Open Hatch

[Update: I've revised this painting. Twice. Except.. I miss some of the more raw impressionist effects of the second revision.. may clear out the excess detail of the third revision..]

I’m in love.

For reference and history, the first version of the painting is here. The second version is here.

How I made this:

1. iPhone4 taking a picture in HDR mode (I think?).
2. Photoshop CS5 transplanting street and construction objects in original photo with turf/leaves/trees/mountain backdrops via “content-aware fill” (which is amazing – have a look here.)
3. Painter 12 “Auto-paint” feature running batches of various brushing paramaters I fed it, to make an overlay to my own hand-painted work: digital watercolor cloning (of the photo), and oil cloning of a broad, messier under-painting (from the photo).
4. Photoshop again, to mix layers: layer 1 is oil under-painting, layer 2 is watercolor layer in color dodge layer blend mode, layer 3 is auto-paint batches at 60 percent transparency.

So this is mixed digital media in three layers: a lower layer of oil, a middle layer of watercolor, and another top layer of oil. But it’s like all the light in the watercolor dodged everything in the oil beneath it (which you cannot do in real life), and on top of all that is more oil, mixed as viscous material but very translucent (maybe you could do that with a thinning agent? I don’t know real oil painting).

[Update: now it's multiple layers of multiple types of media, multi-layers themselves combined in stages using clipping masks in Photoshop; and additionally including digital colored pencil.]

If you’re also in love with it, you may buy a print with a variety of options.

Approaching 10 years since the terrorist attacks on America of September 11 2001, I have been thinking a lot about United flight 93, and the actions of the retaliating passengers who thwarted their attackers’ mission.

After the hijackers either killed or disabled the airplane pilots, passengers learned from cell phone calls to loved ones that other targets had been hit: other hijackings had succeeded. They knew they were riding an airplane-turned-bomb, which must have some intended target: they were facing imminent death. They knew that their choice was to retake control of the flight or die.

Faced with their own imminent destruction, the passengers chose to fight. They organized and mounted a counterattack. The combat that ensued bore out the apparent intentions of the terrorist attackers: to maintain control of the airplane toward its destructive goal or else destroy themselves and the passengers.

The flight recorder captured the sounds of the conflict in which the passengers either closely approached retaking control of the cabin, or actually retook it. At that point, the hijackers, faced with the imminent failure of their mission, chose self-and-all-annihilation. On the flight recording is one of the hijackers issuing an order to end the flight, just before the time ground witnesses reported the plane crashed. It approached ground near upside-down at a steep angle, and impacted at about 500 miles per hour in a giant fireball, immediately killing all the hijackers and passengers.

The passengers succeeded in killing two hijackers and thwarting the remaining two. The terrorists succeeded in thwarting the passengers’ attempt to re-take the plane: by ending their own and all lives present.

Whether or not it was the passengers’ intentions to defend America as well as their own lives, they in fact did defend their country. What is more, they probably defended the Capitol; abundant evidence suggests the intended target of the flight was the White House or the Capitol building. At the cost of their own lives, the citizens-turned-soldiers of United flight 93 stopped a plot in action to destroy the housings of our liberty, and all of the life in them.

The survival battle and the sacrifices of the passengers of flight 93 are heroic.

These, and the other victims of the attacks of that day, left many survivors and survived, not only in the United States but globally. In some way we are all survived, but it is worst for those who had to confront this most personally and directly. To any of you, if you read this: To merely function after surviving a forced confrontation with such unspeakable evil is heroic. For all of us, but especially for you, I pray.

Eight years after Microsoft’s Operating System’s chief slams open-source software as un-american [Salon article], Microsoft has now contributed driver source code to the Linux kernel [Slashdot], with the same free software license as Linux.

I applaud Linus Torvald’s sensible, even kind, statements (as quoted at that slashdot article).

