Centralize, De-Centralize, Centralize, De-Centralize. The pendulum swings. Back and forth, back and forth.

Well after Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Google, Amazon, eBay, it's time to swing back. Don't forget it's a World of Ends. Nobody owns it. Everyone can use it. And crucially; Anyone can improve it. And they can do that from any end (edge). It doesn't have to be improved from the center outwards.

Here's a good one. Last night I did a Skype chat interview with a Register (and Wired and AP) journalist about 419 scams on the Social Network where I'm CTO. I asked him "How do I know that I'm talking to the reporter you say you are". Especially when his Skype profile is empty and he has only 3 contacts in Skype. Proving Identity on a first meeting is remarkably difficult on the net. But then it's pretty hard in real life as well.

Then we hear of a Yahoo! AuthBB-OpenID mashup that lets you create an OpenID identity based on a Yahoo! account and using Yahoo!'s authentication. On one level this looks great because it potentially allows a very large number of people to have an instant OpenID identity. But of course that is also a curse. short term fake identities on Yahoo! are common. What are we actually proving here? That the person trying to log into your OpenID enabled system has a validated Yahoo! Account? So what?

OMG! WTF! It's a blog about all things "Hello Kitty".

I've recently liberated an old Inspiron 4000 laptop and turned it into a PC for the wife and others. It's a 700MHz Pentium 3 with 310Mb of memory. Just about everything in it is now outdated from USB 1.0 to ATI Mobility M3 graphics. The good bit is an 80Gb disk from when I upgraded it a year or so ago. However apart from programs being a bit slow to load it runs Windows XP fine and actually using it, it's pretty responsive. At least good enough for general web surfing and email along with background downloads using BitTorrent et al. It even runs Skype well and can handle voice calls. It's got a PCMIA ethernet card and a Buffalo Wifi card.

So after cleaning the disk it's got 15Gb or so used and plenty of free space. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity to try out Ubuntu and experiment to see how close Linux is to me being able to make the switch.

Loading Ubuntu
Downloading the latest Edgy Eft 6.10 was easy (and surprisingly quick). The Dell has a DVD player but can't write CDs but my other laptop made short work of burning the CD using Infra Recorder. So now the fun begins. Inevitably I wanted a bit of control over the partitioning so I didn't want to just accept the default settings. Lots of web searching led me to the following layout
1) Windows NTFS 20Gb
2) Shared EXT3 34Gb
3) Ubuntu Root EXT3 20Gb
4) Swap 1Gb
So we fire up the live CD, which takes a surprising amount of time. Everything including the wifi appears to work so hit the install button. Using GParted to set the partitions up was nerve racking. There's a point were the partitions are all defined but it's about to start. HDA1 (the Windows partition) is at the top with a checkbox unchecked for Reformat. I wasn't paying attention but Ubuntu stopped me from trying to reformat it. It wouldn't have done anyway which means the checkbox really should be disabled. I then got a failure message saying it had resized the windows partition but something had gone wrong. It was actually lying and telling it to redo the rest of the job worked.

30 minutes later and I have a dual boot XP-Ubuntu machine. Restart, check windows still works, then boot into Ubuntu. Everything appears fine but startup is pretty slow and some operations, like just starting a terminal session are also slow. The mouse is really jerky and scrolling around Firefox is jerky and slow with keystrokes getting missed. Much web surfing later, I discover that there is a small tweak possible. This involves editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changing the default color depth from 24 to 16. It seems the jerky mouse is a known bug. And the ATI proprietary drivers don't support the Mobility M3. Apparently I'm stuck with slow screen performance. The default drivers just don't seem that good with this hardware. There's a message in here which is *SAVE A COPY OF xorg.conf* When it all goes titsup and X won't start, you can boot into recovery mode and use the cp command to get back to where you were.

At one point I booted up a Knoppix 4 CD and confiormed it's using more or less the same driver and was similarly unreponsive. I didn't notice the jerky mouse but window refreshes and scrolls were similarly nasty.

Meanwhile the fonts are really ugly. So I installed msttcorefonts and changed everything I could to Arial, Courier New and Times Roman TTF. Things are a bit better. The next step was switching the aliasing around. Under XP I have cleartype turned off everywhere because it looks fuzzy to me. But under Ubuntu, the Truetype Arial is getting badly sized. Some sizes look like badly sized bitmap fonts and Bold really doesn't work. With aliasing set to LCD it's useable but not as clear as under XP.

I've also modifed Grub so that Windows is the top option and it defaults to the last used OS.

