internet – Page 6

Abnib, Version 3.0

Abnib Version 1.0 was a funny little beast. It was built to accomodate for about half a dozen bloggers, but ended up with about nine or ten. It worked, though, and the principle of aggregating the blog entries of our friends and our friends’ friends took off. Abnib 1.0 had a few major flaws: firstly, it only showed a summary of the post. This was partially because all but two of the bloggers thereon were using free LiveJournal accounts, and a limitation of free accounts at that time was that you could only get the first couple of hundred characters of a post at once. Another limitation was that the site design was columnular – each person had a column of their own, which dramatically reduced the space available and made in-post images impossible. Furthermore, Abnib 1.0, which updated itself wholly or partially every time it was visited, was as slow as a dog.

Abnib died when I accidently deleted a few key files for which I didn’t have backups, and that was the end of that. However, with Gareth‘s help, it was reborn in August 2004 as Abnib 2.0. This was powered by Planet, a Python-driven flexible feed aggregator which is used in all kinds of places for just the kinds of purposes we use it for. Jon went a step further and added an interesting new style to it, and we added the Abnib Gallery (Abnib 2.1), a place for all things Abnib to share photos. Abnib became a real “centre” for our fun little crowd, gathering information on Troma Night and the RockMonkey wiki, as well as the usual weblogs. The release of Abnib 2.2 brought extra abilities much-requested by users, such as the ability to “hide” the community feeds. That’s where we are now.

However, all is not well. There are a few key things I’d like to see improved in Abnib:

Several LiveJournal users have commented (Paul comments, Matt comments) that sometimes, when they make multiple posts in quick succession, Abnib only picks up on the most recent of them. I’m not sure what’s causing this, so it’s probably Planet.
Some people like to make lots of “friends only” posts (a LiveJournal feature whereby you can restrict visability of your posts to specific other LiveJournal users). As more and more people use Abnib as their “quick window” onto Aber blogs, people are finding the need to make superficially-pointless posts (like this one) in order to ensure that people realise that they have made a “friends only” post that might otherwise be overlooked.
Abnib 2.2 still isn’t quite doing so much for the community as I’d like it to be; it isn’t as interactive or as inspiring as I feel a weblog aggregation portal should be.

So, in order to fix these problems (among others) and implement some new features, I’ve begun work on Abnib 3.0. This new version of Abnib will:

Correctly deal with multiple posts in quick succession from LiveJournal users.
Better integrate with Abnib Gallery.
If permitted (by individual bloggers – either overall or on a case-by-case basis), advertise when you have made a “friends only” post, and how to go about reading it if you have permission.
Load faster by holding content back until requested (for example, only the 20 most recent posts are shown by default, but more can be displayed without a page refresh: up to 80!).
Hold meta-information on members such as a short description, which can be updated by that member only.
Allow readers to ‘hide’ any or all feeds, in order to focus on the things that matter to them.

It’s all powered by a new weblog aggregation engine called Phatnet, which I’ve been building for the last few weeks specifically for this purpose. And it’s pretty damn gorgeous. But that’s not all. Experimental features which might end up part of it now or later include:

Tighter integration with RockMonkey – see what pages other people are reading.
Ajax-powered “keep me posted” features, such as a checkbox that, when checked, automatically adds new posts to Abnib as they are written – right in front of your eyes.
Comment counting: know how many comments have been made on standards-compliant blog posts.
A couple of other things I’ve been playing with.

Hopefully, I can get Abnib 3.0 finished and released later in December. If you want to see what’s been done so far and how it all fits together, take a peep at the Abnib 3.0 Preview (it updates every few days, so it’s no good for actually reading blog posts on, but it should give you an idea about some of the features: try clicking the “More Posts…” link at the bottom or on people’s names in the sidebar). It’s ugly as sin, but hey. Feedback appreciated.

/join #TheMatrix

Here’s a geeky (well, geekier) retelling of The Matrix.

A Cynical Timeline Of The Internet

This is a repost promoting content originally bookmarked via del.icio.us. See more del.icio.us imports or more things Dan's reposted.

Bookmarked via del.icio.us: A Cynical Timeline Of The Internet.