As a larger view of some of the challenges that free software has posed to Microsoft over time, have a look at this image from Wikipedia showing the browser rendering engine usage share since 1995. This shows Mosaic, the original browser (in green), and Netscape (in blue – and I think Netscape was based on Mosaic?), being walloped into nothingness by Internet Explorer starting around 1995 and ending the start of this century. The blue is Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. But the orange in the upper-right is Gecko, or Firefox’s rendering engine, which is an open-source descendant of Netscape. You can see that Firefox has taken a substantial chunk out of Microsoft’s share (through Internet Explorer) since the start of last decade. This is significant here because Firefox, like Linux, is open-source software.. but it doesn’t really provide an idea of the challenges Linux has presented Microsoft, I suppose. For some idea of that look at this web video from YouTube. I find it worshipful (I think that’s Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU operating system (components of it are in Lunux) – they’re deifying?) and slightly inaccessible, but it’s good history.

I’m submitting this post via Firefox running on GParted, a linux distribution I’m booting from a USB drive (set up with YUMI)to make changes to a dual-booting ancient machine running both Windows 98 and Windows XP. I brought up Firefox to look for “Mozilla’s Revenge”, which is a tool that replaces the windows 98 shell with the leaner 95 shell, as well as changing the boot screen to the following amusing image:

.. anyway that’s what I was searching for and I got side-tracked by some of the search results

[2011-06-11 Update: I've just read that, to their credit, Facebook is a participant in an industry working group (DataPortability) that encourages and is actively developing open data portability standards. Over the long run, I believe the web will evolve in ways that conveniently, portable..y?.. and securely serves the interests of users.]

Now, before I rant, mind! – I got my current (great) job via Facebook contact! Notwithstanding:

One of the things that drives me nuts about Facebook (and really a lot of the social web) is the “walled garden” thing. You’re devoting many hours (probably way too many) of your life to this site, but is your data viewable to any other network (at least in ways that you would like – here’s another rant about Faceook making your data available in ways you might not like)? Can you easily (or at all) export, download, or backup any of your data, such as:

• Contacts (with their phone #s, emails, birthdays, etc.)
• Your “statuses” (short text posts to which people can add comments – how about we call these “stati”?)
• Profile data (“likes”, bio, sites, information about you etc.) – wouldn’t it be great if you could just yank that from one social web site to another – port it straight from facebook to Yahoo, google, myspace or any other web site, forum or whatever – anywhere you list profile information?
• Uploaded photographs; galleries
• Pages you wrote, etc..

Is any of this laboriously created data available for you to export or backup easily? Email, you can download, archive, copy etc. But any of the above – stati, “Likes” (or google’s equally silly “plus 1“), profile data etc. on most any social web site – nope.

Digression:

show

Except that a few brilliant folks have pointed out ways you can get no. 1 (contacts); there are even signs the “walled garden” is at least getting some of the nastier hedges trimmed away, or even doors and windows cut out!

With a fair amount of work you can use the information to the end in subject (specifically this post’s subject header).

Option 1, which I found much slower: a chrome browser addon that simply puts all of your Facebook contacts’ info into your gmail account’s “contacts”. Steps:

1. If you don’t have it, get chrome.
2. In chrome, navigate to the Facebook Friend Exporter page and install the addon; it will guide you into it’s automated copy of contacts from Facebook to gmail..
3. Sit back and wait. In my opinion, wait way too long. But it seemed to me it got more and better data than the next option..

Option 2, which I found quicker (even though it takes much longer to describe):

1. Import contacts directly from facebook to Yahoo Mail, via a tool built into Yahoo’s service. If you don’t have a yahoo account, get one, then go to your mail. Look for a “contacts” tab. There you’ll find a tool that will guide you through importing from Facebook (or Gmail, maybe others). I wanted to pass the data on elsewhere.. glance three steps ahead if you want to fix duplicate contacts in Yahoo.
2. Export your Yahoo contacts to a .csv file. (as I write this, you can do this at the Yahoo mail web site under the contacts tab, then an “actions” button, then “export all contacts”). Save the .csv file to a safe place you know..
3. In Gmail (so you’ll need a Gmail account), under “contacts”, click the “more actions” button, then “import..”, which will guide you through uploading that .csv file you made from your Yahoo contacts.
4. There’s a good chance that many of the same people are already in your Gmail contacts (and duplicates could have been made in the Yahoo import step). Fortunately, Gmail and Yahoo both have a handy feature to merge duplicate contacts. For both, it’s under the “actions” button (“Fix duplicates” in Yahoo as I write this; “Merge duplicate contacts” in Gmail). I’d use that now.
5. If you want to get these neatly collected and merged contacts into Thunderbird mail (which I love/hate even more than Outlook Express or Windows Mail.. I’m looking for a mail client I like that uses maildir format instead of the clunky mbox), and assuming you’re already using Thunderbird, download and install the gcontactsync Thunderbird extension (another coding miracle from the open source community). I’ll let you meander on your own from here, but this will let you yank contacts out of gmail right into Thunderbird, and best of all, sync them; changes in Thundebird will migrate to gmail and visa-versa. I had duplicates as a result of first sync, but if you go back a step, merge duplicates in gmail again, then sync again, all these new duplicates are merged.