So after about 10 hours of work I've got a working dual boot system but frankly video performance under Ubuntu sucks. And the lost mouse movement and lost key strokes makes it impossible to work with and especially impossible to give to someone else.

Thoughts
There was still way too much need to get your hands dirty and use the command line. I'm used to command line Linux so it's not alien but it's too much for a newbie. Having X fail to start is worrying. Perhaps it should fire up a basic VGA driver if the full driver fails.

Firefox doesn't support backspace to go back a page only alt-left. Huh?

Partitioning didn't quite work as it should have done. In the end eveything was ok, but I can do without the racked nerves of spurious error messages.

The automatic updates work well. App install works well. The Synaptics package manager is a good solution. Perhaps universe and multiverse should enabled by default.

The documentation on the Ubuntu site is pretty good though it suffers from the usual wiki problem of being a bit unorganised. It sometimes hard to find your way back to a page you knew you'd seen before.

As I used Ubuntu, I could feel myself getting dismayed by just how much work I'd have to put in to get it "just right" for me. But then my XP setup has taken several years to get right, so expecting to get to the same point in a few hours is unreasonable.

So all in all I can imagine using this day to day. It's not quite ready for prime time as a direct replacement for XP but it's damn close. However trying to run it on 5 year old hardware is not really on. This is disappointing as I expected it to be at least as responsive as XP and hopefully better since the underlying OS is better architected. Something not exactly surprising was the font problem as I've heard of similar stories before and screen driver problem. It's a testament to how much work Microsoft have done, both themselves and with their partners that Windows screen and font control is excellent. It's only when you see another system fail that you appreciate it. This is perhaps the biggest issue that Linux has to solve before it can become truly mainstream. And I get the impression that this is down to the X code and not any one distro as they mostly seem to use the same underlying system. It's just possible that Kubuntu and Xubuntu (and hence KDE and Xfc) work better but I think the problem is actually below these in X.

Shuzak.com | Anatomy of a Successful Social Network : Ads, ads everywhere

One thing I particularly dislike about Web 2.0 startups is their Web 1.0 approach towards displaying advertisements. It shouldn't take an Einstein to realize where Google ads are appropriate and where they are not. For instance, after I click on "My Friends" tab in Hi5, I am displayed an ad of "Become a nutritionist" and "Should the government regulate gas prices?". These ads are absolutely irrelevant to my interests, and there is no way in hell that I am going to click on them. Simply put, they are pointless and annoying. Note that there is nothing wrong with displaying ads as long as it makes sense to do so. If you have no ads on your site, you will not make money off of it. If you have too many ads on your site, nobody is going to click on them.

Yet another example that AdSense sucks. There's something deeply wrong in Advertising land. Whenever you see people talking about it, it's always from the point of view of the advertiser or the Ad Agency. Nobody ever talks about the publisher. And I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that that's because context sensitive Ads only work where the Agency is also the Publisher. And that's on the search engines themselves.

Which makes life tough for those of us involved in web properties that depend on monetizing traffic via advertising.

But then I run Firefox with Adblock. So even though the Ads on our sites are increasingly annoying I never get to see them.

Apparently the DTD for RSS 0.91 has gone missing. Again.

Woah! What just happened? Did we just slip through a time warp back to April 2001?

We had an outage on Friday evening. This was caused by a loss of power to the database server. It took some time to bring the server back up and it's clock was then set back to 2002. All of that has now been sorted. No data has been lost but there may be some records with invalid timestamps which we will attempt to rectify.

While the clock was out a number of background tasks will have sent out emails incorrectly.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Another hero bites the dust. Robert Anton Wilson has passed away.

Fnord

Marc's Voice » Blog Archive » Blogging away the Midnight Oil

Re Toyota: One area that the internets are bad at right now is supporting small groups of people talking about niche subjects. The Few-To-Few communication paradigm. We used to use usenet, then mailing lists (yahoogroups) but these are currently broken with spam, Outlook users and a general loss of netiquette. For real time comms in these groups we used to use IRC and now Skype Public Chat but it's hard keeping these going. On the web we used BBS systems like phpBB but they don't go far enough and the UI for all these discussion forums is clunky. Blogs have enabled an outpouring of verbiage but it's One-To-Many publishing not Few-To-Few discussion. Even with blog search tools its almost impossible to follow a 10 person discussion conducted via blog postings. Blog comments are fundamentally broken as well for this as the discussion is taking place in multiple places and troubled by spam.

And as you point out, supporting a niche group is more than just the comms. There's feedback, marketplaces, meetings, subscription management and many other functions needed t do it well.

I reckon in 2007 somebody's going to do "Discussion Groups 2.0" directly aimed at supporting millions of 150 person groups. It's an area ripe for re-invention and for a player to knock Yahoogroups off it's perch.

