fnt (fascinating new thing)

Courtesy of Dan, I now have an Atom feed!

[Wed May 20 11:55:28 2009] p
Perl helps me vote:

if ($argument_text_in_voter_guide =~ /(\b[^\Wa-z0-9_]+\b/g) { &vote_for_other_side ; }

(That regexp is blatantly stolen from the Perl Cookbook. What I came up was far less elegant: /[A-Z][A-Z]+/g) [Um... I guess this might need some explanation. That bit of code in between the /slashes/ looks for anything written in ALL CAPS, which is often found in hysterical Voter Guide arguments for or against a particular measure/proposition.]

[Mon Apr 27 23:52:47 2009] p

Faces

I'm currently obsessed with face recognition because I've always thought tagging was way too much work. But letting a computer do it for me with a bit of training? That's both incredibly geeky and lazy!

iPhoto '09 does it but you're stuck with the face data all being in iPhoto. The underlying database is sqlite though, so there's a possibility of hacking the tags from there and either embedding them in the JPEGs as IPTC Keywords or now I'm looking at XMP. (Wait, can you do sidecar files for JPEGs? I'm too lazy and cheap to shoot RAW.)

Oh, there's face recognition in Picasa Web Albums, but alas, that data is not currently accessible via the API, even though plenty of people want it.

Recently I found a new site called Polar Rose that will import your Flickr photos, let you tag them (ideally with your Facebook contacts), and if the tagged parties join Polar Rose and consent (guuuuh, darned viral marketing), those names will get pushed back to Flickr as notes (guh, X-Y coordinates are cute, but IMHO, unnecessary. Just give me the names, please.) So... there's a lot of things that have to happen before your tags show up. Friends tagged must 1) have Facebook accounts 2) join Polar Rose, 3) consent to your tagging them. So uh, tagging your kids? Not going to work unless you're comfortable with your 5-year old having a Facebook account. Apparently Polar Rose is also flirted with Glowfoto.com, Jalbum.net, 23hq.com and Gallery but of course (duh) the big target would be Facebook with their ginormous userbase but there's some issue with a FB policy prohibiting storing their data for more than 24 hours.

Finally, a company called Face.com announced a FB app called Photo Finder that purportedly lets you run facial recognition across your FB galleries. It's still in alpha though, and frankly, I think facial recognition for Facebook is largely superfluous because 1) people are much more selective about what they upload to FB, so they are more likely to tag the photos right after uploading, 2) FB has made the tagging interface so easy, that it's almost hard not to tag, 3) FB has made tagging collaborative by letting your friends tag themselves and others.

Bottom line: Facebook photos usually get tagged by you and your friends -- you don't need a computer to do that work for you. What you need is for a computer to go through the piles of photos in your hard drive and tag all the old photos of your family/friends from the last 5 years so that you can post the embarrassing ones to Facebook.

Speaking of which, yet another reason Facebook sucks -- it ignores existing IPTC Captions or Keywords when uploading.

[Sun Nov 2 01:53:21 2008] p

Free Safari!
No, not the Mac web browser. Safari, O'Reilly's on-line archive of every book they've ever published (I think), is available to any resident of California, if you get a Sunnyvale Library Card.

Oh man. Nerd heaven.

(An annual subscription to the Safari Library with Unlimited Access would be $472.89!!)

(Now reading Perl Hacks, if you must know.)

Oh phooey. Not everything is available. Notably, Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook are absent. This must be some kind of lame "public library" version of Safari. Weak! Oooh, I see, it's something called "Safari Select", which is a subset of the full Safari collection. Again, weak. :-{

[Wed Oct 22 01:16:53 2008] p

Every day is exactly the same

Ok, so now that Dan has updated his layout to not include images (or like, line breaks), a reference to this blog entry doesn't make as much sense, but anyways, the point is, California sure can be boring sometimes:

[Thu Oct 2 17:49:45 2008] p

Shutterfly has an API?
That's weird, in light the fact that they're a "Photo Hostage Site." :-}

Not surprisingly, adding Shutterfly support to SmugMug's SmuggLr or Phanfare's import tool, might run afoul of the Shutterfly API Terms of Use which has some disturbing things like:

Without the express written consent of Shutterfly, you can't use the Shutterfly Open API for any commercial purposes or derive any revenues from your implementation or use of the Shutterfly Open API.
You can't use the Shutterfly Open API to create a service or application to replicate the user experience of, or the services and features available at, www.shutterfly.com or websites owned and operated by Shutterfly.
You can't use the Shutterfly Open API to enable printing of Content through photo print services other than Shutterfly.
You may not copy, cache, store or retain any Content without the consent of the Shutterfly member. Any Content retained by or through your App may only be retained for a limited period of time to provide the services available through your App.

