Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • phpAdsNew

    I’ve recently been playing with phpAdsNew, a PHP ad server system, for a work-related project, and I have to say, it’s a pretty solid piece of software. I’m very impressed.

    It installs quick and painlessly, and you can add advertisers and build ad campaigns in no time. It comes with very nice PDF documentation—user, administrator, and developer guides. It has a good admin interface and rolls out a ton of stats and reports that blew me away. It’s definitely a “best of breed” PHP application (and those are rare).

  • OPML

    My poking around in the world of RSS has inevitably led me to OPML, another XML format created by Dave Winer, and is ostensibly designed to contain outline-structured information. What is outline-structured information? A fancy way of saying a structured list of hierarchical content, like browser favorites or web directories like Yahoo. It seems any list will do, actually.

    I’m interested by what I see, but I’m still reserving judgment. It looks like OPML will be/is valuable in the same space as RSS (e.g. weblogs), but I can’t find a concrete description of the specification (so far, at least) beyond version 1.0—yet I keep finding OPML files online referring to themselves as version 1.1, and each one has a slightly different set of attributes. Is there a 1.1 spec? Or is it only proposed, letting content creators add features willy-nilly? Hmmm.

  • Ebay as Weblog

    It struck me yesterday as I watched my wife surf eBay and eBay-related sites (like DisturbingAuctions.com) that eBay et. al. functions as a vast weblog for some people the same way that “traditional” weblogs function for people like me. Or more precisely, eBay fills the same needs for some people that weblogs fill for others.

    (What needs? Well, the first thing that pops to mind is social needs, the kind of social needs you find satisfied by participating in an online community of some sort.)

    Probably this has been obvious to many people long before I realized it. But this metaphor of eBay-as-weblog (or perhaps more than a metaphor) has been staying with me, nagging around the back of my mind, so I figured I’d put words to some of the ideas and see what comes of it.

    It might be more fair to say eBay can be considered a meta-blog, categorizing and listing the individual entries (auctions) of thousands of bloggers (sellers) (side-note: perhaps eBay is more like an aggregator?), providing means for users to comment (feedback, ratings). Popular auctions are peer-reviewed and the cream rises to the surface, much the same way as in the weblog world.

    It would be trivial to graft typical weblog services, like RSS, onto eBay’s services. I’ve toyed with this idea before, I think it would be a great example of the killer app RSS wants to be.

    But it makes me wonder: why doesn’t eBay have RSS feeds? They already offer a saved searches feature that emails you notifications when new items appear matches your search criteria; that should be a no-brainer for a feed. Or perhaps feeds to supplement the services that many third-party sites offer: collective views of items you’re selling, with current hit counts and bid prices.

    One problem I do foresee, though: eBay is highly time-dependent. Users want to know what’s happening with auctions now, via a browser refresh or an up-to-the-minute email; RSS as it’s implemented now is not enough of a “push” technology to make this happen. Sure, you could fake it by setting your aggregator to poll eBay every 5 minutes for a feed update, but what happens when 100,000+ users retrieve an XML file 12 times an hour? Bandwidth dies, of course. EBay would brown-out.

    Anyway, that’s enough for tonight. I’m still finding the eBay/weblog idea intriguing; I may try to merge both worlds and produce some sample RSS feeds based on eBay searches. If I do, I’ll post them here.

  • Where’s George? In Bend, OR

    For the second time this year I got a dollar bill stamped with the “official” Where’s George stamp. The first was at the Portland Zoo back in July, the second yesterday here in town, from the Factory Outlets. For the uninitiated, Where’s George is a bill tracker, where users can enter the serial numbers from various denominations of money and their location, and the system will track those bills, and show you a report of where that bill has previously been (if another user had already entered it).

    It’s a neat concept, one of the first of this type I think (along with other sites like BookCrossing), that came out a few years back. All or most of the original stamped bills were released on the East Coast, I believe, so it’s interesting to see them finally circulating out west.

    Of course, it’s also easy to overlook the fact that this is a massive database tracking the existence and whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars across the country, which I’m sure gives paranoid conspiracy theorists nightmares… Myself, on the other hand, I’m a data junkie, and I would just love to get a peek at that database…

  • Broken email prognostication

    I’ve been reading a lot about how email is broken these days—articles here, here and here are examples—and interestingly, I came across the following passage in Cryptonomicon (published in 1999) that I thought was apropos:

    “I hate e-mail,” John says.

    Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?”

    “The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.”

  • More Friendster Notes

    I’ve noticed from the referrer logs that my earlier Friendster post is the #3 result on Google for the search phrase “Friendster is slow“, so I figured it was high time I revisited Friendster and poke around a bit more, to see what I could find out.