Back to Toyota. Who's going to do the job of moderating? it's a horrible, painful task where everyone hates the moderator. But for a corporate forum it's absolutely vital. No corporate is going accept flame wars, teen-stalking or porn spam. There's a business there outsourcing moderation for corporates.

Duke Listens! : Weblog : So from my own perspective, it seems like Google is not just ignoring its mission to organize the world's information when it comes to music. It seems like Google is actively trying not to do music. I haven't the faintest clue why.

Put these together
- Music is one of the most searched items on Google
- Google knows about a lot of MP3s on the nets
- Google knows how to read the ID3 tags in MP3s
So Google could index all those MP3s and allow you to search on things like bitrate.

Now I can think of all sorts of reasons why Google doesn't currently do that. But somebody could. In fact somebody should.

Next stop, metadata in video leading to better video search. A which point I realized I have no idea what metadata standards there are for embedding information in anything apart from MP3. You would expect that WMA, AAC, MP4, etc etc would have a similar scheme to ID3.

There's a few private sharing systems appearing as plug ins for Skype such as Pando and SkySpace. These things allow a small group of people to share privately among themselves. What's missing in these is the ability to search for a specific file or group of files. And that's a key feature for P2P systems. It's why Soulseek works so well. It's not enough to just find a copy of John Martyn's "Sundays Child" You need to know that it's encoded with LAME -presetstandard at 192Kb VBR before knowing if it's worth downloading.

Beyond the Beyond : Cory: Well, America has lots of weird consumption inefficiencies, especially away from the coastal cities where we're encouraged to own a lot more house, car and material goods than we need. I'd be more interested in how much it would take to provide every person in the world the kind of life they enjoy in one of the moderate-priced European "B" cities like Florence. Walkable places with incredible food, design, manufacturing, schools, racial diversity, etc. Places with great public transit AND a high level of private vehicle ownership, as well as universal health-care, cheap or free universities, and refreshing absence of paranoid security theater aimed at eliminating abstract nouns like "terror."

The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.

America has lots going for it -- innovation, the Bill of Rights, a willingness to let its language mutate in exciting and interesting ways, but the standard of living is not America's signal virtue.

Hear, Hear.

This dropped across my desk today. The phrase is allegedly some of Saddam's last words.

"Is this your manhood?" « Fundamentalist Druid : The other explanation is that they actually have no fucking clue about any of this stuff, and it's simply a side-effect of staging a bit of a circus for some of their Iraqi puppets with old grudges and for their remaining drool-case supporters in the US, by demonstrating their arbitary power of life and death over uppity foreigners, just like Caligula did by throwing them to the lions.

At the end of the day though, it's certainly a great advert for the 'freedom and democracy' that Bush and Blair (don't forget our dear Prime Minister) promised to bring to Iraq isn't it?

That's the government that we invaded Iraq in order to install? That mob of guys in black balaclavas waving a noose?

That's what 'bringing freedom and democracy' to a country looks like these days?

That's what Bush and Blair lied so much and killed so many thousands of people to achieve?

Grainy footage of a chanting mob of hooded fanatics stringing up an (embarrassingly brave) old man, in what appears to be an abandoned garage?

God help us.

You know it's time to get a new laptop when the battery life drops to below one hour.

Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » The Man From Google Returns : Turns out search for a record PEAKS upon single release. Yup, that's the HIGHEST INTEREST EVER, when the track is first heard. But as you well know, almost always, YOU CAN'T BUY THE TRACK AT ANY PRICE! CERTAINLY NOT THE ALBUM!

3 or 4 years ago (you know, a lifetime in internet time) back when I last used to buy CDs in an actual record store, I remember being infuriated because the brilliant review in Saturday's Times was for a CD that wasn't available for another month. At the time it seemed seriously stupid. By the time the CD was released and available to actually buy, I'd completely forgotten about it.

Now the record store has shut. It's companion store in the next town has also shut. The Virgin and HMV record stores in the nearest towns with a mall have shut as well. The only place within 20 miles that actually sells CDs is Tesco and Woolworths and they only carry 30 titles. Even the WH Smiths has shut it's music area and only sells movie DVDs.

And they wonder why the traditional music biz is dying?

Julian Bond says: Interesting to see the Last.FM Extra. It seems to be largely a Flash player embedded in a Skype window. Seems like this is a fast way to develop Extras. YouTube embedded in a Skype Extra, anyone?

