From the Facebook Developer blog last week:

Starting Friday, March 18^th, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible. Lastly, we want to be clear that our deprecation of FBML does not impact XFBML, such as the tags that support social plugins.

One’s instructions have been stale since Pages were updated in February with design changes and a new admin identity model. So it goes.

Related posts:

• How to make a Facebook page
• How the hell to make a Facebook page
• Protecting your privacy on Facebook

Analysis of survey data in a study published this year shows that most people underestimate energy usage differences between household appliances, modes of transportation and recycling materials. The researchers speculate that the 100 watt light bulb example serves as an anchor point for thinking about energy usage, and that people make insufficient adjustments from this baseline when estimating the energy consumed by other things.

Our estimates don’t scale

This graph from the paper summarizes the household appliance findings, which is where they focus the majority of their attention in the discussion:

Perceived vs. actual energy used and saved by devices and alternatives.

A few of these surprised me. Adjusting a washing machine’s setting (presumably to use only cold water?) can save about the same amount of energy than it takes to run a central air conditioner, which in turn uses about the same amount of energy as a clothes dryer (measured in watt hours). Laptops consume significantly less energy than desktops. A space heater and a room air conditioner use about the same amount of energy, but a dishwasher uses a lot more. Note that the scale is logarithmic, increasing by a factor of ten with each tick.

Lack of incentive

All this got me thinking about what would motivate people to understand appliance power differences better, and adjust their appliance usage or purchasing behaviour accordingly. If you’re interested, like I was, to know more about the energy consumption of household appliances, Michael Bluejay’s site (I keep reading this as “Michael Bluth”) is a great place to start as he provides a good overview as well as a lot of up-to-date links to more specific information. But all this requires a fair bit of effort and just knowing that you may have your estimates wrong is scant incentive to learn how much it’s costing you to run the dishwasher several times a week, or to wash in warm water.

The authors of the paper say that, when asked how they could use less energy, survey respondents are more likely to think of curtailment behaviours (merely cutting back) rather than switching to more energy efficient devices, probably because the latter requires spending money now. It wasn’t clear to me at first why curtailment is considered much less effective than what amounts to buying more stuff, especially at a time when people are lucky just to have a job. One of the researchers explains elsewhere that curtailment is a problem of declining incentive over time: remembering to repeat the cutback activities versus buying appliances that are able to do the cutting back for you.

Rebound effect?

What about the “rebound effect?” I have read or listened to criticisms of efficiency recommendations that claim that if consumers adopt technologies that use less energy they will use those technologies more. As if on cue, one of the items that caught my eye on Bluejay’s site was mentioned in a comparison table: the very small energy consumption of LED night lights (0.5 W) compared with regular ones (5W). Thinking of the incandescent night light we use I checked out LED alternatives on Amazon, and the top reviewer for this popular product liked them so much he got one for every room.

Seems apt. But the reviewer didn’t mention that efficiency was important to him (though other reviewers do). One can think of reasons why this might have nothing to do with a “rebound.” Maybe he was looking for a light for every room and just liked these ones. Or maybe he chose energy-efficient LEDs because he wanted to use so many, rather than the other way around.

So is this effect real? Maybe, but it might not be big enough to worry about. According to Climate Progress, for example, evidence-based answers to this question are hard to find because of the many confounding factors in accounting for rebound behaviour. The aforelinked post describes an analysis of driver behavior in the US over the period 1966–2001, where better fuel economy was correlated with a modest increase in driving. But significantly, the authors report that the magnitude of the effect declines over time, and also with income level. It doesn’t take much to imagine that with the current economy being what it is, another oil price spike like 2008’s will suppress any rebound effect related to driving that compact car you got out of Cash for Clunkers.

Measure it

Since the paper about how people estimate their energy consumption was framed as a problem of individual choices in daily life it makes sense to look at what would motivate people—not just assist them but actually drive them—to make better choices, possibly (or probably) by educating themselves as a means of saving money (i.e. where saving energy is not the focus). In the case of home appliances, if you are “merely” motivated to save energy then measuring your usage is a way to test what works and know for sure if you are using less power/saving money overall (despite whether some of your usage behaviours rebound a little).