Blam! In only five semi-laborious steps, you’ve taken down a large section of the wall of that garden. Now all your facebook contacts are in Thunderbird.

Just so you don’t think I somehow magically knew all this, I got a lot of it from web sites with dated or arcane instructions I’m not linking to

What are you going to do with that information? When was the last time you sent plain ol’ emails to (or received emails from!) old friends? (“Plain ol’ friends?”) ‘Cuz we’re all like: “Yeah I saw it on Facebook”.. guess what, comrade? I didn’t see it on Facebook. May I hammer the point? Facebook is not yours. If it were, copying valuable information from it wouldn’t induce labor pains. There is too much there; it yanks at you and never lets go; the would-be permanent clinging is ironically a sort of permanent transience; it is not designed with permanency in mind: friends might catch you there.. or they might not.

I’m home sick, surfing randomness on the internet when I’m not in bed coughing and reading THE HERO OF AGES. Almost done with that book. (Loving the series, and this third book in it, so far.) I’d link to it on the web, but guess-what? Your Internet is not spoiler-free. You can’t even count on the back-cover of this book to avoid spoilers relating to the first two. Read MISTBORN first. And that is very highly recommended.

Anyway, some of what I’m running across in said surfing.. Oh My Weirdness.

Below is the advertisement that introduced the world to the original Apple computer, in 1984.

This ad pays homage to the sci-fi novel 1984, and the film adaptation of it, in which Big Brother, mythical/quasi-real figurehead of the totalitarian state Oceania, is betimes represented on giant, uh.. telescreens. Obviously, this represents Apple shattering all that Big Brother.. whoever he is/was in real life.. embodies. Then, presumably IBM; later Microsoft.

(Other reading today: Google as Big Brother. Scroll down to the list. After a read-through, I think one must admit it is at least a bit scary, or else one must be declared, possibly, slightly careless. Maybe I don’t care. But I probably do. I am at least delighted and entertained, conceptually, by many of the things posted at google-watch.org.)

My take: anywhere that technology does things against your will, or affects you in ways you might not choose, without informing you, it’s Poorly Conceived technology, and is probably working in some ways Against You. Combine this with attempts by those who produce the technology to have the means of creating or delivering the technology entirely closed and proprietary, forever, insofar as they can assure.. and you have Technological Oligarchy.

This model still holds the day [citation needed], and perhaps it will, in its scope, forever.

I’m not really a fan of the model, but I think going toward an open-standards, open-source, free-everything approach can tend to an opposite extreme. I’m not sure where information-technology democracy is embodied or idealized, or even if it can or should be, and I’d offer snarky or ranting comments for or against this or that, uh, technological thingie, but mostly, I think.. I’m getting by.. I never really attended any of the screeds for or against this or that technology at this or that Hate Week in this or that Oligarchy. But if any of these pretentiously conceived technological oligarchies causes me duress, I may, uh.. let you know..

The following video explores my 3D visualization of the first scenes from the classic text adventure, ZORK.

Here are a few screen captures from a CCS64 emulator run of the game, showing what I derived this art from, as well as why I still consider this game a classic (the game’s response to a command to hit a table with a knife, for example).

The house was modeled by myself this weekend, with furnishings and weapons from the Google 3D Warehouse. As the version number implies, this is unfinished. This animation was exported from Sketchup (using the lagarith lossless codec, then converted to .avi encoded with Xvid, using VirtualDub).

[This was drafted many months ago, and never posted. Not sure why.. I've decided it's worthy.]

I wouldn’t post this if this were about hacking the XBox live arcade version of this game; because that would provide information which people could abuse to cheat on the game’s global list of high scorers (leaderboards). I hope I’m not mistaken, but first looking at this game on the PC, I don’t think there’s any kind of global high score boards.

