Paul Gilding on his weblog, introducing a co-authored report released earlier this month on how humanity might approach the problem of not annihilating itself:

We were actually surprised by the outcome of our work, which showed that not only is One Degree and 350ppm possible, it is surprisingly achievable and practical. It certainly requires that we act very soon and that we act with a level of determination and commitment not seen since WWII, but it can be achieved. In recognition of this comparison, we called our paper The One Degree War Plan. It is a plan that shows what humanity can achieve — and we believe will achieve — when it develops a rational response to the climate threat.

The authors are releasing this work “for general public reaction and comment.” They outline their take on the current status of climate change, and predict what the global public response will be between now and 2020. From the paper’s (PDF) introduction:

Given the physical momentum for change already in the climate system and the continuing lack of action on the scale and with the urgency required, it is now too late to prevent major disruption and damage in the decades ahead, as a result of inaction over the past several decades. We believe there will now be an ecological and economic crisis, of a scale that is significant in the history of human life on earth.

But we certainly do not believe it is too late to prevent the collapse of the global economy and civilisation.

One of Gilding’s main arguments is that the modern world remains steadfastly organised for industrial production, “endless” economic growth and increasing consumption, and that for humanity to take genuinely effective steps to avert runaway warming (that would likely destroy the civilisation) will require a coordinated reorganisation of social and economic systems around the world.

Randers and Gilding compare their survival strategy to the allied mobilisation during WWII, and military metaphors (“war plan”) are, well… we’ll see if that works, and if not I suspect they’ll adapt. Also, I don’t think that their invoking of governmental responses to the financial crisis as an example of reactive capacity will go over well in the U.S. But that’s a minor quibble, I suppose.

One degree and 350 are the new symbols, and what they will come to signify — hope, propaganda, doom, deliverance, fate, Armageddon — is yet to written, though whatever the answer I’m starting to think it will happen in my lifetime.

See also: The Great Disruption, Background Briefing, June 14, 2009.

Related posts:

• Black carbon earth

1. Don’t enable comments unless you really have to. Even if you do, some postings don’t need comments.
2. You need published guidelines and a separate place to discuss the application of same.
3. You must have courage in your convictions and must have enough backbone to delete comments and ban users when necessary.
   1. If you are too much of a pussy to throw your weight around now and then because somebody might call you a tyrant or a censor, hang up your skates right now and save everybody some trouble.
   2. It’s slightly more desirable to delete first and ask questions later than the converse.

He also points to Metafilter as the paradigm case for how to do it right, and I agree. The fact that the admins delete uncivil posts keeps it a reasonable place to spend your time.

Related posts:

• Interview with a bastard

An excerpt on global web usage from the (newly redesigned) World Wide Web Foundation site, whence I also co-opted the graphic above:

Only 25% of the world’s population uses the Web, despite the fact that more than 70% (and growing) have access to mobile or fixed communications.

Useful to remember next time the “ubiquity of the web” argument rolls around. The WWW Foundation has a lot of good projects on the boil, of which the program to “teach youth in the most economically-challenged neighborhoods of major cities to develop Web applications” is especially cool.

Related posts:

• Joe Clark: Unreadable
• Serious business

According to data provided on Google Flu Trends comparing to this year to 2003–2004 (a particularly severe year) the rate of estimated flu cases has climbed high and early. As for severity by state, this is what the map looked like in November last year:

Estimated USA flu severity map as at November 11, 2008 (Image: Google.)

And here’s what it looks like this year as of the end of October:

Estimated USA flu severity map as at October 30, 2009 (Image: Google.)

Finally, here’s a chart showing a comparison of Google estimated prevalence data and CDC prevalence data since the 2003–2004 season:

Yellow: CDC data. Blue: Google data. (Image: Google.)

