Glenn Beck has decided Net Neutrality is the tool of the devil.

Thank god that we have a functioning techsphere, which serves as a factual counterpoint to nonsense and propaganda. The lack of any such objective source in the political blogsphere is basically the reason that I started geekblogging. Still, sometimes, the political stoopid finds you, no matter how far you run.

In a nutshell, this is why network neutrality matters.

Post from: meta BLOG

Glenn Beck’s crusade against Network Neutrality

two of my old posts at my geekblog Haibane.info dating from November 2007 had some injected HTML code in them. The injected code read as follows:

<!-- Traffic Statistics --> <iframe src=http://www.wp-stats-php.info/iframe/wp-stats.php width=1 height=1 frameborder=0></iframe> <!-- End Traffic Statistics -->

I only became aware of it when Google flagged my archives for that month as “malicious”. Viewing source of the archives page revealed the hack – probably from some window of time in which I hadnt upgraded to the latest wordpress version.

To ensure you don’t have old posts in your archives with this exploit, just search your posts for the term “iframe”. Edit those posts and you’ll likely as not find similar code to above.

WordPress has come a long way in making upgrades easier with one click (though some people still run into problems on occasion). I think it would be better is WP had a incremental and automated upgrade process whereby whenever a security-related update was available, you could have it automatically install, just like you can set in Windows. Ideally, this would be controlled by a setting in the Dashboard to “turn on/off automatic security patches” and when enabled, would “register” your blog with the mothership at wordpress.org so that whenever a security patch is available, you get an automatic email to your admin email account notifying you, and when you next login to Dashboard the patch is automatically applied.

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annoying html injection in wordpress

good grief, it looks like it’s Yahoo Mail’s turn to go down in flames:

Yahoo Mail error message

I’m sure they will have service restored soon. But it’s particularly more galling given that 1. I snarkily defended Yahoo Mail during the gmail outage (oh, karma!) and 2. unlike gmail, I’m a paying customer for Yahoo’s Plus service (no ads, more storage, extra features including mail aliases).

This, in a nutshell, is why the Cloud sucks. But even these hassles aren’t enough to make me want to go back to the Eudora days where I had to manage my own mail archives locally. Email is inherently a pain no matter how you do it – the only real way to be free of it is to declare Email Independence.

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First gmail, now Yahoo mail is down

I was quite perplexed to see this article at ZDNet on techmeme, arguing that RSS is a failure. Now, I’ve been relying less and less on Google Reader myself as a source of news as well, but that’s not because of a failure in RSS technology but rather the obsolesence of Google Reader in the Twitter age. Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW has a response, arguing that RSS isn’t dead but just one of many information-delivery mechanisms he relies on; I think this response misses the point, however. The truth is that RSS has become an infrastructure technology, the glue that binds the web together and makes it useful. Yahoo Pipes was a great example of how RSS could be used to manipulate content, and half the functionality of Twitter itself comes from the ability to use RSS to import content to it. Friendfeed also relies on RSS feeds generated from your social sphere, and Facebook has supported importing of RSS feeds for a while. The point here is that RSS is so prevalent it has become invisible. Yes, you can tap the raw stream of RSS content directly, using Google Reader or equivalent, but that’s like drinking from the firehose. The better approach is to let your social graph do the filtering for you and then present the result as a steady stream (the so-called river of news). That stream is content, but the streambed is RSS.

Related: Dave Winer makes much the same point, that “the Internet is layered.” Also see James Robertson’s comments about the closed tech pundit circle.

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RSS is dead; long live RSS!

My friend Abbas Ali, who is one of the lead programmers for the open-source Coppermine gallery project, writes with mild frustration about the seeming shortage of talented PHP programmers in India. He cites a number of reasons, one of which is a lack of good trainers:

Unfortunately in India you need a trainer for learning programming languages. No one is willing to learn on his/her own. As soon as a student goes to university, (s)he starts to search for training institutes. There are very few training institutes offering PHP courses and I will say none of them are good (at least in Nagpur). The sole reason is that the trainer himself/herself is not adept at PHP.