OpenID And Scatmania

Over the last few weeks I’ve playing playing with an exciting new technology known as OpenID. Do you remember Microsoft Passport and it’s opposite number, Liberty Alliance? Well; we all know that these services weren’t all they cracked up to be. They claimed to be “distributed log-on services”, but in actual fact they were centralised log-on services (controlled, for example – in the case of Passport – by Microsoft – do you want Microsoft to know everything you do on the web?), and not really distributed at all…

…OpenID really is a distributed log-on service. Anybody can set up an OpenID server and start giving out OpenID accounts. If you have a weblog with LiveJournal, for example, you already have one, and soon folks on other similar blogging services will have them too.

I’d love to see a future where OpenID catches on, because it really is a beautiful and elegant (from a technical point of view) way of doing things, and it’s really easy to use from a user’s point of view, too. I’ve spent a little while implementing the beginnings of a WordPress (the blogging engine that powers this site) plug-in, and it’s taking shape: if you look in the upper-right of the page, you should find that you’re able to log in to this web site using your LiveJournal account. That means that WordPress users like myself, in future, should be able to do things like LiveJournal’s “friends only” posts, and allow LiveJournal users to make comments in a way that proves they are who they say they are, and many other benefits, too.

But, of course, it doesn’t stop there: DeadJournal will be next. Then TypePad. Then Blogger and the forum sites – phpBB and the like. Then the wiki sites. All of these sites will be able to authenticate against one another, and make content private, or accessible, without having to have silly “sign up” systems of the type we’re starting to see everywhere these days.

It’s all very exciting, but it’s early days for now. Right now, my WordPress plugin doesn’t do a lot – you can log in and out, and that’s about it. But give me a go, and tell me what you think – log in to my blog using your LiveJournal account, and give me some feedback. And when I finally get this code to a production level (right now it’s buggy as hell), I’ll release it as a WordPress plugin, and the world will be great.

Abnib v2.2

Abnib now supports “feed hiding” of the “community” feeds (RockMonkey, Troma Night, Gallery). Just click the “hide feed” link at the bottom of a post of the type you don’t want to see. This feature by demand of Jon.

In other news, Blue Dragon is proving somewhat popular, with 7 registered players (plus me, but I don’t play on account of the fact that sysops who play their own games tend to do well, even if they’re not cheating, and get accused of cheating regardless of how well they do), and a couple more about to sign up. If you’ve not given it a go yet, there’s still time to get in and cause some damage before the “top players” pull too far out of reach… and if you are playing, you’ll see that a few new areas just became available to you…

This Looks Promising

Hmm… my blog works. On it’s new host.

This looks promising.

More when I have it.

How To Sell May Ball Tickets

Every year the Students Union here in Aberystwyth puts on the May Ball, an excuse to dress up and party if ever I saw one, for students. For the last few years this has been held on-campus, in the Arts Centre, Students Union, and the concourse in-between the two. Live music and shows, dancing, and a fairground… and hundreds of students in ball gowns and tuxedos… Since the event had been moved “on campus” there have been less tickets available than ever, and demand grows steadily higher. As a result, students queue for hours to get their tickets.

This year, tickets began to be served at 10am, but the queue was 270 people long by forming by midnight: yes, people were willing to stand, all night, for ten hours, to be first in a queue for May Ball tickets. The Students Union have, of course, monopolised on the situation and will be selling drinks to the people queuing. Hey; let’s charge them twice.

Another recent problem has been that of ticket touting. Tickets sell for under £40, but can be re-sold to those desperate to go for as much as £100. Last year, the Students Union would not allow more than 8 tickets to be bought in a single transaction (and with queues so long, there’s no chance of queuing again), but that still meant that sly touts could easily earn up to £480 for a few hours work. This year, only four tickets can be bought by any single person, but this simply resulted in a longer queue, sooner, and I don’t think it’ll stop touting (if I was going to the May Ball, and therefore needed to queue anyway, I would buy my full allotted four tickets, regardless of how many people I was actually purchasing tickets for… and I know of dozens of others who follow this methodology every year, meaning that even as demand goes up, the touts take an even larger share of the profits).