How valid is this information (i.e. how much is it a reflection of actual rates of influenza infection)? It appears that Google’s flu prevalence estimate data based on search counts (a form of “syndromic surveillance”) are accurate predictors of reported rates of influenza in the United States. The Flu Trends About page (linked above) mentions the Nature study that Google undertook with a CDC researcher, and links to a free, Google-hosted version of the paper as a PDF file if you’re interested. This is further corroborated by the modest paper “More Diseases Tracked by Using Google Trends” that was published in the CDC web journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (Volume 15, Number 8–August 2009)^† though this is more of a research note than a detailed study.

I did find one interesting statement on this by the CDC, in answer to a direct question from a reporter. At a press briefing on May 5 Alice Park from Time posed the following to the CDC’s Richard Besser:

I just wanted to ask you about your opinion on some of the new flu tracking, surveillance service out there. I know that the CDC has worked with Google flu trends, for example, can you talk a little bit about how helpful that type of information is particularly now to get a better sense of the dynamics of the outbreak, you know, where it might be increasing or what the ebb and flow of it and is it getting worse, is it tapering off, can you comment a little bit about how useful those kind of methods are.

Besser replied:

In terms of our ability to detect emerging infectious disease, new infectious diseases, we’re constantly looking for what we call situational awareness. I mean what’s going on out in the communities. And we’re looking at you know, many, many different sources of information. The Google flu tracking information, there was a study done with Google in conjunction with CDC to look at can you use that information, can you use people going on the web to find information about flu as an indication of where flu is taking place? And the first year looking at that in terms of looking back, it was very helpful. The question is looking forward can you see that? As of two weeks ago, Google hits on flu on H1N1 are just off the charts. And so our website gets 8 million hits a day. So looking for a signal of increased activity on the web in a particular place isn’t very useful. But we’re open and are continually looking at various approaches to early detection because the sooner you can detect a problem, the sooner you can understand it and implement appropriate control measures.

Translation: I’m comfortable saying, with the benefit of hindsight, that Google Flu Trends in its first year of operation has done a pretty good job, but you are not going to hear me endorse it as a predictive tool for tracking H1N1. Or: it’s been shown to be valid, but we don’t yet know how reliable it is from year to year (or, for that matter, how much it might be influenced by special kinds of flu or fears about flu).

So, for what it’s worth, I’m going to go ahead and take it all with a grain of salt for now. I’ll say one thing though: it makes for some interesting graphics, and you have to admit that we’ve had a lot of graphs going down these past 18 months…

Related

The follow-up article for Time by Alice Park, “Is Google Any Help in Tracking an Epidemic?” published on May 6, 2009.

† Be warned: the CDC web site is even slower than your Toyota Yaris.

Related posts:

• Google Flu Trends
• What’s next for EveryBlock?
• News in the time of Internet

It turns out that the same behaviour applies to current versions of the WordPress image resizer. This means that if you use WordPress’s native media support to display images for which copyright metadata is important, be aware that you might be serving up “orphaned” content, whose author cannot be determined when the asset is separated from your page, if you’re using the dynamically created thumbnails on your site. It looks like this might be changed in an upcoming release, but the details are hazy… The workaround is to size images yourself, output them with intact metadata, and insert them as “full size” into your posts or galleries.

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• My Flickr workflow is pants
• El Caminos on Flickr
• Mini with the works

The short version goes something like: worth it in the end, but shouldn’uh hadtuh…

Longer version

Reinstalling Leopard using Erase and Install fixed every problem I listed a few weeks ago with the exception of vhosts which I had to recreate because of an architectural change in Leopard:

1. Airport connects on wake.
2. Mail.app syncs on wake.
3. VPN is working again.
4. Video artefacts have gone.
5. Safari has chilled out.
6. Command + Tab switching works.
7. My business is fast.

What I did:

1. Cloned startup disk using SuperDuper! and confirmed it was bootable.
2. Launched the installer, restarted and chose Erase and Install.
3. Created a new admin account.
4. Selectively copied user data for some (mostly-Apple) apps^† and additional fonts using Adam Rosen’s guidelines.
5. Reinstalled additional applications from scratch^‡ intentionally leaving the cruft behind.
6. Cloned the new startup disk, tested it and scheduled nightly backups.
7. Added the printer.
8. Added the scanner.
9. Blogged about it.