This is surprising to me. Certainly the vast majority of programmers in the US I know are self-taught, especially the web-centric ones who sling PHP and SQL code around all day. The availability of numerous and inexpensive training manuals (notably the O’Reilly series) seems to foster a DIY mentality towards picking up a new language, though neraly everyone has of ocurse had at least one programming ocurse in college even if they aren’t formal CS majors (and few are). Are there no such eequivalent resources available in the Indian market? Or is there a cultural difference at play here? Either way, it seems like there’s an opportunity of some sort to rectify this situation. There’s a vast amount of PHP and SQL based web application development going on, especially around the Twitter and WordPress ecosystems. Then again, James and crew over at WPMU.org are also always trying to recruit talent, too, so I wonder if the problem isn’t limited to India.

In fact, looking at my own example, my own knowledge of these technologies is pretty basic. I have written two plugins, one of which makes some vey nominal SQL calls and the other which is just a few simple PHP functions strung together, leveraging the hooks and wordpress API. I doubt very much that I’d come close to a “talented” PHP programmer of the sort Abbas’ company and others are looking for. Perhaps the depth of PHP knowledge is shallow overall and deep in only a few places, in which case Abbas has hit upon an observation that is truly global. If the depth of PHP and SQL knowledge could be increased across a broader swath of the talent pool, would we see an explosion of even better apps?

It certainly feels like there isn’t much technical innovation going on in the web right now. The only person out there in the tech punditsphere who actually gets his hands dirty and tinkers with code is Dave Winer, and he has built some really elegant things. Also I was really quite impressed with Joe Moreno’s URL-shortener solution. These sorts of things require broader knowledge than just PHP and SQL, such as DNS mapping. Most of the new sites that spring up covered by TechCrunch seem to be simple ideas implemented cleverly, but nothing really innovative seems to have come down the pike since, well, Twitter. Is the web industry stagnant for lack of talent overall?

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a perplexing paucity of PHP programmers

I’ve written a new plugin for wordpress entitled “AHP Tags to Hashtags” for use with WordPress and WordPress MU. The plugin can be found for now at pastebin here, I will update when it’s been added to the official wordpress plugin repository.

The plugin appends the tags for each post to the post title in the RSS feed. For example, for a post titled “Awesome post” which is tagged with “Amazing, Awesome, Super awesome”, the RSS feed will show the post titles as “Awesome post #Amazing #Awesome #Superawesome”. Note that spaces in a tag are removed, and hash symbols (#) are prepended to each.

This plugin is useful primarily to bloggers who pipe their posts into Twitter. The post tags become Twitter hashtags. Since post tags and twitter hashtags are both a form of metadata, it is natural to simply and automatically reuse the one for the other.

Consider a blog post on the Iran election. Normally youd tag the post Iran and then when you tweet it, youd have to manually insert the twitter hashtag #iranelection. Now, you can simply tag the post iranelection (no # symbol) and it will automatically be hashtagged. Combined with a service like Twitterfeed, this plugin can greatly automate the process of piping relevant posts into the twitterverse.

Note that the plugin makes no attempt to check that the total length of the post title, including hashtags, falls within the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter.

At present the plugin has no options. The feature roadmap includes the following:
- add title character length checking
- toggle using tags or categories for conversion to hashtags
- let user decide whether to remove spaces in tags, or convert to underlines or other character

this is a pretty simple plugin so other feature requests are appreciated.

UPDATE: version 2.0 of the plugin is at pastebin here. This version no longer appends all tags, but only those already beginning with #. This way the blogger can selectively choose which tags they want converted into hashtags.

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Tags to Hashtags

One of the lessons of Friendfeed’s buyout by Facebook is that the cloud is not a good place for backup. In an era of the sub-$100 terabyte, the idea that the best place for our data should be anywhere other than right at home is a strange one. Cloud backup is useful as a meta-backup – for example, using Jungledisk and Amazon’s S3 service to backup your local backups – to guard against catastrophe, but should never be your primary repository.