By way of anecdote, my Dad’s car estimates for him what his range is based on his driving behaviour. Not only does he like this, he treats it as a game to see how far he can drive on a tank. The numbers go up and down in real time, and it’s easy to associate this feedback with efforts at control such as maintaining a constant speed, lower revs, and fewer hard stops. There is maybe a five second lag after a throttle change and the dashboard displays an updated number. Gasoline prices in Australia are not as high as those in Europe, but they are significantly above the US, and could be seen as glimpse at our future here.

I just read a fascinating article in Home Energy Magazine from 1993 on Bob Hubbard’s new-at-the-time, off-the-grid, PV-powered house in Arizona. At the time that he built this house, Hubbard worked in the solar energy industry, so he had a comprehensive understanding of how to build efficiency in, and designed the building to use about a tenth of the energy consumed by a typical American home: about 855 kWh compared to the regional average of 9,300 kWh.^† (It’s big too, at 2,600 ft².)

What became clear as I read the story was just how important it was that Hubbard was able to measure the effect of each of his appliances and systems, both at the planning stages and after he moved in: from assessing the baseload of the house when nothing was being actively used, to knowing which time of day was best to use power tools, and even to determining that the gas oven had a hidden power cost while it was running that was not covered in the manufacturer’s specifications.

Software can help

All of this was possible because of the continuous monitoring and feedback of energy usage that Hubbard designed into his house. At the time it was built the entire residence was completely off-grid, and generated much more electricity than the two occupants used. The article suggests that if the house had instead been connected to the electricity grid his monthly bill from the utility company would have been about $7. Almost twenty years later, this is exactly the area where software could make a mark and help the general public to reduce their living costs.

Here’s an example of how real-time feedback makes a difference based on the writer’s experience with a “moment-of-use” monitor (in this case a PowerCost device):

A few minutes after one of my children started showering, the display unit jumped from its 3–400 watt idle value to over 1.5 kilowatts. […] I realized that was from the hot water heater turning on. When I hear the AC relay flip and the house begins to cool off, I watch the display unit jump to over 3kw. I found this type of monitor to be an effective way to begin understanding the systems in my home and how different behaviors affect how much energy we use.

This is a great example of the immediate usefulness of being able to receive feedback about your energy consumption, though it probably falls into the same camp as curtailment behaviours in that it takes a bout of motivation on behalf of the individual and is not easily sustainable even if you are a geek about it. The most well-known moment-of-use device is the Kill-A-Watt, which is affordable and easy to use, but only allows you to test devices that plug in to a wall socket. Even with the PowerCost which attaches at the breaker box, there is no data logging, so you have to be paying attention to the device to get any useful information out of it.

The web makes it awesome

It’s in web-based monitoring that the real leap forward lies:

Electric utility partnership with Google PowerMeter

Currently this is available almost nowhere. Obviously (well, it seems obvious to me, but I could be wrong) this is awesome, but it won’t take off until it’s something you can order through your utility company, and ideally would allow integration of different energy sources (e.g. electricity, natural gas, user-uploaded data on wood, pellets, propane, etc.). However, the good news is that if you are super motivated you can get started on this right now by purchasing a compatible device, or—if you have mad phreaking skillz—by making your own using open source hardware and software.

Google PowerMeter is a Google.org project, and doesn’t cost anything. (I’m not saying that there is therefore “no cost.” There are privacy implications, though from what I have read the status of this product means that Google is not intending to try to make money out of it, directly at least.) What it does do is makes it trivial to include energy monitoring in your life the same way that you check your bank balance online. And it allows you to represent the data in different ways and compare your usage history with data from the general population.

I suppose this is what people who use the term “smart grid” are talking about, or maybe the idea of combining something like this with appliance-level communication within the home, which—provided it can all be done without using too much power—would make it much easier than it currently is to (a) have a clue, and (b) care about how much energy you consume, in the home and beyond.

