the identity of a government employee) as a terrorist threat or something …he got his own back, though. He came up to my office at a few minutes to midday to inform me that he’s had to pass on my details to the Technium legal team, and he managed to make my heart skip a beat before I realised that he, too, was just having a joke.

A selection of feedback so far on the gag after I sent out a “gotcha” e-mail to everybody affected:

“Way too much time on your hands………” – Aled, thinkplay.tv
“You have far too much time on your hands but it was very amusing!!” – Kayt, MapAnalysis
“When I realised it was an April Fool I did look at the email address and questioned it but didn’t think [it could be spoofed]! Must be because I’m a technical dumb ass!” – George, MapAnalysis
“Dan, Sion was serious [about the legal team], when he popped his head round the door at 11.45 he had some documents in his hand.” – Nic, Angle Technology
“When did you find time to make this, then?” – Simon, SmartData

I had to leave the room when it first started to catch Simon out: I heard him phoning his wife to ask for a reminder of their cars’ number plates and had to excuse myself so as not to give the game away with my girlish giggling.

So, that was all good, and far more successful than my backup plan which involved passing on missed call messages to co-workers to ask them to return a call to Rory Lyons at Captive Audience on 01244 380280. The number is actually the number for Chester Zoo: I so very nearly made some of the people I work with unwittingly call up Chester Zoo on the morning of April 1st and ask, “Can I speak to Rory Lyons, please?” It’s a good prank, anyway – I’ll save it for another time: or if you want to give it a go (it doesn’t even have to be April Fools’ Day, with a great joke like that), let me know how you get on!

Google’s April Fool…

…seems to be to not text me me Google Calendar alerts this morning. So I didn’t get reminded to put the bins out, which I’ve kind-of come to rely on. Whoops!

Best Bug Ever

On behalf of a client of a client of SmartData, I was responsible this weekend for moving a website over from one server to another. It’s a monolithic old custom-written content management system, in Perl, which over the last four or five years has been passed from developer to developer and has begun to look quite disgusting. Needless to say, we’ll be recommending refactoring.

But in the meantime, a server move was needed. No problem, I thought. Install Apache on the new server, CGI::Application, mod_include, mod_rewrite, MySQL, blah blah, all pretty standard. Copy the files over, copy the database over, hook it all up, and test it. And after a day or two of playing with it on the new server and with approval from our client, we move the DNS over to complete the operation.

Yesterday morning I get a phone call from somebody who manages the site.

Romanian Days Of The Week “All of the days of the week are in French!”

I suppose I ought to say something about this particular company. Like many companies in this part of the world, this company runs it’s website bilingually: that is, in English and Welsh. But for some reason, claimed our client’s client, their web site was now putting the days of the week in French instead of Welsh. The months of the year were still in Welsh, and the stuff that was supposed to be in English was still in English, but… well…

Further investigation showed that this report was mistaken. “I’m not sure it’s French, you know,” I replied, typically helpfully, “It’s Romanian.” I was pleased with myself right up until the point that I realised that this wasn’t actually helpful, about a second or two later.

It turns out that the site uses a Perl module called Date::Calc to display days of the week in an appropriate language, and I’d just used CPAN to do a quick-and-easy install of Date::Calc. But something was different about the old server’s copy of this module. It turns out that, not unsurprisingly, Date::Calc doesn’t naively support the Welsh language, but that some time many years ago an enterprising programmer, not wanting to go to all the effort of adding a new language to Date::Calc the proper way, simply patched the module, overwriting one of the languages already in it. He decided to replace a language that he didn’t think anybody would ever have reason to use on the server – Romanian.

The reason that the months were still in Welsh was because they used a far more standard method of translation. So I simply wrote a couple of regular expressions that changed the old, Date::Calc-translator code into a more common approach, and that fixed it. Somebody had even already defined me an array with the Welsh weekdays in (it looks like this change was planned at some point in this huge, horrible codebase, but never actually happened).

Not sure I’ll ever find out who was responsible for the atrocious bit of coding that caused this particular website to turn Romanian for a few hours, but if I do, I’ll be sure to tell them about this, the most amusing bug I’ve seen in a long, long time.