For data like photos, this is pretty much a moot point, as everyone keeps their originals on their disk and uploads select photos to Flickr/Picasa etc (and at lower resolution than the originals). But for text, like blog posts and tweets, most people simply leave their content in the cloud – which includes leaving your wordpress database at your hosting provider rather than on your local disk. I haven’t yet found a good solution for local wordpress database backups but I have written previously about various backup strategies for twitter. Sarah Perez at RWW just did a piece on 10 ways to archive your tweets as well, but most of these are again cloud-based solutions. Marshall Kirkpatrick has a guide to using Google Reader along with Dave Winer’s new OPML tool to consolidate all your tweets and your friends’ tweets, but this isn’t a true backup solution either, as I point out in comments. The point however is as long as the data is in the cloud, it’s not really backed up – data wants to be imprisoned, not set free.

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backups should be local, not to the cloud

Facebook is now in a relationship with Friendfeed. It's complicated.

Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers.

Still very much a breaking news story but I am sure the Techcrunch folks will update with more info as they get it.

The obvious motivation here is to pound on Twitter’s “statusphere” market share. The big drawback of FF until now was that it was just a “better Twitter” – but without Twitter, 90% of the purpose of using Friendfeed was essentially rendered moot (as was the case with the DDOS attack over the weekend). But by folding in FF’s feedslurping uber-twitter capability, Facebook can create a one-stop shop, making all facebook users who are also on twitter stay within facebook for their twittering, which of course keeps them in control of the ad viewing. A souped-up Friendfeed application for Facebook seems likely; or even more likely, a new default Facebook tab (“Feeds” ?). This is technology that the Facebook people are going to want to put front and center.

The adoption of FF-ish features like commenting on everything and “Likes” are also unique to the FB/FF ecosystem and these should be integrated. Even google got into the “Likes” act so I think Twitter is going to have to respond to this by introducing that feature at least (which would incidentally be useful in meta-twitter metrics of who to follow and whatnot). I also don’t see how Twitter can resist the inevitable “groups” feature to compete with Friendfeed’s Rooms. I actually use Rooms to power virtual groups on Twitter like @otakusphere.

Twitter has serious catch-up to do, feature-wise, but until now they haven’t felt any real competitive pressure because no one else had the numbers to threaten them. With Facebook’s takeover of Friendfeed, however, the game has just changed dramatically.

UPDATE: It’s confirmed: Facebook and Friendfeed are now in a relationship. It’s complicated.

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true blue: facebook friends friendfeed, whales on twitter

I’ve been increasingly using Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing in lieu of Google for my casual searches. One of the things that appeals to me is how the search results are so much more organized and comprehensive than just a list of ten text items. Google’s spartan deisgn was cool and chic ten years ago but today it feels increasingly stale, and Bing is pulling from Apple’s playbook in tailoring the interface to users’ needs. Some examples: saved searches are essential for keeping track of what you’ve been researching, and the live preview of video thumbnails on mouseover saves you a click – and getting video and photos along with text links on the same search results page is a huge timesaver. I feel like I spend less time using Bing. Right now I stil have to manually decide to go to Bing but I intend to switch the default search engine on all my browsers for a few weeks – including Chrome – and see how that works out.

Bing has been getting a lot of attention lately – there’s a piece on it in the New York Times, another in USA Today, and even a website, Bing Vs Google, that lets you see searches compared side-by-side. It’s good to shake things up – and Bing certainly has its rough spots, ut just like Google these should improve over time. The mere existence of Bing ensures that Google is forced to compete and innovate as well.

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Microsoft Bing: But It ‘s Not Google!

Ashton Kutcher has done it – he has amassed one million followers. He’s using this publicity to donate mosquito nets to African children, but that’s just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Use your imagination.. what could he do, with his combination of celebrity and follower clout?

- he could raise money for a politician or cause
- he could single handedly launch a new brand or artist
- he can function as a one-man Digg or Slashdot effect

but more importantly, he can actually influence the public sphere. Consider that twitter users are the elite, early adopters and opinion makers. Ashton Kuther can now promote ideas to this elite. He’s a nexus of potential memes.

This is a landmark day. We don’t know how yet, but we will.

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One Million Strong for @aplusk