Mike @ Macgirvin.com

Mike

7 months ago

So it looks like Microsoft now wants a patent on delivering search results for "Mila Kunis nude".

Microsoft Patenting Celebrity-Shaped Bing'ing - Slashdot

GeekWire reports that Microsoft is seeking a patent on the concept of applying the persona of a celebrity to Internet searches, allowing people to see search results shaped by the personalities and preferences of Hollywood celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Megan Fox, and Jessica Lange. A search for an evening dress using the persona of Jessica Lange, explains Microsoft, would return dresses that reflect the actress's 'style and/or fashion preferences,' including 'color, fit, designer, cut, etc.' Your move, Google.

Fabio Comuni

7 months ago

Genius. Pure genius.

If I can tell.
Maybe is patented.

bek **

7 months ago from Diaspora

...okay.

Mike

7 months ago

Mike

7 months ago

More nostalgia. The short ugly guy is the bass player for a popular 70's rock-n-roll band.

Mike

7 months ago

There are probably a few minor bugs that will take another day or two to shake out, but Friendika folks should now start seeing Diaspora reshares and all the Cubbi.es stuff.

2 people like this.

bek **

7 months ago from Diaspora

Sounds like it might be easier to do another checkout once I get over my ssl hurdle :)

Mike

7 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Birch Wind

Mike

7 months ago

A side effect of some recent updates is that Friendika folks should now get updates when a Diaspora person changes their name or profile photo.

Oh, and if they've disclosed their birthday in their profile it will get put into your event calendar and displayed with all your other birthday notifications.

3 people like this.

Vasudeva Kamath

7 months ago

Oh that is nice! thanks for the feature :)

Mike

7 months ago

nsfw - Click to open/close

Mike

7 months ago

Mother in law recovering from masectomy yesterday, in her mid 80's. I'm off to the city today to help out and get her hubby to the hospital.

10 comments show more

Tobias

7 months ago

Best wished for her!

Mike

7 months ago

She's doing fine.

The "city" is something else again. My observations:

"Service with a scowl".

"Supersized people pushing supersized shopping carts chockers full of stuff to make them more supersized".

Country life is way different.

Tobias

7 months ago

Good to hear that

Germanies cities are not compare-able with real big cities I guess, but I saw supersized people in German villages as well

Mike

7 months ago

This wasn't a comment on obesity. There are large people everywhere, including the country. A visit to a shopping center in Sydney was like being on an alien planet. In fact it reminded me a lot of

http://visboo.com/more-walmart-people.html

bek **

7 months ago from Diaspora

Something about Sydney? That's not the first time I've heard that kind of view on it :)

Tobias

7 months ago

uh... now I understand the alien feeling

J David Eisenberg

7 months ago

When I was in Berlin in January, I was aware (for the first time in years) that I'm short -- there are a lot of tall people in Germany.

Erkan Yilmaz

7 months ago

shorter than me? 167 cm

Tobias

7 months ago

mmh I'm average tall for a male in Berlin with my 185cm I'd say.

J David Eisenberg

7 months ago

165 cm.

Mike

7 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with copyninja

Mike

7 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Vasudeva Kamath

Mike

7 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Chris Blount

Mike

7 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with zottel

David Sugar

7 months ago

I am curious if you knew if anyone had already tried running friendika on lighttpd yet. It has its own rewrite rules, and I have yet to figure out how exactly they would correspond to the existing apache .htaccess ones, but I had thought about trying it.

Mike

7 months ago

A couple of people have gotten it running - look in the friendika google group for some configs.

Also define LIGHTTPD (to something, anything) in your config file. This conditionally fixes the way they expect expect headers to work in curl posting.

Mike

7 months ago

Roadmap for Friendika 2.4 | Friendika

It's just over a year since we introduced Friendika 2.0 - and provided the first glimpse of what a privacy enhanced federated social web might look like....

7 people like this.

Mike

7 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with blackdot@joindiaspora.com

Mike

7 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Leonard

Mike

7 months ago

For those who errantly have claimed that Steve Jobs invented the mouse - no he did not. It was invented by Doug Englebart at SRI, and the first prototype was built by my friend and former co-worker Nick Veizades.