A Quick Play With HTML5

I’ve been playing with HTML 5 a little this morning. It’s really quite fabulous: a lot of smart design decisions have been made and it looks like – given a good few years to get things up to scratch even after the specification has been finalised – it’ll really provide a lot of useful tools to help the web developers of tomorrow reach their goals more easily and in a more structured way.

I knocked up a quick test page to see how the code comes together, and, in particular, to play with the new sectioning elements that can be used to state what parts of the page have what purpose and what their relationship is to the rest of the document. So far, so good. Then I tried to style them.

HTML5 Test in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 7 didn’t really stand a chance, I suppose. Microsoft don’t have any plans to support either HTML 5 or XHTML 2 – an alternative language for the future web – and that probably won’t change until they think they’re losing browser market share over it. That’ll happen, perhaps, but much slower than they lost market share to Firefox over issues of speed and security: the media make a far bigger deal of computer security these days than they ever will about standards-compliance, because standards-compliance doesn’t sell newspapers.

So yeah; IE7 got all the content, at least, thanks to the fact that HTML 5 is backwards-compatible (in a way that XHTML 2 simply isn’t), and the page is just about understandable. But it wouldn’t allow CSS styles to be applied to any of the "new" tags it didn’t understand, so the page is quite a bit more simplistic that it should have been.

I’d expected more from the latest beta version of Mozilla Firefox – Mozilla are, along with Apple, perhaps the biggest supporters of HTML 5 as the future of the web. Unfortunately, I was mistaken.

Perhaps the majority of the HTML 5 support will come in a later release of Firefox – although it’d be nice it they supported at least the core, well-understood features in the final release of Firefox 3. Yeah, yeah, I know they’ve started to implement support for things like <canvas> and stuff, but it’s hard to get excited about things that, while cool, I’m just not likely to use.

Firefox understood that there was something to do with floating something in the <aside> element, but didn’t do a very good job of actually floating it, instead just drawing a box where it might have put it if it understood it better. This is actually just slightly worse behavior than IE, which failed to understand but didn’t half-heartedly try to interpret what it didn’t "get." Nonetheless, Firefox still rendered a readable, understandable page – good old backwards-compatibility, there.

Opera, as I’d have expected, excelled here. Opera’s support for emerging standards has always been impressive, and this was no exception, as it rendered the page almost exactly as I would have expected. It genuinely seems to understand the new sectioning elements provided by HTML 5 (although a later experiment has shown that this is possibly just because it will happily interpret CSS directives for unrecognised elements: however, this is a good future-proofing strategy for any browser – had Mozilla taken this approach, the majority of the page would have looked perfect in Firefox, too).

In short, we’re a long way from being able to use HTML 5 in any real way, and all the exciting things it’s bringing will have to wait for now. But I expect we’ll be seeing better and better compliance with the standard as the standard becomes more finalised next year and the geeks at the major browser manufacturers compete to have the coolest features first. My prediction? Lead by Opera, Safari, and Firefox (as well as Konquerer, which I gather is also likely to support HTML 5 early), we’ll start seeing usable snippets of some of the fun things the future of the web will bring us as early as next year, and Microsoft will – eventually – give in and implement them in Internet Explorer too.

In the meantime, it’s been fun to read through the current working draft specification for what I think is likely to be the more popular language of the next generation of the web. But that’s perhaps just because I’m the kind of person who enjoys reading specifications for fun.

Update: Two more browser snapshots (thanks Katie).

Camino, as you might expect, looks pretty much identical to Firefox.

Safari fares well, rendering the page in the same way as Opera did, seemingly understanding all of the elements perfectly.

LiveJournal For Google Reader v1.3 Update

Earlier this year, I released my LiveJournal Atom Feed Digest Authentication Proxy (also known as LiveJournal For Google Reader Users). This tool allows Google Reader users to subscribe to “friends only” posts in LiveJournal weblogs, which normally isn’t possible because Google Reader doesn’t support the necessary authentication methods.

Thanks to the hundreds of users that use the service, and in particular to Mike, Aaron, Thom, and Nat, who filed particularly valuable bug reports, this post announces the new version of the tool – version 1.3. If there were a tagline for it, it’d be “at long last, it’s stable!” The source code for this version is also available for download.

