Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Via the videoblogging mailing list: audiovisceral.net are developing a tool for videoblogging.

Firefox 0.9 is out.

NewsAloud takes RSS feeds and turns them into human voice read MP3 files (which you can then listen to on the train). Intriguing.

Harry Fuecks: “I continue to be blown away by just how good Simple Test is.” I’ve never worked with unit tests, I guess I should check them out. (If I ever get back to programming that is.)

Sleeping habits: “Americans are sleeping at least 20 percent less than their forefathers a century ago.”

If you have to fly to India (bombay) or Europe (brussels, london), Biman (the Bangladeshi airline) often have the best deals. It’s not easy to get tickets for them though, you usually can’t buy them online. I’ve used them before to get cheap tickets between New York City and Brussels. The airplanes are old, but they have great seats and cool 70’s decoration. They serve good curries too, and I’ve never found cheaper tickets. To find them:

1. Go to Biman’s website and check their dates and destinations. You can’t buy tickets there.

2. Find a travel agent. To do that, call the Biman office in New York City (the phone number is here) and ask to buy tickets. They’ll tell you you can’t buy tickets there, but they’ll refer you to a travel agent in NYC.

3. Call the travel agent, get the ticket. They don’t send it to you (maybe if you ask nicely), you have to go to their office in NYC to pick it up.

4. Pick up your ticket.

The good thing about these tickets is not only that they’re cheap, but they’re also very flexible about changing dates. Just give them a call. I got a NYC-Brussels ticket for US$ 430 that anywhere else (and I tried everything I could find, including Virgin Atlantic and such) was minimum US$750 (peak season).

hullabaloo.be // weblog (Dutch): In the elections in Belgium this Sunday, 25% voted for an extreme-right party. (Voting is obligatory in Belgium, over 95% if the population votes.) Dark days.

Meta Efficient: A Guide To the Most Efficient Things in the World. Gadget blog with an environmental sauce. Love it.

So this puzzles me: minutes after posting an entry, the GoogleAds for it are relevant (about memory cards). Yet, if I look at the cached page at Google, it says it doesn’t have any. So has Google spidered this page? If not, how does it know which keywords to show? (I don’t have access to my logs to see if the bot came by.)

A SanDisk SD 512 MB Secure Digital Card is now $75 after rebates. That’s what I paid for a 256MB card less than 6 months ago.

Knowspam.net, the spam solution I’ve been relying on (and paid for) is showing a Test Page for the Apache Web Server on Red Hat Linux page which also means I’m not getting or sending any emails. Dissapointing.

dog or higher: Catching web standards: “The developer I was working with initially built our site using tables, and when I pointed out that company policy was to use CSS, she got, shall we say, a little huffy. I knew I had to get my boss on side to influence her to do it over.
So I went in to him. “Boss”, I said “you are not going to understand much of what I am about to say but you need to know that it’s important and I will try to explain it to you as best I can.”
He looked mildly alarmed.
I went on. “Imagine that you wanted me to send out a document on your behalf, and we have a lovely word processor there to use, but I created the document on a manual typewriter instead because I didn’t know how to use the typewriter.” He nodded.”

So now that I found out that, yes, people are actually writing software and selling it for US$24 that does comment spam (wiki spam won’t be far off), we really need to work out bullet proof solutions. By bulletproof I mean that can’t be cracked too easily on a large scale by determined coders.

Some ideas on battling commentspam, referrerspam, wikispam and such: (most are for battling robots)

- Randomize the scriptname that accepts the POST data for each installation, or even for each pageview. Not bulletproof, but makes finding your script harder for the software.
- Add a random ID to your form, valid for a 1 post. If the ID isn’t right, the post doesn’t go through. This means that for every spam post, the spam software needs to download the page once. If you randomize the field name as well, it might even work better. Not bulletproof though.
- Generally randomize all field names. Create a table that maps your randomized field names to the real field names.
- Until a poster has proven they’re human, make it really hard to machinespam.
- Find a way to penalize spammers, that doesn’t make it easy to penalize others by faking them as spammers.
- Make sure you don’t make it too hard to post.
- Keep a central list vetted by some authority (maybe a community) of know spam URL’s. Actively use it to scare the people who buy spamming software (find them!): “We’ll make you loose pagerank!”. Be aware of the problems with central lists - this list should only list clear, true and proven spammers, not may-be-spammers.

More ideas?

From my referrers: www.php-soft.com looks like they sell comment spam software, used for comment spam, wiki spam and other stuff. It looks pretty efficient and somewhat advanced - enter a scriptname and it does a google search and spams all the scripts it finds.

I started a wiki page on Video Encoding Tools. Feel free to add :)

Jon’s-video-Udell points to the Turbine Video Encoder, which encodes Flash video. There’s a free version that places a small watermark. I will have to try this out.

Comments on my Video Blogging Timeline welcome!

I’ve helped 2 friends of mine start blogs in the past year: Jay and Melina (I don’t even remember her URL). They don’t blog much though, think they aren’t getting that bloggin’ feeling. Jay sends me URL’s sometimes that I tell him he should put on his blog instead.

What are your experiences with helping people start blogs?

And here we have an illustration of why RDF is useful: “The bane of my existence is doing things I know the computer could do for me. When I got my proposed July 2001 travel itinerary in email, I just couldn’t bear the thought of manually copying and pasting each field from the itinerary into my PDA calendar. I started putting the Semantic Web approach to application integration to work.”