Update: a promising development.

† This was in 1993. As of March, 2010 the national average is a rather shocking 11,040 kWh (with regional averages ranging from 6,252 kWh in Maine to 15,624 kWh in Tennessee).

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The eighth rule of Facebook is, verbatim: if you don’t need to use Facebook for work then walk away soldier, and don’t look back, even for a second. For everyone else, here are some tips for protecting your privacy and information security on The Social Network.

First up is some background information in the form of a rant, with more movie references. If you just want the “how to” details, then skip to Global Privacy Settings.

Facebook wants you to over-share

Over the past five years Facebook has gradually changed it’s default privacy settings for both new users and new features. If you join in 2010 and do not change your default privacy settings then your activity can be observed by a lot more people than if you had done the same thing in 2005. Here is a nice set of pie charts that illustrates the story.

Similarly, if you joined in 2005 and have never changed your privacy settings then your activity has gradually become available to a larger number of people because Facebook has added new features that don’t respect or relate to your existing privacy settings. Places, discussed below, is a good example of this.

Two levels of concern

Given the creeping exposure of all manner of personal data over time, there are two levels of concern with Facebook. The first is that your activity may be observed by undesirables (employers, children, parents, stalkers, etc.): the privacy problem. You want to be sure that you configure and use your Facebook account in such a way that your disclosed data can only be observed by the people you choose. The easiest way to deal with this is to treat everything you do on Facebook as potentially a public statement. Another way is to use friend lists.

The second level of concern is that even with good privacy controls that protect you from other individuals on Facebook, your activity over time may generate a behavioural profile that can be used to identify you even if your name never appears in the data comprising that profile. This is exacerbated by factoring in your activity on other social networks. Facebook, its advertising partners or, potentially, law enforcement or hackers have access to aggregate data that could be used to de-anonymise you: the information security problem.

Evil fireball

Just like the evil space fireball in The Fifth Element, that only grows bigger when General Staedert orders his crew to fire at it, Facebook gobbles data and the more active you are, the more it knows about you. Example: deleting a photo you don’t like equals more data about you (she didn’t want that photo to be seen by her friends). Deletions, by the way, are recorded. The data that is deleted remains recorded, etc. Everything is saved. Evil fireball.

Of course, jerks who see the world in black and white because it suits their agenda will tell you that if you have done nothing wrong ever in your entire life, and know that you never will, then you have absolutely nothing to hide from the fireball. They do not care about your privacy and liberty, they just want you to get out of their way. Nevertheless: the best way to deal with these problems is not to join Facebook. The second best way is to treat everything as public even if you have taken measures to control who sees it.

Global privacy settings

On May 26 Facebook replaced it’s convoluted privacy controls with a unified and simplified global settings panel. Nick O’Neill, who has written many useful articles on Facebook privacy, provides and overview in his post “Ten things about today’s privacy changes.” This is easiest way to start protecting your privacy.

Go to Account → Privacy Settings and choose something other than “Everyone” or “Recommended”. Facebook’s “Recommended” settings are, naturally, not very private. If you want my advice, choose “Friends Only” and lock that in first, then customise it further to restrict some of the settings to either a list, a specific group of names, or “Only Me.”

Note that at the top of the settings page there is a section called “Basic Directory Information”. Click on the unassuming little link that says “View settings” to both view and change your default directory settings. This is basically the information that people can find out about you through Facebook’s various search features.

At the bottom of the settings page there is also a section called “Applications and Websites”. Click on “Edit your settings” to set limits to the kinds of data that Facebook applications can access about you by default should you choose to install them (something that I recommend you avoid as much as possible).

Settings for ‘Places’

Following the popularity of location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook in August launched a location “check in” feature called Places that allows you to send your geographic coordinates to the system to let people know where you are. With all of their usual charm and tact they set up this feature to allow, by default, other people to check you in to places. (Bruce Schneier, whom I linked to a couple of times above, calls this type of information about you incidental data.)