I used to let people hold this actual prototype (as shown) which was casually laying on a table in the SUMEX-AIM machine room at Stanford until I left there in 1996. That's an optical encoder wheel in front, (the encoder wheel for the alternate axis is just below Dr. Englebart's thumb) and $1.98 red pushbuttons from Radio Shack were used for clicking. Nick found the broken wooden box in his garage.

6 people like this.

Mike

7 months ago

The lab I managed at Stanford had a bit of history. It was the very first(!) node on the ARPANET (now called the "internet"), and we had the first mouse, we were responsible for the existence of Xerox PARC (which brought you mice, ethernet, MacOS, software fonts, and windows); Cisco and ethernet routing, Sun Microsystems, and the IMAP protocol. I might have missed a few things but you get the general idea.

Mike

7 months ago

Here's the Word version (attached)

3 people like this.

8 comments show more

Tobias

7 months ago

looks good

Martin G.

7 months ago

Wonder what'd happen if someone posted this on their Diaspora* wall.

Mike

7 months ago

How does your social network compare?

I mocked this up quickly in Word and then discovered (of course) that the file format was un-useable for anything I want to use it with.

Can any of you clever folks improve on this - as something I can include into the project website? (html body with perhaps some better images in a zip file - and feel free to revise if you think you can add value.)

2 people like this.

3 comments show more

Mike

7 months ago

I'll attach the Word doc in a new post. I don't care about the header line.

The four categories are "has capability" "has capability but buyer beware", "they might be able to provide this capability - it's not completely certain or obvious", and "cannot provide this capability".

J David Eisenberg

7 months ago

By header line, I meant the line that shows the names of the networks; once you've scrolled down far enough, you don't see their names, and you lose track of which column is which.

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with bonky@joindiaspora.com

Mike

8 months ago

Just thinking out loud - the system notifications are getting pulled on a timer now, and there may be a lag between your actions and the feedback for those actions. Should probably do a ping right after we load the page (within 1-2 secs?) and then back off and use the normal timer for the next one. This will let you know something like "Settings saved" more immediately and not leave you wondering.

Mike

8 months ago

No doubt only the Aussies who are tuned in will understand - it's a #drizabone day.

#drizabone

bek **

8 months ago from Diaspora

Shirt and shorts weather over here :)

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Allan Haverholm

Mike

8 months ago

nsfw - Click to open/close

Tobias Diekershoff likes this.

Tobias

8 months ago

it's in the addons repository at github https://github.com/friendika/friendika-addons

Mike

8 months ago

Well that was really wonky.

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Tony Baldwin

Mike

8 months ago

Lost a couple of days on the zot integration fighting an XML parser which steadfastly refused to parse valid XML into a coherent structure.

Finally had to forget about trying to make it work and come up with an alternative - and I think we're moving forward again.

3 people like this.

Mike

8 months ago

To those working on the Friendika UI - the logic is a bit contorted at the moment, but in theory it's possible for us to combine multiple criteria on the network page and do something awesome. I'm at a bit of a loss on how to present it.

Most of the search/sort criteria can be combined except for a couple of conflicting choices.

With the right URL parameters one could for instance see all starred bookmarks from Devlon containg the tag linux - in posted order.

Or everything from your 'family' group containing the word 'mother' in commented order. At the moment you can't do this by clicking things because the choices aren't completely integrated. But you can do it from the URL bar if you know what you're doing.

How do we make this power selectable and intuitive? The number of options are going to grow with community tags and date selectors and other sort orders (like 'reverse' or even 'random').

7 comments show more

bek **

8 months ago from Diaspora

Are you familiar with Drupal? Do you have time to have a look at the Views module? It does stuff like that but you're not using Drupal obviously :) Perhaps the code might help you?

Mike

8 months ago

Just to point out that the search page is accessible to the public and contains public conversations on this site (which could be spammy), whereas the network page is more of a personal thing and restricted to conversations initiated by your contacts. So if one was to put the Groups widget onto the search page, it could only be done for logged in folks and this would essentially turn it into a somewhat limited network page if a group were selected.

Mike

8 months ago

The network page is really where you interact with people. This is where we need all the filtering and sorting we can get away with.

The search page is the destination for linked hashtags, but otherwise I tend to think of it much like the community page - mostly for outsiders to have a squiz (e.g. a look around).