Would I recommend you do it if you have mad problems resulting from a regular upgrade? Yes. Should you have to? Nope. It’s just the price you pay for love-needing the Apple.

† Address Book, iCal, iTunes, Mail and Safari. I also had to boot back into my old system to export data from Address Book and Transmit.

‡ Coda, MAMP, MarsEdit, NetNewsWire, Photoshop, Quicksilver, TextWrangler, Tinkertool, Transmit and something nasty from Cisco related to VPN.

Related posts:

• Shit got ill in the Leopard upgrade
• NetNewsWire and me
• SuperDo

Result of a bug in PHP, version 5.2.10.

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• New WordPress worm
• NetNewsWire and me

For October ’09, we’re writing a quick-turnaround proposal for new research into captioning. We’re doing it in Canada, but it will be applicable to other countries. Our proposal is actually a counterproposal that we will offer to broadcasters, who seem to want to throw good money after bad on an unscientific “report” on captioning. You can help.…

Two points worth emphasizing: We’re publishing all our work. And we definitely want our proposal to be easily adapted to other countries. We’re doing your nation’s work for you.

After 21 October, we’ll begin a series of occasional–and free–educational sessions for people who do captioning. Our first session, “Copy-Editing for Captioners,” will be announced soon. (You can come!)

If nothing else think of the gym bunnies with their iPods on trying to read CNN from their elliptical gliders. Please consider a plug, a donation, or both.

Related posts:

• The accessible presidency

But anyhoo, there are at least two ways to set up Mac OS X 10.5 to recognize hostnames other than localhost (e.g. being able to access a local site using http://mydomain.dev) in place of the defunct NetInfo Manager.app:

1. You can use the dscl command line utility to set up virtual hosts (e.g. sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/mydomain.dev IPAddress 127.0.0.1).
2. Or you can edit /etc/hosts (e.g. by adding 127.0.0.1 mydomain.dev to the end of the file).

Number two is easier since the file is “watched” for changes by the system. As soon as you add the entry and save the file Apache will be able to use it. By the way, this is all assuming you have set up your virtual hosts using Apache’s httpd.conf.

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• Shit got ill in the Leopard upgrade
• Quirky permalinks problem
• Thirty-one

• Airport card fails to connect to the default network when waking from sleep.
• Mail.app sometimes fails to sync with the IMAP server when waking from sleep.
• Local virtual hosts I’d set up for web development were deleted.
• Cisco VPN client errors out on launch.
• I sometimes get weird video artefacts when resizing or switching windows.
• Safari keeps trying to access Keychain.app when a username input element receives focus even though I’ve always instructed it not to save passwords.
• Command + Tab switching sometimes leaves the wrong app on top.
• Everything feels a bit slower.

Abe has a 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 processor with 1.25 GB of memory. Last of the mighty twelve-inchers.

Related posts:

• Edit the hosts file in place of NetInfo Manager.app
• On reinstalling OS X Leopard
• NetNewsWire and me

I care about this because after e-mail clients (Mail.app and Thunderbird), text editors (TextWrangler and Coda) and browsers (Safari, Firefox, etc.) my next most heavily used application is NetNewsWire. I like this product and I want to stick with it. It’s bloody excellent. I use it on two computers (home and work) and on an iPod touch—so the synchronisation feature is fundamental.

It was on Brent Simmons weblog that I first heard that a new version was in the works. Not long after, I received a rather pumped up message from NewsGator saying that exciting changes are coming ra ra ra and oh, by the way, synching is changing:

• NetNewsWire for Mac – you may continue to use your current version (synchronization won’t be supported after August 31, 2009). However, we recommend that you download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account for synchronization. Please refer to our transition instructions for assistance.
• NetNewsWire for iPhone Customers – a mobile RSS Reader requires synchronization and a new version of NetNewsWire for iPhone that supports synchronization with Google Reader will be available soon. We will notify you when it is available so that you can download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account prior to August 31, 2009.