I’ve been taking video capture of this game as part of a video portfolio, and found myself messing around with a funny bug I found, and.. otherwise exploring the game.

I’ve figured out how to hack the save files for this game (the PC version) to change the number of items in resource piles. Here’s an example:

• While playing the game, find a resource pile and identify how many of that resources are in it. For this example I found a pile of 139 Carved wood.
• Second, find your savefile. Mine is named:
  

  C:\Program Files\NinjaBee\AKingdomForKeflings\Saved\S0000030272500Xf50000L9IHXvmr9a.kef

  Back up that save file.

• Using a hex editor like hexedit, open your save file and search for that pile of 139 carved wood thusly (click the thumbnail image for a larger detail):



• Unless you happen to know how to translate decimal to hex quickly or in your head, open Windows Calculator. Click the view menu->Scientific. Punch in 139, then click the “hex” radio button. This will display 139 in hexadecimal which is (8B).
• In hexedit, click the edit->find menu, then in the popup dialog click the “hex” tab. Type in:
  

  01010000[the hex value you are looking for, in my case 8B]

  - so that you are searching for

  010100008B

  and click “Find Next”. You may need to search from the beginning if prompted.

• Using Windows Calculator, figure out hex for a much larger number, say, erm.. 16,777,215, or FFFFFF Starting at the offset in your savefile where you found 8B (which is followed by 0000), type that right into hex edit, then save the file (I had to tell hexedit yes, I want to change to write mode).
• Load up your game and go examine this hex-modified resource pile. It may look something like the following: (click the thumbnail image for a larger detail)

In the following, I may be guilty of posting, for the first time in many months at this blog, a post which is.. snarky? It’s hard to help.. what I find here is so hopelessly at odds with itself it’s just.. almost funny. If this bears penance, the next post will be an, erm.. positive.. post about a game hack.

I’m setting up a 3D render farm at home for hobby work, and installing Windows 7 on new hardware as a base for farm nodes.

As part of installing Windows 7 on these “nodes”, I’ve examined remastering tools, like RTSe7enLite, that allow you to (theoretically) drastically reduce the installed size (and therefore make more efficient the loading and running) of Windows 7. (I’ve had mixed results with RTSe7enLite, and I’ve mostly given up on it for now.) This has led me to discover that a certain folder in Windows 7, \winSxS (for “Windows Side by Side”) takes up almost half of the installed operating system (Windows 7 lands on your hard drive at a whopping ~10 Gigabytes; this is an operating system? No, it’s a cow that ate the whole pasture and is ready to die and/or explode!), all for the sake of managing compatibility with applications and operating system components I will most likely never use on a render farm.

(More interested in Linux now. Linux can be very, very lean and mean..)

There are mixed reports that you can harmlessly remove or drastically reduce the size of the winSxS folder, so I’m looking into that. This led me to a web page which directly quotes from two different Windows technical developers:

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #1:

All of the components in the operating system are found in the WinSxS folder – in fact we call this location the component store.. The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system.. Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder.

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #2:

In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll.. however what’s being reported is.. the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32..

They’re talking about slightly different things: the former, Windows Vista, and the latter, Windows 7, but these two operating systems have largely (or entirely?) the same architecture.

So are you still with me? Are we still speaking the same language or did your brain fill up with mud? Technical Developer #1 is emphatic that all “components” in the system reside in WinSxS; says he:

“Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance.. of each.. file.. and that instance is.. in the WinSxS folder.”

.. while Technical Developer #2 explains how WinSxS points to files in many different places:

..nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere.. the files are not actually in this directory.

Which is it? Are the files in the folder, or not? Says Developer #2:

The fact that we make it tricky for you to know how much space is actually consumed in a directory is definitely a fair point!

It’s sounding like users aren’t the only ones for whom it is tricky to determine what is actually used and where..

I’ve been slowly working on a project to produce a version of the Book of Mormon which integrates modern grammar with textual corrections discovered in Royal Skousen’s Critical Text Project.