Julian Bond says: related: We were talking about the Google Search API being closed down. I recently wrote some code to get the top 3 results from Google from a command inside Skype. This led to thinking about why you would want that. One I came up with was Skype being free on some paid hotspots. If the only internet access you can get is Skype, (on a wifi phone perhaps), then getting web pages inside Skype makes sense. But the rest of the time, why not just use a web browser? Which then means that Skype extras only look interesting if they add some value that is only possible from inside Skype. Just embedding something available elsewhere doesn't cut it. So a Last.FM player in a Skype Extra is an interesting demonstration of example code, but I can't see the point.

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: Don't you think just making the user's experience more Skype Centric is of value?

Julian Bond says: Actually no.

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: Well I think it adds value to Skype Ltd and some Skype Users like me.

Julian Bond says: But we already multitask between Skype, firefox, thunderbird, googlemail. Each of these things is optimised for it's task. We're all comfortable with context switching between them. Add in uTorrent, winamp, etc etc

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: I do not disagree. I certainly would not want to browse the web via Skype. I want IE or FF for that. However I do not mind getting RSS feeds via Skype.

Julian Bond says: I've used Anothr to get alerts generated from synthetic RSS feeds. Great for PR companies and market researchers. Do a search on Google news/blogsearch or technorati for your company name, feed the RSS to Anothr, get an alert on Anothr shortly after someone mentions you.

Julian Bond says: philosophy: I've been thinking about online communications as a 3*3*3 matrix X-axis=publisher, y-axis=reader, z-axis=time. One-Few-Many publishing to one-few-many, in time, immediate-delayed-offline/permanent

Julian Bond says: So Skype is
one->one : chat, voice
few->few : group chat
mostly immediate to delayed

Julian Bond says: Blogs are One->Many, permanent
blog comments are few->many
Clubs-Tribes are few->few

Julian Bond says: In time: Phone -> IM Chat -> Email -> Mailing list-> Blog Comment discussion -> Blog -> Broadcast news progressively longer timescales

Julian Bond says: The current online world is still not very good for few->few group discussions on a niche topic. We used to use mailing lists and usenet but both have been dropping off in effectiveness. People are just not very good at that style of discussion. It's really hard to keep IRC and Skype chats going. The norm is that they fade into disuse. Blogs and Blog comments are hopeless because the discussion gets spread all over the web and it's too much like hard work to check on responses to what you write. Discussion boards work kind of OK, but the UI is mostly pretty unpleasant.

Julian Bond says: The kids use TXT but us old people have a hard time with tiny keyboards and thumbs.

Julian Bond says: Don't get me wrong. I also think public chats are great and are taking what was in IRC to a new level. But it's hard to keep chats going.

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: And hard to keep them focused

Julian Bond says: Rule of thumb: you need 5 noisy people. 90% lurk so you typically need 50 people for self sustaining momentum.

Julian Bond says: And when you hit 150 people, the conversation will split and new groups will bud off.

Julian Bond says: So Skype need to up the chat size limit to >150.

The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » Gowers Review : However, we are concerned that the report seems to make no distinction between large-scale commercial counterfeiting, and small-scale non-commercial acts carried out by individuals. Too often these vastly different acts are conflated by the music industry, and the drafters of any new intellectual property law must make the difference clear to both the courts and the rights holders.

Amazing how often arguments about one get twisted into arguments about the other. Otherwise intelligent people seem to have this problem repeatedly and can't understand how I can be in favour of prosecuting large scale commercial counterfeiters and be against prosecuting individuals giving away music for free.

ClearForest Announces Winners of the 2006 Semantic Web Services Mashup Competition: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
semantic mashups [from: del.icio.us]

Marc made me laugh this morning.

Back in the day, Stewart Alsop, Dave Winer and myself used to hang out allot and kibbitz on the industry. So we decided to start a secret organization called "The Silicon Valley Asshole's Society" - just so we could say we had our own secret organization.

Hey! Dave Winer called me an asshole once[1]. Does that mean I'm eligible to join?

ps. Shouldn't it be "arsehole"?

[1]But I don't hold it against him! I'm not an asshole, but I play one on the internet.

Zenarchery.com » Full text of the Grim Meathook Future thing : The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

It's not evenly distributed! There are other futures. But what's probably scariest for us middle class westerners who live in a provincial suburban town is that we have our own version of the meathook future. Where the oil gets ridiculously expensive, house prices spiral out of reach of our debt ridden children and we're spied on continuously by the local crazy, nanny state government motherfuckers lest we rise up and start shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more". Of course that doesn't even begin to compare with living in the Counterstrike game. But try telling that to the inhabitants of a racially mixed Paris suburb, or a Chicago Project, or a council housing estate in Leeds.