I don’t want to use Google Reader for synchronisation, but that’s another story. Let’s just say that I like this software enough that I’ll go with it for now. I’m tuned in and following along at home. The transition instructions told me to download the new version of NetNewsWire for my Mac:

Download the latest version of NetNewsWire.

That link takes you to a beta version. Okay, so it’s not ready yet but they want us to move everything over to Google Reader really soon so they can shut off synching. The iPhone version is not available yet either. Here’s the part where I digress and tell you that I’m a weird nerd who still uses Mac OS X 10.4 even though at that time all the cool kids were starting to count the sleeps until 10.6 was released.

This is relevant because I decided to follow NewsGator’s instructions anyway and installed the latest version of NetNewsWire. It doesn’t work on 10.4. Fortunately, when I downgraded again to my previous version (which I’m still using) all my data was there so I didn’t have to resort to restoring from backups or anything.

So now I’m thinking, hmmm—I will have to finally upgrade to 10.5. No big deal, I guess. I’ve been using it on my work machine and I love it. Then I had a brainwave and decided to check the prices of replacement hard drives for my Mac. [ed.—Excursus #2, for those who are counting.] These things are cheap as chips! You can jam a 300GB drive in there! (I have an 80GB drive currently.) Next, I ask my friends whether upgrading is something that anyone can do with sheer hutzpah alone, or whether you really need to be a technician. @berkleebassist was quick to tell me that the answer lies somewhere in between:

@adriancooke 36 screws to remove the top case. Takes me about 2 hours to do, & I’m a certified mac tech. Get a manual, & be careful!

Ahh… yeah. Well, maybe that’s not really me. I would freak out too much if I killed my computer. I did check out the procedure on iFixit and there was a reader comment in there somewhere about little hooks that you can’t even see in the high res photos and you can break things if you’re not careful and I was all not tonight Josephine after that.

Anyway, back to NetNewsWire… I eventually ordered a copy of Leopard, carefully installed it last night (i.e. using the John Gruber’s Murphy’s Law approach) and now I’m sitting down to figure out how many days I have left until my synching is switched off. So far I have seven related tabs open to try to get this straight:

1. The e-mail: “Action Required – NewsGator Consumer RSS Reader Product Changes”
2. NewsGator Product Transition Instructions
3. NewsGator FAQs
4. nnwbeta.com
5. Google Reader’s signed out page [ack!—sorry, hairball]
6. NewsGator Exporting Clipped and Tagged Articles
7. NewsGator Online (where I’m logged in, but clueless)

Of all of these number four is the most helpful:

Note: This is still a beta — it’s unfinished, and it has bugs and incomplete features. If you haven’t started using a beta yet, you don’t need to: you can wait until it’s finished. […]

(Note: we won’t turn off NewsGator syncing until NetNewsWire 3.2 and NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone are finished.)

Oh, and in the midst of all of this I got another message from NewsGator saying, “chill, the dates have been pushed back because we’re not quite ready just yet.” I don’t know what to do next, so I thought I’d tell the Internet. All of this for a feed reader! And people are saying that RSS is dead. Pish!

† Does anyone else think that NewsGator should have a small “g” just like Photoshop has a small “s”? Wow,you all do? Would you look at that.

Related posts:

• On reinstalling OS X Leopard
• Highlight differences
• MAMP 1.8.3

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

It should be noted that version 2.8.4—the latest stable and secure version—is only 24 days old, so if you haven’t upgraded recently your blog is vulnerable. Apparently it’s more difficult to recover from this one than previous WordPress attacks because the worm makes changes to the database. Immediately upgrading to version 2.8.4 and making sure you have a strong password is the recommended preventive medicine. And I would add: institute a good backup routine, if you haven’t already.^† If you can get into the habit of upgrading within a week of a new release you should be able to stay ahead of these kinds of exploits.