Thankfully, I’ve been to the May Ball once and I’ll happily get by without ever going again. But I got to thinking, having seen the lunacy in those students who’ve spent all of this morning and all of last night queueing, that this isn’t the best way to be arranging this event…

A Better Way

Here’s how it should be done. All the tickets should be sold online, by the Students Union. If you want to buy tickets, you connect to their web site and fill in the following details:

Your university user name – this ensures that your ticket is ‘reserved’ for you, and that you cannot buy multiple tickets.
The number and type of tickets you want to buy – only two tickets maximum per person.
How you’d like to pay and obtain the tickets: you can pay online (and have them posted to you) or you can collect them from the union building for up to a week afterwards and pay in cash.

An e-mail is sent to your university e-mail address to confirm that it really was you who ordered the tickets (and not somebody ordering in your name). If this is not replied to within 24 hours (as will be explained in the e-mail), the order is cancelled. The tickets (which are posted to you or collected from the union) are printed with “Your Name”, and “Guest of Your Name”, eliminating the risk of touting (assuming that reasonable checks are made by security at the gate – just checking the identity of every fifth person in would act as sufficient deterrent to those who would like to go to the ball using a ticket in somebody else’s name).

The e-mail confirmation also gives people a chance to change their mind: if their friends, who they wanted to go with, were unable to get tickets before they all sold out, for example, they would know about it and be able to cancel their order. But it would also ensure the identity of the purchaser without requiring them to pass their password over the network. Students collecting tickets from the union would have to produce photo ID.

Those tickets remaining unsold after the web server is hammered by requests for tickets (for example, those cancelled or released later) would all be sold in a “second wave” (which would be announced in advance).

It is terribly unfair for the union to make students stand out in the cold and the rain, without sleep, to get tickets to an event; it could even be argued as discriminatory (whereas the University ensures that all students have the capacity and tools to use an internet connection). There would be no queues, no touts, and no unfairness. There would be no fights for the limited amount of cash in the on-campus cashpoints. The union would save money in ticket salespeople and policing the queue. And a system like this could be implemented for them for a sum of money that could be measured in the hundreds, not the thousands, of pounds. Hell; I will quote them for it, if they ask: I’ve already knocked up a prototype. Why not send a message to the May Ball organisers and tell them what a good idea it would be, particularly if it would make the difference to you, personally, about going to the May Ball.

They still won’t listen.

GMail Accounts

People have asked me for GMail invites again, but one of these people’s @aber.ac.uk e-mail address doesn’t seem to be working, says GMail, so here are some “ready to pick up”:

Invite 1 (used)
Invite 2 (used)
Invite 3 (used)
Invite 4 (used)
Invite 5
Invite 6
Invite 7
Invite 8
Invite 9
Invite 10

Get ’em while they’re hot. If one doesn’t work, try another. If they all don’t work, leave a comment (and pull your finger out next time).

Google Wants Your DIY Porn Videos

Got home videos? Send them to Google! That’s the message that Google co-founder Larry Page is trying to put out.

In anticipation of launching a “video search” system, Google wants a stack of material on which they can test their “video spider” – a program which will hunt for keywords (spoken, or on-screen) in video material, so that it’s searchable in much the same way as web pages already are.

Fucking weird.

Ceefax On Scatmania

Do you remember Ceefax, that wonderful service from the BBC that seemed so cool until you discovered the internet? Well I do. And so does a Dutch consultant who set up a system, on the web, for searching Ceefax pages.

Well; in any case; I thought that his site was fun (in a nostalgic kind-of way) but hard-to-navigate, so I’ve developed a sensible front-end that’s far more reminiscent of the way Ceefax works: Ceefax Browser On Scatmania. Give it a go.

Physical Device Fingerprinting Over TCP

A PhD student in San Deigo has written a fascinating paper which will spook internet anonymity freaks – Remote Physical Device Fingerprinting – which describes how a physical computer can be uniquely identified on the internet, regardless of operating system, IP address, or data sent, just by looking carefully at it’s TCP packets (which contain the data for a large amount – perhaps a majority – of the internet’s traffic, including all web and e-mail traffic).

The technique works by observing the deviation in the timestamps sent (in accordance with the widely-adopted RFC 1323: TCP Extensions for High Performance, specified back in 1992). Each computer’s hardware clock is made from a separate piece of quartz, and each quartz crystal is unique in it’s imperfections. By measuring these imperfections across the internet, it’s possible (with enough sample data) to identify a computer individually, which has implications both good (computer forensics) and bad (anonymity).

