Geek Stuff category archive

The prosecution presents Exhibit 1,342,923,673.5.

Via Balloon Juice.

It’s been a year since I redesigned the appearance of this site and it’s time to mop up some loose ends, as well as mix a few metaphors.

Since I started this blog, I’ve chosen to surround quotations with links, rather than to insert the link to the source elsewhere in the post, which is the more common practice. It seemed to me to indicate a direct quotation without requiring extraneous words–I have enough extraneous words already.

It was the first independent design decision I recall actually thinking about.

I finally took some time to figure out how to turn off the underlining in quotations, one thing I’ve wanted to do for some time now, because it truly clutters up longer passages.

It required changing this bit of css almost halfway down the stylesheet; the change took a lot less time than tracking down the culprit:

.posttext a {
/* text-decoration:underline */
text-color:blue
}

The “/* */” at the beginning and end of the second line “remarks out” (marks to be ignored) the underlining. The third line I added so that the text color would distinguish the link. (Remarking out the entry makes it easy to undo, if need be. Undoing is, fortunately, easier to do in HTML than it is IRL.)

I also changed the global “hover” quality (“hover” is when the mouse is held over an item) to display an underline by adding the third line below, for those who might have trouble distinguishing the color (the “color” line changes the color to a shade of red on hover). “Global” means this behavior will occur everywhere in this blog:

a:hover {
color:#753206;
text-decoration:underline
}

At this point, I have one more tinker for when that round tuit finally arrives–to make the dashes longer. (Update: Done!)

All rapped up in evolution:

Via Delaware Liberal, which has more, including an explanation of bling.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, January 5.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

What most users don’t know is that the new features being
The medicine show breaks in a new grift. Follow the link for details.

What most users don’t know is that the new features being introduced are all centered around increasing the value of Facebook to advertisers, to the point where Facebook representatives have been selling the idea that Timeline is actually about re-conceptualizing users around their consumer preferences, or as they put it, “brands are now an essential part of people’s identities.”

The name itself is cleverly designed to conceal the fact that your profile no longer arranges information chronologically. Yes, things are laid out by year and by month. But, when it comes to what’s displayed to your social circle at any given time, other metrics, including direct payments to Facebook itself, will now influence the ranking and placement of stories. This payola will be a crucial part of the graph rank, the new metric for placement that the social network uses to determine what appears on your profile.

Achtung! You vill comply!

A fellow left his employer, taking his twits with him. Now his ex-employer is at twits end:

PhoneDog Media LLC, sued in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming that Kravitz’s Twitter list was a company customer list and demanding damages. Legal experts told the paper that the case will set precedent regarding ownership of social-media accounts and the relationship of popular Twitter users to companies.

You may think he left them twitless.

You would be half right.

Unless you tell it not to, Facebook will take your picture and arbitrarily pop it into ads shown to your “friends,” implying that you “like” whatever it is.

Some Californians have had enough:

Facebook Inc., the world’s most used social-networking service, can be sued by people who claim showing advertisements that their friends apparently like violates a California law regarding commercial endorsements.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose rejected Facebook’s bid to dismiss the lawsuit on Dec. 16, ruling the plaintiffs may pursue claims that the company’s sponsored ads violate state law and are fraudulent. Koh granted Facebook’s request to dismiss a claim that it unjustly enriched itself with the sponsored ads.

The California law says that you can’t be shown as endorsing a product without your permission. This hearing was not about the merits of the suit, but about standing.

I expect that Facebook will argue that accepting its terms and conditions equals giving it permission to do whatever the hell it wants to do.

If you care to hear my dulcet tones, I have a podcast up at HPR.

It was recorded and edited in Audacity. A thank you to all the geeks who posted audacity how-to videos on YouTube.

Russian edition.

I’ve found that persons who resort to name-calling are the persons shortest on reasoning power.

Facebook settles charges of abusing user data, without, of course, admitting any wrongdoing. As part of the settlement,

Facebook was barred from “making any further deceptive privacy claims” and ordered to regularly undergo a third party audit to ensure it is keeping its promises.

In other news, pigs, wings.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, December 1.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Advertising uber alles twits.

I’ve known this day was coming for quite a while.

I finally got fed up with the direction in which Ubuntu is heading and replaced it with Slackware on my primary laptop. I started my Linux days with Slackware and it’s still my favorite distro.

I’ve put it off because the laptop has a Broadcom wireless chipset, and Broadcom can be a little tussle to set up; the firmware to use it must often be installed manually (in most cases, in my Linux world, hardware drivers are already in the kernel; having to install drivers separately is almost never necessary).

The machine came with Ubuntu and the wireless worked, so I’ve stuck with Ubuntu out of laziness.

Since I use the Fluxbox window manager, I was able mostly to ignore that Unity monstrosity Ubuntu is touting as the Next Big Thing (it’s not), but the recent update to Ubuntu v. 11.10 caused too many irritations.

The installation gave me a bad moment when it crashed halfway through the first CD, twice, at the same place. I took the CD out, found a fingerprint, wiped it clean, and then it went swimmingly.

So I’m a happy Slacker once more.

The ACLU seems to have had enough.

A new web feature by USA Today details the ways that Facebook stalks you around the Internet – even when you’re not logged in. Facebook’s tracking methods – in the guise of the innocent seeming “Like” button – record every web site its 800 million-plus members have visited during the previous 90 days, even if you never click on that button, or don’t have a Facebook account.

We shouldn’t have to choose between browsing the Web and keeping Facebook from tracking everything we do online. That’s why we’ve asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into Facebook’s practice of tracking your web activity even if you never click on a Like button or log into Facebook at all, and why we encourage you to tell Congress to take steps to protect our privacy by creating a “Do Not Track” mechanism with legal force. And, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, has pledged to hold a hearing to investigate these reports.

I seldom visit Facebook and, when I do, I do so in a private browser session; cookies dropped in private session are deleted when that session is ended.

I’ve also set my browser to “delete new cookies” upon exit.

That took a teeny little bit of work.

I set the preferences to the default of retaining cookies. I then deleted all the cookies except for the two or three I wanted and exited the program.

I then restarted the browser and changed the cookie setting to “delete new cookies,” so that the ones I wanted would be retained, since they were no longer “new.”

No Facebook creepy stalker cookies on my computer.

The newest things since patent trolls: twitter twolls.

This is distinguished, of course, from pictures users post of themselves:

Facebook says it is looking into reports that pornographic and violent images have been posted to its website.

The pictures are reported to have shown up in users’ newsfeeds.

According to the technology site, ZDnet, the material is being spread via a “linkspam virus” which tempts members to click on a seemingly innocuous story link.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said: “[We are] aware of these reports and we are investigating the issue”.

Addendum:

Facebook is blaming a “browser vulnerability” (which browser or browsers are not specified in the article) and claims it was a target, malicious act, rather than random vandalism.

Whatever it turns out to be, I am confident it won’t be stringent enough.

Facebook Inc. is in talks with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to settle claims that it violated users’ privacy when it changed default privacy settings to disclose more information than was previously made public, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.