Royal Skousen has spent decades researching the original and earliest sources (and for that matter, eventually all major printed editions) of the Book of Mormon, and he has discovered thousands of errors and alterations transmitted through various editions from the original manuscripts to subsequent editions. None of these errors or alterations change the meaning of the text substantially, but there are numerous cases where relatively small meanings didn’t come through. One example is the final verse of the book, where the original manuscript, it has been discovered, read “..pleading bar of the great Jehovah”, but the first printed edition (and all subsequent editions) mistook this as “..pleasing bar of the great Jehovah”. (Incidentally, I’ve always found that mistaken word a bit jarring and puzzling – now I’ve learned why. That’s not how it was intended to read!)

My main reason for this is that for some time I’ve wanted to orate a “podcast” of the Book of Mormon, as I really don’t prefer any of the existing audio versions of this book; so while I’m doing that, why not do it with a text truer to the original manuscript?

Initially I even contacted Dr. Skousen himself, seeking permission. He seemed open to it, but deferred to Yale Press, forwarding my request there. Yale Press denied permission on the basis that they would want to authorize and organize such an effort through an established publisher. (I predict they never do.)

Nevertheless remaining curious, I got my own copy of The Earliest Text from Deseret Book. I was both very pleased and disappointed. The disappointment stems from decisions necessary to remain true to forming a “critical text”. This means a text reproducing the original manuscripts as faithfully as possible – right down to some of the weirder grammar – such as “if there be fault, it be the mistake of men” in the original title page – which, incidentally, I think is a perfect mistake. These grammar errors may be inherent to Joseph Smith’s dictation when he (early on) had little education in language. I don’t mean to marginalize The Earliest Text. Being strictly true to the original text doubtless has very worthwhile academic and historical application. But for the layman and everyday readers, it doesn’t. Joseph Smith himself made considerable grammatical and other emendations to the text for the third edition (dozens of times, he scratched out the very redundant phrase “and it came to pass”), and apostles and prophets who followed him down through the decades made numerous grammatical corrections, none of which alter the meaning of the text, all of which make it clearer and easier to read.

What pleases me in The Earliest Text is the plain layout, the spare devotion to only canonical text (none of the extensive introductions, cross-references, chapter introductions etc.), the preservation of initial section breaks as denoted by Joseph Smith, and Skousen’s very clear reworking of the punctuation from scratch. (The original manuscripts were, with very little exception, un-punctuated, continuous blocks of text. All periods, commas, semicolons etc. were added by the original type-setter.)

It dawned on me these facts (of my pleasure and disappointment) produce an opportunity.

The Earliest Text edition may arguably be under copyright as the first printing of all combined discoveries about the earliest text, plus Skousen’s completely reworked punctuation. What it does not have is the grammatical emendations of later editions – which are all in the public domain. Very little has been altered since Orson Pratt’s grammar emendations and versification of the text early last century.

I can combine the two without violating anyone’s copyright.

My edition will integrate these of Skousen’s findings: 1.) Correction of all errors that alter meaning, such as “pleasing” to “pleading”, 2.) All language that supports the original text’s self-consistency, such as the identified “Hebraisms” – for example, so many conjoining clauses prefixed with the word “and” 3.) All grammatical emendations subsequent to the original publishing which clarify meaning, and 4.) Perhaps even some of my own grammatical corrections. For example, where Lehi says “..behold, I have obtained a land of promise, in the which things I do rejoice”. If this isn’t evidently originating in any language phenomenon inherent to the text before translation, why not simply reduce this to “in which I rejoice”? No change in meaning, and plenty of improvement in clear grammar.

Unfortunately, producing a new edition of the text is an involved undertaking. But modern technologies are speeding it up vastly (such as Optical Character Recognition grabbing me a full 1921 text, from a scan of an edition of that year downloadable from archive.org).

I have a full text; I’m working out OCR scanning errors. I’m aiming for a layout akin to the first edition, but maintaining verse numbers unobtrusively.

Hours ago I accidentally ran into the work of a font designer who created a font intent on reproducing a style of typeface in wide use in the 1800′s through early 1900′s, but which was subsequently almost entirely abandoned. I’ve incorporated this font into a page layout and title page design first draft; I’m very pleased with it. Here is a link to a pdf export: 1921-bookofmormon00smituoft-editcopy3-title-pages-design1

This entry would probably best be at a new blog devoted to the project; but I’ll have a section here devoted to it as well; so maybe I’ll just copy relevant stuff to.. whatever.. new blog.