The paper itself [PDF] is well worth reading. And, for those that are paranoid about their anonymity online, here’s how to “turn off” this feature of TCP for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Linux:

Windows 2000/XP – Run RegEdit; navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters; add (or edit, if already present) the DWORD “Tcp1323Opts” to 1. This disables TCP timestamps, but leaves Window Scaling (a really useful TCP/IP enhancement) enabled.
Linux – echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps

Of course, the absence of timestamps from your machine may, if you’re in a small enough sample group, single you out even more, but at least you’re not globally unique any more; which from an anonymity perspective is a really good thing.

Opera 8’s Solution To IDN Exploit

I’m sure you’ve all seen the recent Internationalized Domain Name exploit, which affects most web browsers (except for Internet Explorer – shocker! – because it doesn’t yet have the power to support internationalized domain names): if you haven’t, why not visit paypal.com – looks just like the real thing; doesn’t it: the browser bar says you’re at PayPal’s real site, but you’re not. That first ‘a’ in the name is an international character (actually the letter ‘a’ from the Cyrillic character set, which is just slightly different from a Western ‘a’, if you look closely. Of course, this leads to potentially thousands of dangerous phishing exploits, tricking users into exposing their bank account details to random Nigerians.

Opera, makers of a stunning web browser that I’m not quite sure I should be abandoning yet, have announced their solution to this problem (which isn’t actually a web browser problem at all, but a specification problem): IDN domain names from outside of places which are expected to need then (e.g. dot-jp, etc.) will be displayed longhand, and secure sites (https) will display their certificate holder’s name – longhand – alongside the domain name in the address bar.

Of course, unless you’re using Opera 8 beta, the only way to be sure you’re safe from this exploit is to manually type in every link you follow.

This Has GOT To Be Anti-Trust/FUD

This screenshot taken from Microsoft Anti-Spyware:

[screenshot removed – later turned out to be a fake]

Firefox Finally Appeals

As you may all know, I’m a die-hard supporter of the Opera web browser, despite many of my friends now claiming that Firefox is superior. I’ve been following the Mozilla project for a long while (haven’t we all), and on the many occasions I’ve tried Firefox (and it’s grandparents) I’ve always been unimpressed. It’s always been the little things that Opera did that kept me coming back to it, time and time again.

With the full release of Firefox 1.0 (download Firefox here), there’s been an explosion in the number of Firefox extensions that have become available, so I decided to try to find a combination of extensions that would at long last give Firefox the capabilities that always kept me coming back to Opera. The theory is – if I can find enough extensions to give me the functionality I need in a web browser (which Opera very-nearly perfectly provides) in Firefox, it’ll make a convert out of me. Here goes –

- Mouse Gestures 1.0 – One of the great things about Opera is that it really pioneered mouse gestures (waving your cursor in strange patterns in order to facilitate shortcuts), and led the way for years thereafter. Mouse gestures are infectious – once you’ve used them and you get the hang of “doing things faster” (particularly mouse-intensive activities like web browsing), you end up trying to do it elsewhere – I’ve frequently used friends computers (with Internet Exploder, or similar) and tried to do a gesture before remembering that I can’t.The Mouse Gestures extension for Firefox is fully-featured and highly-configurable. I found the original settings a little unresponsive, and had to increase the “diagonal tolerance” (slippage permitted in a non-cardinal direction) to bring it back in line with the speed at which I execute gestures, and of course I’ve customised some of my own gestures. Apart from that, it’s wonderful.

Firefox Downloads Window In Sidebar

- Download Manager Tweak 0.6.3 – One thing I loved about my customised Opera configuration was that pretty much everything not directly related to browsing – my RSS-feed subscriptions (that let me keep an eye on all my friends’ weblogs in realtime), my downloads, etc. – were set up to all appear in the wonderful “sidebar”: a non-invasive way of keeping information “to hand”. Firefox’s download windows are chunky and ugly, only a little better than the hideous ones provided by Internet Exploder. This plugin allows you to move the download window to the sidebar – a far more sensible place for it – and manage all your transfers from there.
- Web Developer 0.8 and Nuke Anything 0.2 – As a web developer, I love the web developer tools in Opera. The ability to switch stylesheets, emulate other browsers, change and test content on the fly, and manipulate cookies is invaluable when debugging large, complex web projects. Combining these two excellent extensions gives me all of this, and more. The Web Developer tools can do things like manipulate form data on the fly, edit offline HTML and CSS on-the-fly, simulate different screen resolutions, and validate source code – it’s fantastic. Nuke Anything allows content to be ‘removed’ from the page: a great way of digging through complicated source code to find how a particular trick is being achieved.