† For example, I run a copy of my weblog on localhost using MAMP. When backing up I export the database from the remote host and import it to the local instance, check that it is displaying as it should, and confirm that I can login. I also synchronise the WordPress files using Transmit over SFTP. At least once a week—that’s my estimate of how much I could afford to lose and not start smashing things.

Related posts:

• WordPress Automatic Update
• MAMP 1.8.3

The problem

Say you want to make a Facebook page, and you’re a Facebook regular. You look at your own profile page—you know how it works, after all, from back-to-front—and you think, “I’ll just follow the links and prompts and I’ll make myself a Facebook page.” Odds are it won’t be that easy. I don’t know why this is and I don’t care. You probably don’t either. So that’s why I’m going to tell you some things that took me way too long to find out—the kind of time that is now lost forever, never to be regained, and surely to be intensely regretted if Facebook is superceded by some other proprietary system entirely within the next 18 months.

The basics

These are the basic steps:

1. I started by reading over a few of the links at “How to create and manage Facebook Pages.”
2. Visit “Create a Page,” and fill out the form to create a page.
3. Once you’ve created the Page (don’t publish it yet), an “Ads and Pages” button appears at screen bottom, next to Applications.
4. Click through to Ads and Pages → Pages.
5. Add anyone else you want to have admin access using Admins → Add in the right column (you can select from your Friends list or add by e-mail address).
6. Modify your other page settings to suit and then begin adding your content.
7. Some specific things you might want to configure:
   • If you want to add an RSS feed to your Page’s Wall go to Edit Notes → Edit Import Settings → Import a Blog.
   • To allow your Page’s fans to add their own photos and tag photos that you or others submit go to Edit Photos → Edit Settings → Allow Fans to Add Photos | Allow Tagging.
   • If you want to create sidebar links to Favorite Pages then visit the pages you’d like to link add and select Add to My Pages Favorites.
   • You will then need to go to your Boxes tab and drag Favorite Pages so that it displays in sidebar.
8. You can get further help at the rather weird Facebook Pages / Public Profiles page.

So now your have your Facebook Page. If you’re happy with this and you feel done then have a great day, and I’ll catch you later. For everyone else, your troubles are just beginning.

The sidebar

So how do you change the sidebar? What if you’d like to add a little list of additional links. What if you’d like to add some free-form text? Chances are that the Page Edit options don’t offer you any clues. If you are like me then you probably had an page of someone else’s that you were using as model of what’s possible. You might—after an inordinate length of time (you’re like me, remember) realise that a Facebook Application must be how the cool kids are doing this.

I tend to think of Facebook Applications as third-party products that look bad and typically don’t fit in very well to their neuva-Windows 3.11-Facebook-blue-grey surroundings. My reference page’s sidebar just had a list of normal-looking links, and a nice little section header. It looked like any other section of the sidebar. I never guessed that it was being produced by an Application (instead of just being part of the Page Edit options), nor did I even dream that it was a Facebook Application that is not part of your page by default, and there’s no way in hell I knew it was called Static FBML. But there it is, folks. This is what you want. Every Facebook Page should have this as part of the Edit Page options—when I set up my page back in May, 2009, Static FBML a.k.a. Add Some Basic Shit to My Sidebar was a nowhere to be found.

Okay, so you want to get Static FBML. How? Alright, it’s not that hard, I’m exaggerating. You go to the Apps page, and type in a search for static fbml. For you, it will pop up right away as the only possible answer. For me, I got the interminable waiting graphic, then those annoying little red boxes reporting some error that goes way over the popup’s border—for ages and ages, even when I gave it a rest and came back later to try again… over several days. Anyhoo…

Choose that.

You can add it to your page by selecting Add to my Page → Add to Page (next to the Page you want to add it to in the box that pops up). The application should now appear when you click on “Edit Page.” You can configure it as you would any other default region of the page. Your Static FBML app appears as one instance by default, below your default apps in the Edit admin area. One instance is equivalent to one sidebar box. The option to add another instance is inside the edit area of the first one. Go to Edit FBML → Add another FBML box.