No reason why we couldn't provide an advanced search on the search page but perhaps it would present slightly different functionality, and be more geared to just finding specific things on the site than interacting with people. Bookmarks, photos, and video searches would probably work well there, as would posts by specific people on the site (any which allow public viewing).

But the concept of "friends posts", your own groups, and "posts I've starred" are all based on stuff that may be private to you and probably belongs more on the network page where it would probably fit more with your privacy expectations.

Note that we currently have saved searches available on the search page, which I think is useful there - so there's no solid criteria defining what goes on either page. Each probably needs their own overlapping set of search options and criteria.

Haakon Meland Eriksen

8 months ago

I still get confused over when I'm sharing information on the Internet, when I'm sharing information to logged in users at our Friendika instance, when I'm sharing information to all connected Friendika instances, and when I'm sharing with single individuals.

The Network page usually pops up with a number, indicating new posts from someone, so I mainly go there.

The Community page seems to be some kind of summary/random page and you get the "Show in context" message. I thought these posts were only visible to Friendika people, but when I logged out and saw all the things available to the rest of the world, I had to take a deep breath.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but in my mind I have this notion that Friendika is more private than Facebook, and that "Community" here meant "the Community of connected Friendika instances" - not the world community.

Fabio Comuni

8 months ago

Let's say you're a community, maybe a LUG. Let's say you decide to use friendika for your community site. In this site, every member post about LUG activities and so, in public internet, and they can communicate between them in private.
People coming from 'outside' can take a look on what's going on in your LUG in "community" page.
Every user has an 'internal' view of LUG in their "network" page

Btw, community page can be enabled/disabled by node admin in admin/site panel.

Mike

8 months ago

There is no unifying privacy mechanism across all the networks we connect to. We do the best we can to accommodate conflicting privacy policies and walk a fine line between them all.

*If* you block public access to your profile, your "public" posts by default are shared only with your friends - and will not show up on the Community page.

Likewise, if you select individual permissions for a post, it is shared only with those people/groups.

That's the high level view.

However - posts may be subject to leakage of some form if any of your friends are on networks which aren't very private (pretty much all of them except Diaspora and Friendika).

Even then, a *public* post may be visible on one or more Diaspora sites even if your Friendika wall is set to private. This is because Diaspora creates a mirror of your public profile on every linked Diaspora node where you have friends. I haven't investigated fully if access to this mirrored public profile can be blocked.

If you want to post to the world, we can do that better than anybody else. We can blast it across cyberspace and put it on Facebook, Twitter, identi.ca, all your mailing lists, your blog, and also all your Friendika and Diaspora contacts.

It's all under your control.

But it does mean for maximum privacy that you have choose your friends wisely. Not just who they are, but what network they're on.

Mike

8 months ago

One of the paradoxes of enhanced privacy is that it's hard to make friends with people or even discover them if everybody is hidden behind their private wall using psuedonyms.

The Community page is, like Fabio said, for sites that act as community hubs, but also to aid in discovering who on your hub might be interesting to connect to.

Messages only appear on the community page if they are allowed to by virtue of being "visible to everybody", and can be blocked from external public access on either a personal level or a site level.

Mike

8 months ago

Think I've got the notifications sorted on duepuntozero and those themes derived from it. It isn't yet showing all the detailed notify messages, but should once again work as it did a week ago with all the correct message counts in the correct places - except system messages will now appear in a popup.

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with bek

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Martin Graap

Mike

8 months ago

@Highlander allowed me to use this under cc-attr:

Where I come from, if something has no cost but has strings attached, we call that a "free lunch".

Thanks. This is the concept that I seem to have had difficulty putting into words.

One may not object to the "strings attached", but their presence makes it a "free lunch" - and as many of us were taught, "there is no such thing" - which we all took to mean "it isn't really free".

@Highlander

Mike

8 months ago

Will be checking in a feature later today to benefit those of you with public servers that have a severe polling load. It will let you declare an account as "abandoned" if it hasn't been logged into in x days - and will no longer poll for those accounts. The account is still there and will receive direct and personal deliveries, but this keeps the system from wasting resource filling public content streams for people that perhaps tried the account once and never returned. All they have to do is login and messages will start flowing again.

5 people like this.