Here’s the “for dummies” guide to getting it working:

Using Google Reader To Get “Friends Only” LiveJournal Posts

There are lots of good reasons to use a newsreader (like, for example, Google Reader) to subscribe to your friends’ LiveJournals. The big and obvious one for me is that it’s possible to subscribe to your other friends’ non-LiveJournal weblogs, too, and to other comics and news sources and all kinds of things all from one place, so you don’t get stuck in a cycle of “check the LiveJournal friends page, now check this blog, now check that one,” and so on. But if you’ve used Google Reader already, you won’t need to be told about how great it is.

The problem is that if you just use Google Reader to subscribe to LiveJournal weblogs, it doesn’t pick up your “friends only” posts. That’s kind-of irritating, and could be a showstopper, unless somebody wrote a tool to get around the problem. Hey look, somebody did!

You’ll need a Google Reader account. If you already have a Google Mail or similar account, you can use that, or you can make up a new one to make it hard for the all-seeing Google to link together all of your online activities into their massive databases. If somehow you don’t have one already, create a Google account here.
Next, you’ll need a LiveJournal account. Unless you’re one of these fancy folks who uses OpenID to authenticate and read your friends’ “friends only” posts, you probably already have one of these. If not, create one here and then get everybody you know to add it to their friends list!
Finally, you’ll need to log in to LiveJournal For Google Reader Users. This bit’s really easy, because you just log in using your LiveJournal username and password. If you don’t like the idea of your LiveJournal credentials being stored on some site somewhere that isn’t LiveJournal, you’ll want to download the codebase and run it on your own server.

Then you’re ready to go! Just click the “add to Google Reader” links (or use the “atom feed” links to get links you can use in other reader tools, if Google Reader isn’t your thing).

And Here’s The FAQ

What’s new in this version?

It works properly, for one. Previous versions have had bugs when picking up feeds of users whose usernames contained dashes or underscores, or when your username had uppercase letters in it. These irritating little bugs took a while to be found, and are the result of strange behaviour on the part of LiveJournal’s server. They’ve now all been fixed, and all feeds should work perfectly.

What about… OpenID…? Communities…? DeadJournal…?

If you’re looking for extra features; here’s the round-up:

Support for OpenID probably won’t ever happen, and certainly won’t happen soon, because it’s horribly complicated compared to the simplicity of the rest of the program. I love OpenID, I really do, but LiveJournal For Google Reader Users will probably never support it (unless you feel like writing that bit of it). Sorry!
Communities probably will end up supported in the next version, so you can pick up friends-only posts in them, too. Stop asking.
Related journalling systems like DeadJournal can probably be really easily supported by this or a similar system. I’ll implement it as soon as somebody asks me to.
Another feature that’s in the pipeline is an indication of friends-only posts. Right now, in Google Reader, there’s no little “padlock” icon to let you know that what you’re looking at is a friends-only post: they all look the same. This’ll probably be fixed in a later version.

Got other suggestions? Leave a comment to let me know!

I’m already using Google Reader to subscribe to LiveJournal. What should I do?

You should unsubscribe (sorry!) from every single LiveJournal you’re subscribed to, then re-subscribe to the addresses given to you by LiveJournal For Google Reader. It’s a painstakingly long process, and I wish I could think of a way to make it easier, but I can’t. If you want to do it a few blogs at a time, that’s fine – and I suggest you start with the blogs which most-frequently make friends-only posts.

Why do I have to give you my LiveJournal username and password?

To get access to friends-only posts in your friends’ feeds, LiveJournal must be supplied with your username and password. LiveJournal For Google Reader stores these for you and provides you with a complex URL that doesn’t contain your username and password (so people can’t work out your password just by looking at the list of feeds you subscribe to).

To help you feel more secure, the entire application is open source (you can read the code and see that it’s not doing anything malicious) and you can even run a copy on your own server, if you don’t trust me at all.

Alternatively, if security is a concern for you, open a second LiveJournal account and have your friends add that one to their friends’ lists, and use this new account with LiveJournal For Google Reader. This way, your own personal LiveJournal account remains completely protected. Can’t say fairer than that, I guess.

If you change your LiveJournal password or close your LiveJournal account, LiveJournal For Google Reader will stop working until you supply your new credentials.

