Geek Stuff category archive

“Here’s looking at you,” writes Ed Chen at Science 2.0:

Facebook has always been plagued with privacy issues, such as revealing to third parties personal information which may be used to sell you goods and services . . . . However, there is a far more insidious algorithm embedded in facebook. By a few refreshes and a few clicks, you can easily see who has most recently been looking at your facebook profile, down to a timeframe of 36 hours, as well as who your overall top stalkers are. Of course, they may not be exactly stalking you, but they are watching you.

He goes on to describe several techniques for following your followers.

Facebook: not a good place to make your death threats.

Federal agents consulted with the online Urban Dictionary to learn the definition of a slang word before securing an arrest warrant for an Indiana man who has been accused of using Facebook to send a death threat to the manager of a gun shop.

Via OhMyGov!

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, September 1.

Note: Meetings are normally on the first Thursday of each month.

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)

Yesterday, I changed the spacing between the lines (making it less) and paragraphs (making it more).

Here’s the CSS:

I added the 15px bottom margin to paragraphs (it was zero), increasing the space between them and reduced the line height from 1.6 to 1.3.

I hope this made the darn thing easier to read. Feedback welcome.

Twenty years ago today, Linus Torvalds posted a message to the Usenet group, comp.os.minix, announcing his decision to design an operating system. Here’s a snippet from the text of his post:

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Linux has a minimal market share in home computing (meaning laptops and desktops); this frustrates Linux users, who tend to have an evangelical streak.

In the world of cell phones, web servers, embedded devices, Linux is a major player. If you have a DVR or flat screen TV, it is likely powered by Linux. If you ever use Google to search the web, you use Linux. There’s a good chance that the websites you surf run on Linux servers.

Read more »

No, he isn’t 40 years old. Only half that:

A Decatur man has been charged with cyberstalking after police say he sent a woman cruel messages about her dead father on Facebook.

(snip)

The woman said she doesn’t remember ever meeting Suka, but Thompson said Suka admitted to creating fake Facebook accounts to send her messages because he thinks he overheard the woman call him a virgin.

Science 2.0 reports that social media does little to drive traffic to external sites. Facebook Frolickers, Twitter Twits (and by extension likely Google Geeks) tend to stay in the safety of their walled gardens.

Which is exactly what the walled gardeners want:

A group called Outbrain did an analysis of recent traffic trends and say the same thing – on social media, people react to the title, they click the link and read less often. If you have a large Twitter or Facebook group, it’s fine to get a lot of repeats of your posts, but you are getting little traffic, and if someone is paying for a social media marketing campaign, they are insane.

Overall, Facebook may drive nearly as much traffic as The Drudge Report, for example, but it is a million submissions to do it – if you get an article on The Drudge Report it will crash your server with the traffic and you will only notice traffic from Facebook if you are really looking. And many people look at linked Tweets as bordering on spam.

This is consistent with my little experience. The few persons who comment on one of my posts on Facebook and those who comment on the blog out there in the Big Wide Internet world are completely different sets of people.

Charts and graphs at the link, as should be expected from a blog called “Science 2.0.”

A few final tweaks over the last two days:

• Changed the color of the “submit” button for the search and comments from that garish red to green.
• Figured out how to wrap the slogan to the width of the banner picture, which I find more attractive than the full screen width.
• Changed the wording of the “more” tag from “Read more” to “Finish reading this post.” (That one took the most hunting to find.)

I’m taking Jack Handy away because I just checked his website and there may be licensing issues. I originally got the plugin from WordPress, but the plugin is also gone. I believe in fair use, but this plugin may go beyond that.

Look for some fun with the banner picture soon. Other than that, I’m done.

This theme allows me to post the complete Bennett Cerf quotation that forms the motto of this blog.

Bennett Cerf was a genius, a scholar, a gentleman, and a lover of English, which he showed in his affection for puns, the horribler the better.

As a country boy who has become a city boy, I can attest to the accuracy of this particular quotation.

The newest trend in comment spam seems to be yahoos promising to help me improve my SEO.

Since they can find me, I don’t think there’s a problem. Heck, I’d rather they didn’t find me.

Anyway, I’ve never been interested in trying to fake out Teh Giggle, and fake out is what these bozos are selling.

Also, before I pecked this out on the typing machine, I did something I have not done in several years, not since I registered my domain name: Searched for “pine view farm” with several search engines. The results were interesting.

According to my stats, the search that brings the greatest number of referrals here is consistently the James Beard Hollandaise Sauce recipe. followed by the Steak with Mushroom, Onion, Red Wine Sauce recipe.

I just went through my blogroll and removed blogs that seem to have gone inactive (see Afterthought) or irrelevant to my interests, as well as added a couple I have recently been visiting and citing frequently.

I removed the Blogroll Amnesty category, as it has outlived its usefulness; since the passing of Jon Swift, the concept has no prominent champion. I merged the links that I kept into my regular blogroll.

I also restored the “Other Stuff” to the sidebar–somehow I had overlooked it.

I’m looking to have some fun with the banner picture next.

Afterthought:

In the podcast world, a podcast’s going inactive is called “podfading.” Would this be “blogfading”?

Ask Amy offers advice.

Twit twits and twits respond.

If you follow the link, be sure to read beyond the first paragraph or you won’t get the full twitifericicity of it all.

Anonymous announces that it will go after Facebook.

This is hardly upsetting. Indeed, were Facebook inaccessible for a few minutes, the world might be a little better.

I tinkered with the CSS yesterday and am now generally happy with the font sizes. It took a little digging to find out where to adjust the headings on the sidebar.

This morning, thanks to an email from one of my two or three regular readers citing research that italics can be hard for geezers like me to read, I made the italics in the sidebar go away.

The only trouble that still needs shooting is that the entire sidebar contents are centered in Microsoft Internet Destroyer and are left-justified in every other browser known to mankind.

I want only the headings and certain individual bits of the sidebar centered.

I’ll deal with that later.

Suggestions and feedback are welcome.

Addendum:

Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts are back.

Today, I updated several Linux computers. No reboots were required.

I updated one Windows computer.

Two reboots were required, interrupting my enjoyment of an episode of Mystery Is My Hobby.

Twice.

Wonder now why I think Windows sucks is less than desirable?

It is because Windows sucks is less than desirable.

This is not an animation (though the YouTube is a video). The images were created directly from programming code as the code runs.

H/T Mark for the link.

Bloomberg takes a look at free speech rights vs. continued employment in the world of twits:

The five-member labor board and its general counsel have sided with employers in some cases, agreeing workers can be fired for gratuitous “griping” about the boss. In other circumstances, the government has contended employees were exercising a right to speak out about workplace conditions. The NLRB risks creating a right to Twitter-bomb the boss with online insults, said Michael Eastman, who prepared the study for the Washington-based Chamber (of Commerce–ed.).

If you twit about toil or Facebook about the factory (do we still have factories?), you might want to read it.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution contains a report on the growing attractiveness of smartphones to the makers of malware:

All at once, smartphones have become wallets, email lockboxes, photo albums and Rolodexes. And because owners are directly billed for services bought with smartphones, they open up new angles for financial attacks. The worst programs cause a phone to rack up unwanted service charges, record calls, intercept text messages and even dump emails, photos and other private content directly onto criminals’ servers.

The article continues includes descriptions of various forms of malware. If you have or are considering a smartphone, take a look.