    It was still slow, but not as fatally slow as the first time I was playing with it. I had previously created a profile for myself and uploaded a picture, but I had not invited friends to join. I was curious to find out if I could use Friendster without any friends (irony! irony!), and the answer is “yes,” albeit conditionally.

    About the only thing you can do when you don’t have any friends—apart from inviting some—is search for other users. However, I’ll save you some time on that right here: you can only search for users from your personal network—that is to say, friends of friends of friends (ad nauseum); if you don’t have any friends, and by extension no network, then you’ll always end up with 0 users found on the search results.

    This wasn’t obvious to me from the way the site was set up, but for sake of argument let’s say I’m socially stunted and overlooked the fact that a site that’s designed to network among friends wouldn’t naturally let you search for strangers… anyway, maybe it was obvious in hindsight and I missed it. Moving on.

    I invited some friends. Five that I could think of that (hopefully) wouldn’t think I was too weird in sending them emails inviting them to my Friendster network. Okay, nothing to do after that but log off and wait.

    A little while later, my brother had registered with Friendster and suddenly I had a friend! But then I ended up asking myself, “What now?” There still wasn’t any obvious benefit to this system that I could see.

    Then, later in the day, another friend registered on the site (I got an email notifying me of this). Didn’t have time to check it out at the time, I was heading home from work. Also didn’t figure there would be any more to do with Friendster with two friends instead of one, so it wasn’t a big priority.

    But by the time I logged back into it from home, my jaw dropped: I suddenly have 400 people in my personal network! It turns out my brother linked to two more friends, who in turn link out to friends, who link to more friends, etc. Very six degrees of separation.

    Now I can see the value in what’s going on here. I have access to a network of people that I can browse, search (by demographics or by interests), contact. (Noting, of course, recent stories about how a lot of Friendster accounts are fake as people assume different identities online or are just playing around.) Very interesting. I haven’t decided what I’ll actually do with Friendster yet, aside from figuring it out.

    Here’s something interesting, though: When I logged on and found my network of 400 people, Friendster seemed to run faster than when I had none. This is counter-intuitive; it should run more slowly when it’s sifting through larger data sets (ie. larger networks). The only thing I can figure is that their data queries are either highly unoptimised—perhaps brute-force searching through all the users to find out none were in my network?—or when dealing with zero-user networks (ie. no friends), the database/system/whatever is dealing with NULLs improperly. And any good database tech can tell you that NULLs can be a killer. It’s very odd.

  • So Long Sobig

    I checked my email this morning and not a single Sobig-infected message came through.

    Not one.

    Just as quickly as it started, it’s over. Very odd. The only thing that makes sense is that there was only one computer infected with Sobig that had my email address on it, and when that user finally patched their computer, it stopped sending to me.

  • Worm Food

    Well, it took longer than most cases I’ve heard of, but I’m finally getting deluged with the Sobig email worm. Started yesterday.

  • New Urban Legend

    We got an email this evening from a friend, one of those types of emails that has been forwarded something like 5 times or more, warning of a serial killer that lures women out of their houses by playing a recording of a crying baby. Something about the way it was written made me think “urban legend,” so I dug around a little bit on the Web.

    It is an urban legend; the Snopes page debunking it is here. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen an urban legend so new that it’s practically gestating; interestingly, the text of the email we received has some slight variations on the one posted by Snopes. Urban legend evolution?

    Here’s the full text of the one we were emailed, the only thing I edited out was the annoying >’s from all the forwarding:

    ***VERY IMPORTANT*PLEASE READ***

    This is scary!

    Someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby on
    her porch the night before last, and she called the police because it was late and she thought it was weird.

    The police told her, “Whatever you do, DO NOT open the door.” The lady then said that it sounded like the baby had crawled near a window, and she was worried that it would crawl to the street and get run over.

    The policeman said, “We already have a unit on the way,
    whatever you do, DO NOT open the door.” He told her that they think a serial killer has a baby’s cry recorded and is using it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone dropped off a baby.

    He said they have not verified it, but! t have had several calls by women saying that they hear baby’s cries outside their doors when they’re home alone at night.

    Please pass this on and DO NOT open the door for a crying
    baby. This email should probably be taken seriously because the Crying Baby theory was mentioned on America’s Most Wanted this past Saturday when they profiled the serial killer in Louisiana.

    PLEASE send this to friends and family.

    Note the variations from the Snopes version; the most interesting addition to the one we received was the bit about America’s Most Wanted. Designed to give a bit more authenticity, perhaps?

  • Google Calculator

    Here’s an interesting tidbit: Google now has a built-in calculator. This is a cool feature to be sure, but AlltheWeb has been doing this for a while now (as an undocumented feature), since at least April 14, 2003. Try it and see.