Why do you get all mysterious towards the end of FAQs?

You’ll have to wait and see.

Google Reader For LiveJournal Users

There’s a new version out: click here!

My previous post reminded me that I’d never gotten around to writing something I’d promised a few of you already: that is, a guide to using Google Reader and LiveJournal together effectively (Google Reader doesn’t support digest authentication, which means that it’s not possible to use Google Reader to pick up, for example, “friends only” posts, so I’ve written a bit of software that bridges the gap).

I’ve used a number of bits of newsreading software over the years before realising that what I really needed was a web-based reader that I could use from “wherever.” I implemented my own, Dog, which worked adequately, but Google Reader has since matured into a wonderful program, and it seemed a waste not to use it.

In case there’s anybody else out there in Abnibland who wants to be able to use Google Reader to centralise all their blog reading into one place and who has LiveJournal friends who make “friends only” posts (it’s nice to have all the comics I read, all the news I’m interested in, and all of the blogs I follow – including those on LiveJournal – integrated into one place with reminders when new stuff appears, searching, etc.), here’s my guide:

Google Reader For LiveJournal Users

You’ll need a Google Reader account – if you’ve got some other kind of Google account (e.g. GMail), just log in, otherwise, sign up for one.
You’ll also need one or more LiveJournal accounts through which you can read the “friends only” posts you’re interested in. Another advantage of this system is that if you have multiple LiveJournal identities you can read the blogs of the friends of both in one place. If you don’t have a LiveJournal account, why are you bothering with this guide? Just go use Google Reader itself like a normal person.
Log in to LiveJournal Feed Fetcher using your LiveJournal username and password. Then, just click on each of the “Add To Google” buttons in turn for each of the friends whose blogs you’d like to syndicate.
Remember to add other people’s (non LiveJournal) blogs to your Google Reader account, too!

Now, whenever you log in to Google Reader, you’ll be presented with the latest blog entries from all of the blogs you read, including “friends only” posts, if available, from your LiveJournal buddies.

Advanced Tips

Install the Google Reader Notifier plugin (mirror) for Firefox. This sits in the bottom-right corner of your browser window and lets you know how many new posts you’ve got to read, and provides a convenient shortcut to your Google Reader account.
In Google Reader, click Settings, then Goodies. Under “Put Reader in a bookmark” you’ll find a bookmarklet that you can drag to your Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar (or a similar place on the user interface). This will appear by default as a “Next” link that you can click to immediately go to the web page of the next item in your reading list.

I hope this short guide will reduce the demand for further maintenance of abnib help people to get a handle on Google Reader and on reading syndicated LiveJournal blogs. The LiveJournal Feed Fetcher can very be easily extended to cope with similar systems (DeadJournal, etc.), so just let me know if there’s anything it’s “missing.”

Abnib Events

Abnib Events, Inline In order to reduce the amount of time my blog spends being used to organise events like Black Red Dwarf Adder Nights and whatnot, I’ve launched Abnib Events, which aims to centralise the organisation of such get-togethers. You’ll also find that the next upcoming event appears on the Abnib front page, in the upper-right – like the upcoming Eurovision Night.

Obviously I’ll still end up mentioning these events here sometimes, but this still feels like a step forwards.

You’ll find that you’re able to subscribe to the XML or ICal feeds for the list of upcoming events, so if you use Google Calendar or similar software, you’ll be able to have Abnib Events appear right alongside your existing appointments. I’ll sort out RSS/Atom feeds for you newsreader fans at some point soon.

Right now, Paul and I are administrators of Abnib Events. If there are events you think are worth publicising to the Abnib community at large – Troma Night or other related film or TV series nights, barbeques and bonfires, house parties, nights out, board game or poker nights, for instance – get in touch with one of us two.

40 Days On Facebook

I’ve been playing with Facebook for the last 40 days or so, to see if it’s any good. Here’s some of the things I’ve observed that I like (and don’t like) about it, followed by my conclusions:

Observations

In no particular order.