Nick O’Neill again provides a good overview and some advice in “Places privacy settings.” The most important thing is probably to prevent other people from being able to check you in to places so be sure to set “Friends can check me in to Places” to “Disabled.”

Customising your settings

If you plan to use Facebook to say things that really do need to be restricted to a smaller group of people then you should customise your privacy settings. O’Neill’s post “Five privacy tips,” written before the privacy simplification changes in May, is still very useful in this regard, especially for the details it provides on using fine-grained Custom permissions, which is what you need to use if you want to restrict a data type to yourself or a short list of specific indiviuals.

Related to this is a change to the Publisher that went into effect this week, and relates to your everyday use of Facebook. The Publisher is the open text box at the top of your Wall and News Feed screens that invited you to start typing something (“What’s on your mind?”) has now been replaced with a Share bar that presents the following options: Status, Question, Photo, Link and Video.

When you one of these you get either a text box for typing, or a set of upload options, as well as a Permissions drop-down that allows you to limit who can see what you type or upload. Use the permissions feature to restrict your status updates to trusted friends if you are planning on sharing sensitive information.

Or, better yet, don’t share sensitive information on Facebook.

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These tips are based on the creation of the Wesleyan University Facebook Page, and they update an earlier version to account for recent system changes.

Visit Wesleyan University on the Facebook

The basics

These are the basic steps:

1. Log in to Facebook.
2. Skim through “Creating, administering and editing your page.”
3. Visit “Create a Page,” and fill out the form to create a page.
4. Once you’ve created the Page (don’t publish it yet), an “Ads and Pages” button appears at screen bottom, next to Applications.
5. Click through to Ads and Pages → Pages.
6. 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).
7. Modify your other page settings to suit and then begin adding your content.
8. 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.
9. You can get further help at the rather weird Facebook Pages page.

Custom wall tabs

You can create a custom tab for your page that contains arbitrary HTML using the Static FBML Facebook application. See the “Wes on FB” tab for a live example of a custom tab made using Static FBML. Styling is achieved using inline CSS. The content should be restricted to a width to 500px. You can see the example HTML and CSS used for the Wesleyan page, modify it, and try your own.

To install Static FBML visit the application’s page in the Apps directory. 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.” 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 Wall tab.) The option to add another instance is inside the edit area of the first one. Go to Edit FBML → Add another FBML box.

To present the Static FBML instance as a tab, go to “Edit Page,” scroll to the instance, click “Application settings” and then “add” next to “Tab: Available.”

Navigating the edit options

One of the more confusing things about Facebook Pages 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”

(Update: In August, 2010 Facebook announced that profile boxes are going away. One effect of this is that adding custom sidebar content via applications like Static FBML is no longer possible. Whether the boxes tab itself will be completely removed is unclear.)

Since everything on Facebook looks like a box it might take a while to figure out what the Facebook UI is referring to when something is labeled Boxes with a capital “B.” It’s a box that appears inside the Boxes tab, which (if you have added content to it) appears by default after Wall, Info and Photos at the top of the main content area of the page. For Static FBML instances that you have created you may have the option to add the content as a Box or a Tab (Application settings → add Box | add Tab). I have seen differences depending on the application and have not investigated thoroughly. Nevertheless, if you can add it as a box it will appear somewhere in the content area on your Boxes tab. If you add it as a tab it will appear as its own tab.

Changes, etc.

As before, I’ll edit this page for accuracy and/or to add new tips as I discover them. If you have information to add then please contact me and I’ll update the page.

Related posts:

• Static FBML no more
• How the hell to make a Facebook page
• Protecting your privacy on Facebook

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.

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• 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.

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• How to make a Facebook page
• How the hell to make a Facebook page

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.

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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
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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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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.

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Result of a bug in PHP, version 5.2.10.

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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.

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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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• 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:

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

• Highlight differences
• On reinstalling OS X Leopard
• 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]

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? ;-)

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.

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.)