4 comments show more

Erkan Yilmaz

8 months ago

#archiving or #deleting posts (where e.g. certain users did not reply yet) sounds like a nice #feature

especially when one wants to #migrate to a new host, not sure how long it will take to #export / #import the DB or if there are certain problems due to software (encoding, ...)
e.g. for @Charles Roth it could've been also nice so he could give each user all "their" relevant database entries so they could import their #data elsewhere (not sure if this (1) export feature can be reimported easily)

(1) http://friendika.skilledtests.com/uexport

#archiving #deleting #feature #Charles Roth

Erkan Yilmaz

8 months ago

thank God, but I remember a chat

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Birch Wind

Mike

8 months ago

Wow - a siren. Haven't heard one of those in years. Hope everybody is OK. Consider a place where the police department is closed. OK - there's a light that comes on at night so that the Sydney riff-raff remain polite at the pub and/or keep on driving.

Mike

8 months ago

You should be able to follow/connect to identi.ca folks again. Looks like StatusNet 1.0 has gotten rid of the personal 'vcard' so we have to scrape through a bunch more extra stuff to figure out what the person's name is and what they might look like.

On the statusnet side, folks there have to follow you by your profile url, not your webfinger user@host - still working on what changed to cause this, as both end up reading the same exact file.

Erkan Yilmaz likes this.

John Tucker

8 months ago

I think the problem is in hm:host entry in .well-known/host-meta statusnet appears to be expecting just a hostname as opposed to the full blown url which friendika currently gives out, when I changed it to just my hostname webfinger requests went through fine.

The relevant check which friendika appears to be failing is below


          if ($xrd->host != $domain) {
                return false;
            }

Mike

8 months ago

Thanks John! That's a regression. I'll have to fixed in a few clicks.

Mike

8 months ago

Last week I was invited to a private party. There were some snacks and a film. The topic of the film had to do with ridiculing religion. I found it incredibly bold of somebody to organise a group of people who had never met before and without any prior warning bombard them with a film making fun of religion. A few people were visibly uncomfortable (but tried to be polite). Not something I probably would have done.

Let's use our tools wisely. One has the ability on the free web to restrict polar topics. Public conversations on the internet are just like public conversations anywhere - religion and politics (and perhaps software licensing) probably aren't the best things to talk about at a party.

There are some bright people here. If we require better tools for Fasicst Wiccans to discuss Grecian monetary policy without being open to attack by Presbyterian Environmentalists who support traditional slavery, let's figure out a better way to do it.

Abinoam Jr. likes this.

Mike

8 months ago

Nothing worse than watching a movie with an American actor playing a role as an Aussie.

American viewers might get fooled, but here it sounds like an American who can't quite figure out a British accent but who was the only person in the casting interview that had read a book on Aussie slang - from the 1950's. Crikey.

6 comments show more

Mike

8 months ago

The video tag is only for html5 (preferably Vorbis/OGG or the new "universal" format - forgot the name at the moment) videos.

Youtube needs to be embedded with the youtube or OEmbed buttons.

We do need to sort all of these out and just be able to "insert video" and let the backend decide how to best represent it.

Abinoam Jr

8 months ago

@Tony Baldwin but... It's pretty common when you say that you are brazilian to receive a "Buenos Dias, Yo ablo español"

For that kind of situation I have to say politely...

"Congratulations!!! I just speak portuguese and a little bit of english".

#Tony Baldwin

Mike

8 months ago

Apologies to all who have had to endure the ugliness of the licensing debate here in the last few days. Free software licenses are a lot like the other "eternal development wars" - vi vs. emacs, tabs vs. spaces - which software developers always find themselves embroiled in. These are all diametrically opposed and compromise is rarely achieved. The only thing that has ever worked is to say "you do it your way and I'll do it mine".

Sérgio F. Lima likes this.

David Sugar

8 months ago

One must understand at happy hackers home for overage coders, they had to have two wings for the dorms; The Stallman wing, and the Joy wing. The cafeteria hall is filled coding codgers shouting at each other "modal" and "modeless" all day and night. And I am not even going to talk about what they had to do about tabs vs spaces, just note that they do have on-premise electro-therapy.

Abinoam Jr

8 months ago

I just would like to say that emacs is much better than vi!!!

(kidding...)

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with JC Sese-Cuneta

Mike

8 months ago

Mike Macgirvin is now friends with Keith Fernie