XML.com: Something Useful This Way Comes [Jun. 09, 2004]: “In other words, development of the Semantic Web requires a lot of work, but there’s been a lot work done. This raises an obvious question: when will all that work pay off?
There are only three ways to answer that question — already, never, or somewhere in between.”

In other words, the semantic web is kinda here and it’s kinda useful. That’s good enough for me.

One thing bothers me though. If it’s the data model of RDF that’s valuable, not the syntax (pretty much everybody hates the RDF-XML syntax), then really, what’s the big deal about? The RDF data model really isn’t that complex. Why do so many people shy away from RDF if it’s really just a useful data model? I suspect it might be because of all the stuff they build around that model, especially the syntax. Couldn’t someone invent RSRDF (Real Simple RDF), implementing the same useful data model (and at the same time maybe explain exactly why it’s so useful), but keeping the tools around it (OWL, syntax, …) much simpler?

Thinking a bit more about wiki spam avoidance: from a usability point of view, it’s a bit annoying for a user to have to enter a code they see in an image every time they edit a wikipage. The system does pretty much completely block out bots though. That’s a good start.

So why don’t we set a cookie after someone has entered it once (and thus proven they’re not a bot)? After that they won’t be challenged again. Cons: a real person could still run a script after going through “the barrier” once manually. Maybe the cookie could be turned off every time the person enters a link to another site, thereby identifying themselves as a possible spammer. I assume maybe 80% of all wiki page edits don’t add links to other sites.

Whatever the solution, avoiding spam is going to be important for any wiki. The potential for abuse is just too great. Until I come up with a solution (I am seriously thinking about working something out), I just monitor my recent changes by RSS and keep an eye out for wikispam.

Wiki sandbox - Google Blogoscoped Forum: “Pillipp, I have had to lock four of my wikis to control your trashy misuse of them. For many people, the internet is a production tool. Converting portions of it to your own little SEO litterbox is arrogant conceit, more suited to politicians than to internet technologists. I’m glad I’ve hunted you down.”

The Art and Science of an Effective Link Building Campaign: “To achieve high PageRank, Silverstein [who works at Google] said you want the expert sites in your market linking to you and hopefully nobody else.”

Google sure keeps their projects in beta for a long time: Google News

Wired News: A Contest to Outwit Google: “The owner of an online forum won the first round of a worldwide search-engine optimization competition Monday, by using a backlinking strategy that scored his site as the top Google result for a made-up term, “nigritude ultramarine.”

Google is considering RSS support (they already support ATOM, a similar standard).

Cyburbia: an urban planning portal. (via Worldchanging)

Jon Udell on portable usability labs. I saw a demo of VisualMark this year, and it is funky. It’s mac only, but worth buying a mac laptop for, and you can test anything on windows or even Linux PC’s by simply connecting a cable. It works like this: get a user behind any (Windows, Mac, …) pc or laptop. Connect your mac running VisualMark. Connect mac cameras to capture face expressions. Run.

Knowledge Sharing at the World Bank (via the excellent Column Two)

XMLTV: “XMLTV is a set of utilities to manage your TV viewing. They work with TV listings stored in the XMLTV format, which is based on XML.”

mod_torrent: “Mod_torrent is a drop in solution for Apache servers when deploying the BitTorrent file swarming technology. With mod_torrent your visitors share the bandwidth burden when distributing large files on your web site. The module transparently makes all, or optionally only certain types of files, retrievable by any client implementing the BitTorrent protocol.”

LAMPPIX: Bootable webserver on a CD - SitePoint PHP Blog: “Here’s a great idea - LAMPPIX a LAMP web server, bootable from a CD. It uses KNOPPIX, a Linux distribution designed to boot from a CD as well as XAMPP - a distribution of Apache the usual suspects (e.g. mmCache).
For PHP solution providers seems like a great way to distribute your product to customers without requiring specialist knowledge from them - just put the CD in and reboot.”

ecto (a blogging tool) now apparently supports movie uploads to your blog!

About Google’s OS: What comes after GMail and Froogle?: “gGrid? Grid? gRid? … Greed?”

InfoWorld: The joy of outsourcing: “Although most IT managers want increases, the dirty little secret of IT budgeting is that a lot of IT gets steadily cheaper even within a 12-month budget cycle. The time between the day when a budget process begins and the books are actually closed on that budget could be as long as 18 months. This means that the $5,000 server you put in your budget in July 2004 for 2005 might cost $3,000 when you actually buy it in December 2005″

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Chinese Wikipedia: “For the 10th anniversary of China going online, PCWorld has a fascinating report about the growth of the “Chinese Wikipedia.” In short: no censoring yet.

BBC NEWS | Inside the Google search machine: “Blogs are not so much of a problem,” says Mr Cutts. “They show up less often than you expect.”

DevNetwork Forums :: View topic - Come to the PEAR-fest: “I am one of the core developers of the PEAR package who has joined the game relatively late. I see the strengths of the PEAR installer as the reason PEAR will become an important force. The base PEAR class is one monstrous mistake, and PEAR_Error is pretty close. Everyone knows this.” Well, I know now.

Bluemountain’s impressive (it’s an e-card service), in a somewhat nasty-you-have-to-be-a a-clever-consumer kind-a way.

Before they let you send a card, they ask you to sign up for a 30-day free trial. In order to cancel it, you have to call their customer support (you can’t cancel online), which is only open during business hours. They then “verify” your address, probably to sell it, before closing your account. (I forgot to ask about that.) Before canceling, they offer a discount as well, so that’s worth doing even if you want to use them.

M$ and SAP were thinking about merging: “The companies initiated merger discussions late last year, but eventually broke off talks for reasons of complexity”