I was just fiddling with the search toolbar and searching from the address bar in Firefox. Somehow I ran into pages detailing how to alter the search behavior of the search bar in firefox so that it doesn’t automatically direct you to google’s “lucky” (#1 ranked) result of whatever you type. (I think that default behavior is presumptuous and annoying.) I also [update 11-10 blah blah blah blah I'm coming back to this and not even reading everything in my own entry, but here it is anyway:] show

Here’s how (copied from that page and updated with my instructions to set it to search via scroogle, with or without SSL). To do it without SSL:

1. At Firefox address bar, enter about:config and press ENTER.
2. At Filter: field, type keyword.url
3. You should see a Preference name of keyword.URL in the list. Double click it, a “Enter String Value” input box will appear.
4. Replace the string with:

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi/search?q=

If you want SSL (so that the search itself is impossibly obfuscated to any eavesdropping intermediary), just ad an s to http (https), so that this is the URL to enter in step four:

https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi/search?q=

The real practical application of this may be limited, but it pleases my inner nerd

Modifying address bar behavior aside, I do think adding different search engines to the search toolbar is very practical. There are many varieties of information (and scenarios for their use) where the findings of a ranking algorithm are not ideal. To that end, here is a page that will lead you to any (or many) links you choose, which will add useful search engines to your search toolbar (not only to Firefox, but to unrelated browsers as well, I think!). And here is an associated (very cool!) Firefox add-onn that will add the search capability of any web site to your search toolbar; so that you can skip navigating to that site’s search tool, and just search from the toolbar.

I’ve sometimes been playing a few old video games with my son (using emulators on a PC). I thought I’d capture some video of the game play along the way. These are both scaled up to HD (viewable up to 720p resolution) but preserving the “pixelated” style of the originals.

Hard Hat Mack on the Commodore 64, playing to level 5 (10 minutes). Run from the CCS64 emulator:

A Boy and His Blob, on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Includes the odd game ending (3 minutes). Run from the NESticle emulator (what an awful name).

For the curious, I got the latter looking like it does by using an ffvdub filter (Resize and Aspect, with the Point luma method for scaling up), via VirtualDub. The former was scaled up to x720 in the emulator during play.

I’ve been trying to get CorelDraw X3 working on a PC to edit .svg files for a project (wow, the svg format is cool). For some reason, it’s arguing with this PC, although it works fine on another (much slower) of mine. Every time I go to the file open menu it brings up a crash report dialog box. I can cancel the dialog and the program continues running fine – after it appears 3 more (total 4) times.

I love this application, but what in the world is with this? I finally tried the obvious, duh approach to finding a solution: google it. I quickly found a page with a proposed fix (from a user with a serious chip on his shoulder).

..You must launch regedit (ALT+R or START->RUN and type regedit and press enter) and go to:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32]

and change NoFileMru from 0×00000001 to 0×00000000

Registry hacking? Oh, brother. However, it worked. Problem solved. Application running normally again.

Since that person’s post saved me grief, I’m paying it forward. You can do the preceding registry hack much faster by using a .reg file. Download the following text (.txt) file, rename the extension to .reg, then double-click it. If Windows doesn’t report successfully importing the information into the registry, try right-clicking the file and then clicking “merge”. These instructions are for a Windows XP account with Administrator rights; Vista users may need to disable User Account Control or run it as an Administrator or whatever.

Registry Fix file (.txt to rename as .reg)

Creepy oddness I just ran across: after a friend of mine on Facebook shared a link, their friend saw an advertisement on CNN.com that said so. “[So-and-so] shared [this-and-that] on facebook”, it said. This is probably only targeted to friends of that friend. Presumably, this is a service, or else why would CNN and Facebook be in kahutz to set this up without either user’s awareness or express permission?

How (technically) did it happen?

By default, Facebook allows all of the following information about you to be shared by your friends:

• Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)
• Status updates
• Online presence
• Website
• Family and relationship status
• Relationship details (significant other, looking for, etc.)
• Education and work
• My videos
• My links
• My notes
• My photos
• Photos and videos I’m tagged in
• About me
• My birthday
• My hometown
• My religious and political views

“Shared” means publicly available for harvesting by facebook applications, or now, apparently, facebook partner web sites (read on). If you’re logged into facebook, here is the link to the friends privacy settings page where you can uncheck all that.