I've sent them a note asking if download of originals is even possible with the API. If not, the concerns about their Terms are moot.

I suppose they added API support to jump on the bandwagon (albeit extremely late) and see if some sucker out there might write a Wordpress plug-in/Facebook App that'll let you include photos from your Shutterfly uploads.

Clearly they've overestimated the Web 2.0-savviness of their customer base, which is primarily scrapbookers, soccer moms, and other people > 45. :-}

[Sat Sep 20 18:44:30 2008] p

There's an anagramatically incorrect cut-and-paste graphic of the OBAMA/BIDEN sticker floating around the Internets (ok, the Facebook) that's been doctored to highlight BAD OMEN. But they've omitted letters A, B and I, because understandably, "A BI BAD OMEN" just isn't as catchy.

But if you add first names, you get:
BARACK OBAMA JOE BIDEN -> AIR JOCK? A BABE? BAD OMEN.

Heh.

[Fri Sep 19 18:34:08 2008] p

So nerdily awesome: goosh.org

[Thu Aug 28 19:37:10 2008] p

Please Don't Do This
The router in Flash's building complex doesn't have bandwidth throttling, or it's not enabled, so:
flash: Our real problem is the standard Tragedy of the Commons, which I warned about five years ago. Apparently we bought a router that understand fairness, but failed to turn the feature on.
darryl: fairness? are you guys trying to throttle bandwidth for the Second Life/WoW players in your building?
flash: Among others. We're also trying to improve our throttling of, among others, me.
flash: Currently, when my VPN goes nuts, our building mgr physically unplugs my enet jack.
flash: I assume that any fairness algorithm will handle that case. Currently it sends ping times to ...
darryl: he needs to install a little 4-port hub between your line and the router
darryl: and power it with an X-10 module
darryl: then he'd be able to do it from his couch
darryl: oh man, that is my most brilliant and stupid hack ever.

[Thu Aug 28 01:15:21 2008] p

Facesuck
UPDATE: Glady correctly pointed out that if all you're really interested in is Status updates, then you can just Save Page in the browser (after clicking "See Older Notes" to make sure you have everything), and voila, snapshot of what you've been doing. Still, XML export would be nice.

So I've finally figured out what irks me about Facebook. Goofy "pokes" and "virtual gifts" aside, it really is a compelling place for you to get in touch and keep up with with old friends.

I think part of my initial gripe with it was the insane popularity (and admittedly very slick usability) of their Photos app. Super simple but fast UI, very specific and useful implementation of tags (instead of the "note graffiti/overload" you sometimes see on Flickr), nice integration into the News Feed, and cool uploading from mobile devices (yay, a Palm app!)

BUT.

What happens if and when Facebook goes out of business, gets acquired and shutdown, or horribly hacked?

Where are your photos then? Surely you have them backed up somewhere else. On your hard drive? What if that crashes?

Ok ok, so maybe you only post some of your photos to Facebook and the originals are safely stashed on multiple RAID 5+1 arrays distributed around the country. Fine.

Here's the important bit (finally, Darryl):

Glady mentioned the other day that what she really loves about Facebook is that it's become a journal of what she's been doing. Status updates, mobile photos, communications with long-lost and closely-held friends. "It's like blogging, but so much easier."

Yes. True. But then it strikes me. The Movable Type install that I set up for her years ago is on a server that I pay to have backed up nightly. The data will be there, presumably for as long as we keep paying our bills. Like photos that I host on Phanfare or SmugMug, there are backups and redundancy, and more important, there is a way to get them back out.

So I've gone and buried the lede: Facebook doesn't allow export, and this is why it sucks, especially when so many people are investing so much time and effort into using it as not only a transient communications medium, but also as a record of their communication.

Sure, Scoble got bounced because he was scraping his contacts. And yes, it would be swell if you could get those out. But whatever -- my network isn't extensive or vital enough to me that I care about losing contact with these folks. But I do care that Glady thinks of the stuff she posts on Facebook as "her journal", when in fact, when Facebook goes bye-bye, so does her journal.

Suck.

So if somebody knows of a way to export the contents your own wall (I'm not trying to write an e-mail address harvester) using the API and I'm just a dope for not being able to find it with 5 minutes of Googling, please let me know

It'll save me the trouble of hacking together something awful.

[Tue Aug 26 13:00:27 2008] p

Dont' Buy It!
So it turns out the site is over 4 years old, but Noah discovered it today, and it is awesome, like if AdBusters magazine did a website for kids:

http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/

(The fake banner ads are awesome.)

*[It's a Semisonic song, ya know? It's not like my life is fascinating. i just had to put something up there.]
>:P
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Yeah, sorry, this is it. i know, i know, all that hype for this?
Well, i still have the geek page, but i won't be updating it. Sorry.
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Oh yeah, your feedback, as always, is welcome.