Navigating the edit options

One of the most confusing things about Facebook Pages to me is that not all of the options to edit something are available in the Edit area (i.e. when you click on “Edit Page” under your Page’s profile pic). I’ve found that sometimes the best way to get to what you’re looking for is to scroll to the bottom of the page you’re on and click the “Help” link in the footer, and then perform a search there for the app or edit option that you need.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are often several ways to accomplish something, often because there are multiple apps that function in a certain way or accomplish a given task. But within the interface there are also multiple pathways to the same Edit options even if the place where you edit something doesn’t always look the same. I find this confusing, but others may simply find it convenient.

Regarding ‘boxes’

Everything on Facebook looks like a box, so it might take you a while to figure out what the Facebook UI is referring to when something is labeled Boxes with a capital “B.” It’s the Boxes tab, which (at least on mine) appears after Wall, Info and Photos at the top of the main content area of the page. One thing you will want to know is how to move something (such as a Static FBML box) to your sidebar, or make it into an additional, custom tab. When you create a Static FBML box, for instance, it adds it as a box to the Boxes tab. To move it to your sidebar, go to Boxes and click on the pencil icon in the top right of that box’s title bar and select “Move to Wall tab.” To me, this does not make any sense. I think it should say “Move to sidebar.” But there you go. That’s how you get it there.

I think that whenever you create content for your page with a third-party/add-on app it generates it as a Box for you and puts it under the Boxes tab. You can then move it between tabs or to the Wall/sidebar. At least, that’s what I’ve observed so far.

More to come?

I’ll edit this page for accuracy and/or to add new tips as I discover them. If you’ve read this far and can add/correct or otherwise share what you know then by all means leave a comment and I’ll update the page. Hope this helps you other poor sods out there who have to waste brainspace on this. Hey, there are worse things, let’s be honest. I mean, at least it’s not MySpace… [shudder]

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The key issue is the cost of management. Thus far we focused only on computing resources such as storage, computation, and data transfer; but the cost of managing all of this—making sure the right software version is installed, that data is backed up, that spam filters are updated, and so on—is a significant part of the picture. Indeed, as the cost of computing resources, on both client and server sides, continues to fall rapidly, management becomes a bigger and bigger fraction of the total cost. And so we move toward an approach that minimizes management cost, even if that approach is relatively wasteful of computing resources. The key is not that we’re moving computation from client to server, but that we’re moving management to the server, where a team of experts can manage matters for many users.

This trend may be turning traditional technology services (from the perspective of IT departments) into what economists call “externalities.” The biggest risk for organisations here is probably going to be increased vulnerability to information security issues. The convenience of having everything available in a browser comes at the cost of requiring a network to accomplish basic tasks, and exposing ever more of those tasks to the Internet.

You change your password every few months, right? ;-)

Related posts:

• Ramifications
• News in the time of Internet
• SuperDo

This sucks:

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.

Ah, but there’s more:

Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called “re-spawning” in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.”

You had better read the whole thing.

Cleaning up

More light reading about this glorious privacy debacle:

• Adjust your Flash Global Privacy Settings
• Adjust your Flash Website Privacy Settings
• Overview piece: “How Flash Cookies Threaten Your Privacy”
• Wikipedia page on Local Shared Objects
• Mozilla Firefox plugin: BetterPrivacy
• Windows optimization, privacy and cleaning tool: CCleaner
• Flash cookie removal tool for Mac OS X: Flush.app

Warning on the first two links: you might find, as I did, that going to a weird-arse Adobe web page over plain old http with no authentication to adjust your Flash privacy settings is creepy. Thank you, once again, Macrodobia for making Internet so fun.

Related posts:

• How may we surveil you?
• Simpson, eh?
• Paper trails

In fact, HTML Working Group is a bit of a misnomer. We don’t have HTML anymore, we have a Web OS.