Sage Extension For Firefox

Sage 1.3 – Now here’s a stunning piece of software. Thanks to Jon for suggesting this one.A great feature of Opera is it’s use as an RSS reader. RSS is a wonderful way to “subscribe” to news sources, weblogs, and the like, and be notified when they’re updated or even have the new content delivered directly to your desktop. It’s so good, that I rarely use Abnib or my friends page any more. Opera makes it easy to set up and manage your subscriptions, and delivers them in the way that suits you best.Now Firefox does natively support syndication, but it doesn’t do a very good job of it. It’s system – “Active Bookmarks”, relies on use of it’s bookmarks list, lots of scrolling, etc. Plus – and here’s the big problem – it doesn’t pass your browser cookies when picking up the feeds – this means that you can’t have it, for example, pick up restricted “friends only” feeds from your friends’ weblogs. Without this feature, there was no way I’d be leaving Opera behind.But Sage pulls it off. It pulls in the feeds and presents them in a brilliant way. It’s default options are a little weird, and it doesn’t support automatic “timed” feed collection, but it still does a great job of this newsfeed lark. I think everybody with Firefox should install Sage.
Session Saver – Simply put, this allows Firefox to remember what tabs you had open when it was last closed (even if it crashed or there was a power cut), and re-open them when you run it again, in a very Opera-esque way.
MiniT 0.4 – A pet annoyance, but one that would have really annoyed me, is the inability to re-order the tabs while using Firefox’s tabbed browsing. I mean: why wasn’t this included with the program? Most other programs that use the dynamic “document” tab metaphor allow the user to click-drag-reorder them, including my beloved Opera. But no, you need a plug-in like MiniT to do this. It’s good: not as “fluid” as Opera, but quite satisfactory.
TabBrowser Preferences 1.1.1 – It didn’t take long of playing with Firefox, particularly on the EasyNews web site, to find another thing which, to me, is a big problem. When people (very rudely) make hyperlinks that request to be opened in “a new window”, Firefox does exactly that: opens them in a new window, rather than in a new tab in the current window (fitting with the tabbed browsing metaphor). I tried a couple of plug-ins to prevent this from happening, but none of them worked consistently (for example, catching JavaScript pop-up windows and tabbing them, for example), as Opera does, until I found this lovely little extension. TabBrowser Preferences has all kind of options I don’t use, but for this one, which I do, it’s wonderful.
LastTab 1.1 – By this point, I had very few quirks left unsatisfied on my “web browser wish list”. One was that, in Opera, pressing CTRL-TAB takes you first to your most-recently used other tab, and then (if you keep pressing tab) through the others you have open. This makes sense to me, because you can then use CTRL-TAB as a two-tab “flicker” (like the “last channel” button on a TV remote): perfect for use as a “boss key” (if you don’t know, you don’t need to know). Satisfied.

This only leave one “big” niggle that still pisses me off – I can’t find a plug-in that will allow me to hold down a particular key (e.g. shift) and click on a tab, to close it (really useful for closing multiple tabs at once, after running and completing a multi-tab information seek). If anybody can suggest an extension that does this, let me know!

So; I guess I’m a Firefox convert. I knew it would happen someday, but I’m just surprised it happened so soon.

Freedom Sport And Surf

There’s a lesson here for any business with a web site:

I’m sure that you may be familiar with Freedom Sport & Surf, the sports goods shop on Alexandra Road (opposite the carpet shop formerly known as Rumbletums Cafe). Well; they had a website – FreedomSportAndSurf.com. But they let the domain name expire, and it’s been picked up by a porn site: take a look.

In any case, the owners of the store aren’t internet-savvy, and had completely forgotten they had a web site. Similarly, most of the staff weren’t aware of it, either, until a lady came in, recently, and informed the staff member at the counter they she thought it was “disgraceful” that the shop had “things like that” on it’s website, where “children could view it”.

Today, staff at the shop are frantically scrubbing the web address from their carrier bags. Hilarity.