Nice. It’s a good platform for keeping up-to-date with your friends for the “littler things” that don’t really warrant blog entries, for helping you remember your friends’ contact details, birthdays, etc., for quickly sharing photos without too much hoo-hah, and so on.
Nice. It imports XML feeds, so you can integrate your Facebook presence with your blog or whatever else.
Nasty. It doesn’t export XML feeds! What is this, the middle ages? There’s a slight risk that some users may begin to use Facebook “notes” as substitute for blogging, and I and others who depend on RSS/Atom will end up not reading what they write as a result of it, but the notes system is pretty simplistic (as it should be) so it’s not terribly likely, at least for the time being.
Nasty. Searching for people is a little clunky: it could at least allow me to filter by country, or intelligently suggest people from my own country before showing me people in other countries.
Nice. Easy bulk-addition of friends from your address book. I’m an untrusting bugger, so I wouldn’t give them my webmail passwords (but I know others who have), but the CSV import tool, combined with a little scripting, quickly achieved very similar results, plus more.
Nice. Unlike many other social networking sites (and particularly the ridiculously bad myspace), it doesn’t allow arbitrary HTML to be splattered all over your profile page, so at least the user interface stays consistent and you’re not horribly vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks every time you use it.
Nice. Good reciprocal “friends” system (including a wealth of FOAF-like “how do you know this person” links that make for interesting exploring when you start looking through your circle of friends) and well-designed privacy options so user have a great deal of control over who sees what.
Nasty. On the other hand, some people still seem to treat it like myspace: trying to join the most groups, have the most friends, or whatever, as if it were some kind of popularity contest. This probably also extends to people with silly names. Thankfully, they’re pretty few and far between, and – at least in my experience – they don’t harass you with endless messages a-la myspace.
Nice. The ads (it’s mostly an ad-supported service) are sparse and discreet. No big flashing animGIFs, flash, or banners.
Nasty. I can see why they’ve done the “networks” thing, but it can get on your tits until you get the hang of it. Why can’t I be in an alumni network for Aberystwyth? Because I didn’t have a Facebook account when I was at Aberystwyth, apparently. Why couldn’t Matt join the original Troma Night group? Because it, like me, was in the Wales regional network (because I hadn’t specified otherwise when I created it, and he’s not in Wales, is he!).

Conclusions

It’s a nice little social networking platform. It suffers from a lack of subscribable output feeds, a very slight “myspace factor” amongst some of it’s users, and weak search tools. However, it does a remarkably good job of providing a secure environment in which to publish your up-to-date contact and other personal information to your friends, share photos, pass simple messages around, arrange events, and discover the links within your friendship groups. I’ve heard good things said about using it instead of Friends Reunited and similar services, for getting in touch with old friends, but I’m not interested in that – I just like to be able to keep in touch more easily with the friends I have.

I’m making the Facebook team aware of these comments (and gripes) and hopefully it’ll become even better. In the meantime: if you haven’t tried it, I’d recommend giving it a go: they’ve got a nice, ethical account closure policy if you decide it’s not for you. A 40-day test drive had me… not hooked like some people, but… contented and impressed nonetheless: something I genuinely didn’t expect.

Abnib Breaks Stuff, Fixes Stuff, Keeps Ticking

As you might have seen, the new version of abnib went live this afternoon. Just so I don’t keep getting the same comments over and over:

Right now, it’s a little fixated on the PST time zone. I’m not sure why this is, but I’ll fix this soon.
For some reason, it’s silently rejecting all applications for a username and password.
There’s no link to Abnib Gallery.

What’s new?

If you’re logged in (hah!) you can block posts by author. Later there may be other ways to filter and prioritise posts.
It automatically refreshes as new posts come in. No longer do you need to keep whacking "refresh" every time you get bored: if you’ve got JavaScript enabled, it’ll quietly check for new posts in the background and pick them up and make them appear on the page.
It integrates with the as-yet unreleased new Troma Night website, so you can see where and when the next Troma Night is at all times. Yeah, and this updates itself without refreshing too.
It’s prettier. I liked the old theme, but I know it wasn’t to everybody’s tastes, and the "it’s ugly" people were louder than the "it’s pretty" people.
A couple of extra features that you can’t see because you can’t log in yet, either. Ahem. Will fix that soon, then.

Dan’s Latest Vapourware

Wanna see what I’ve been hacking recently?

Abnib v5.0