We don’t have a simple HTML document, we have a document that contains the DOM, garbage collection, the Canvas object and a 2D API, a definition for web browser objects, interactive elements, drag and drop, cross document communication, channel messaging, Microdata, several pre-defined vocabularies, probably more JavaScript than the ECMAScript standard, and before they were split off, client-side SQL, web worker threads, and storage. I’m sure there’s a partridge in a pair tree somewhere in there, but I still haven’t made it completely through all of it. It’s probably in Section 10. I know there’s talk of extending to the document to include a 3D API, and who knows what else.

It’s a good post. If you’re interested in the more analytical side of this unfolding drama, this is a good summary article that focuses on the struggle over RDFa.

(Brief aside, I learned HTML and CSS by reading the W3C specs, amongst other things. I hope the end result for HTML5 is a document that you can actually read. WCAG 2.0 was brought back from the brink at the eleventh hour. HTML5 could use the same treatment.)

You can now turn on a setting that will monitor a Twitter username and automatically add any bookmarks posted to their public stream.

Tweets containing URLs will post as a regular bookmark, with the “toread” flag set, and the tag “from:twitter” automatically added. Any #hashtags that appear in the tweet will be converted into a pair of tags—one of them with the prepended hash, and one without (so for a tweet containing “#foo”, pinboard will add tags “foo” and “#foo”).

Pinboard will dereference any shortened URLs to their full form before saving the bookmark. It will also try to get the title of the link to use as the bookmark title. In cases where that doesn’t work, the title will post as “Untitled (URL)”.

Clever and useful. The default posting behaviour is well-considered. I enabled the option to save bookmarks as private by default so that I can tidy up/delete the incoming Twitter links before making the good ones public. I am really starting to like using Pinboard.^†

† Though the app’s markup could use some semantic goodness.

One day I will improve on this lame-arse Flickr workflow:

1. View new photos in Bridge (~/Pictures/setname)
2. Reject unwanted photos
3. Adjust image order, if needed
4. Tools → Batch Rename as setname_000x.jpg to ~/Pictures/setname/_renamed
5. Go to ~/Pictures/setname/_renamed in Bridge
6. Tools → Photoshop → Batch… → Play “Resize for Flickr” to ~/Pictures/setname/_resized (to 1024 x 768px)
7. Go to ~/Pictures/setname/_resized in Bridge
8. Tools → Photoshop → Batch… → Play “Optimise for Flickr” to ~/Pictures/setname/_opt (set to around 50)
9. Check these images in Preview.app
10. Upload to Flickr…

Wide open to suggestions.

Somehow, I just knew that my free Flickr account would find a way to bite me in the bum. It’s one of the main reasons I was so slow to get into it, having previously hosted all of my own photos. Here’s how it happened:

1. Once personalised, Flickr URLs cannot be changed.
2. Original files cannot be accessed unless you have a paid account.

Regarding #1, I want to change my Flickr URL because I recently changed my primary domain name from zero2180.net to ztoe.net and my Flickr URL is flickr.com/photos/zero2180. The only way to do this is to delete or transfer the account and start a new one with a new personalised URL. Okay, it’s not ideal but I can work with it. Only…

Regarding #2, to get my photos out of Flickr programatically, and at their original size, I need to have a paid account. The Flickr API makes the first part possible, and Dan Benjamin’s modified version of flickrtouchr.py is the perfect tool for making the backup. But for the whole paid account thing. Flickrtouchr can download my Favourites (other pro users’ photos that I’ve starred), but not any of my own photos.

I’m at the point now where I actually don’t mind paying for an account, but not if it’s one I’m planning to delete later that day. Mother of pearl.

Forensic investigators who are monitoring active connections can collect all network traffic to and from a specific computer, without the user ever knowing. There are many ways to monitor network traffic. If investigators have the support of network administrators, then the administrators can simply set up a SPAN port on a router, mirror all traffic, and filter for interesting bits. Some companies do this all the time, filtering for malicious traffic, proprietary data, or even keywords that might indicate employees are angry. Wireless networks are even easier to analyze.

“That’s Homer Simpson, sir. He’s one of your boobs from Sector 7-G.”