That isn’t the only place with related settings, it seems. This page has a setting for whether “select partner” web sites (which evidently includes CNN) can “personalize your experience” by use of such information.

Even if you disable that, and you have a facebook account and have “added” any reasonable amount of people you know, the following is true: anyone can find your profile page, and from that page, they can learn all the following: your name, gender, “networks”, friend list, and Pages. This (minus a few things you can withhold, like a profile picture and your city) is all defined by Facebook as “publicly available information“.

All of this bothers me. About their “publicly available information” policy, I agree with this blogger – this search of his blog pulls up three posts about it at this writing. The report he links to from the EFF is alarming, and frankly damning. And I never thought I’d agree with the ACLU on any point

It seems to be the most common attitude of social media engineers; that there is no ethical problem in manipulating people into disclosing as much about themselves as possible, and making this information boundlessly and permanently available. They declaim: we respect your privacy. Rubbish! Their bottom line is advertising, and that means the more information about users they can harvest and exploit (with or without your knowledge and express consent), the better their bottom line. End of story – and all the evidence in the ongoing story supports it.

Google Buzz is also terrible with privacy. Here’s the revision as of this writing, of the Wikipedia entry’s section on privacy concerns over that service. Most notable and alarming there is the report that by using Buzz, a woman was found by her abusive ex-husband, because it shared her contact and work information without her knowledge or consent.

This page relates how to disable the service in gmail, or at the least curb what it discloses about you.

Other readings – a blogger who was creeped out by Buzz’ initial release – Google quoted as officially stating “there is no complete privacy” – a blog post that may be fairer to Google. Still, the release of Buzz was recklessly dismissive of (or even contemptuous toward) privacy concerns.

I’m kinda puzzled, though. The newest relevant blog article I can find on it (and here are two previous – 1 – 2) relates that Buzz hasn’t disabled default sharing of your “following” and “followed by” lists, but; in my own test of Google Buzz, after I joined, activated my profile, and logged out, I viewed my public profile link, and it didn’t display who I’m following and who I am being followed by. (I’ve suddenly just imagined a strange and tasteless modern retelling of Jesus’ arrest and mock trial, in which Peter is accused by those around him of following Jesus’ twitter account, and denies it thrice before, erm.. the google cache reveals it.. and Peter goes out and weeps bitterly.) It also said there wasn’t enough information to be indexed, so maybe that’s why. Regardless.. it’s well enough for me to be part of Google’s Brave New World via the search engine and gmail. Sigh – and YouTube.

(Here is a link to view that in high definition.)

I’ve thought it might be cool to combine animations from the Electric Sheep screen saver with sounds roughly correlating to the images – by way of a reverse spectrogram. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the frequency components of something (for example, a sound), so a reverse spectrogram takes an image and breaks it into component frequencies.

The name of one program that does this for sounds (and it can do it from any image) is Coagula, which I used to make representative sounds for this video in 5 second intervals using stills from this short video to showcase the idea. I then combined these all in a Nonlinear Editor (for video) and rendered the results out to this.

The synthetic sounds Cougula makes generally sound scary, screechy, and creepy – especially with source images like this I like it.

I’ve kept getting this error message at my Ussins blog whenever I try upgrading wordpress automatically, and just got it now when trying to automatically upgrade plugins:

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted”

Fed up with seeing it, I googled it and was led to this page, with a simple fix recommended by the commenter “gestroud”:

You could also add this line to your wp-config.php

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

This way you won’t have to constantly make the fix again whenever you upgrade WordPress.

I added that line near the top of said file in the install, but made it 128M (for 128 Megabytes), and tried the plugin upgrade again. Error fixed.

Someone else there mentioned it might be caused by a php.ini in the wp-includes folder that would have been added manually “by you or your host”. I find no such file at my web server, only a php.ini.default, and I don’t know if that applies. If it did, it would be changing the line that starts:

memory_limit 32

Which for me had a byte listing (not 32 as in the comments in that thread); I’d assume it would just be quadrupling that number to equal 128 megabytes.