Go to the site you RSS junkies. Look at the new theme – it’s Twenty Ten the default theme and I was relieved to find a minimalist theme which can showcase WP 3.0′s new features. Read my lame tagline at the top of the page and check out the new footer widgets. Nom.

Setting up simonw.org slowly. I will be migrating all posts which “make me seem like a smart and/or creative programmer and/or geek”. So will probably abandon ye olde Frost Nova once that is done. Will still keep it live for posterity (wow, I just googled that word and it turns out I didn’t pull it out of my arse).

Google appears simply to lack the ability to anticipate how its actions will be perceived. Or in the case of the recent Wi-Fi scandal, actually has no knowledge of what it’s actions really are.

“Oops, we didn’t read the code! Copy/paste, copy/paste! Coding is fun!”
- Anonymous Google employee (possibly a robot)

And Facebook has the social monopoly. There’s nowhere else for users to go, so there’s no commercial incentive for change. All its users can do is complain. You’re not seriously suggesting that people could ever leave Facebook, right? Don’t be silly.

However, things could be looking up. Last night, when I logged into Google Reader, it asked me whether I wanted my Shared Items to be public or “protected”. I chose the latter, allowing me to share only with selected groups in my Gmail contacts. This can be configured under “Sharing Settings”.

Logging out of Google and visiting my old shared items URL confirms this indeed works.

Then for some reason, I had the fun time of typing in all my friends email addresses one at a time to follow each of them. Thanks Google UI designers.

Hippie-whip: (verb) To exploit someone’s strongly held alternative values and beliefs for the purposes of tricking them into going out of their way to help or support you. The subjects of a hippie-whip are compelled to act in your interests as it is a way for them to demonstrate their commitment to their hippie values.

Their daughter enjoys being a vegetarian, not because of any noble principles, but simply because it’s a way for her to “hippie-whip” her parents into making a fuss over her and her vegetarianism.

Phone leg: A British synonym of phantom phone, the experience of feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket when in fact it hasn’t. You are either imagining it or mistaking other vibration sources for your phone. Commonly occurs when driving in the narrow cobble-stoned streets of London. More likely to occur if you are talking about someone behind their back. You suddenly think they’re calling you, feel an immediate twinge of guilt, followed by immense relief when you realise it was just phone leg.

Ed: “Hang on, my phone’s going. Oh no it’s not. It’s phone leg. I thought it was my daughter. Do you get phone leg?”
Rob: “Yes, but I try not to keep it in my leg.”
Ed: “What are you, a terminator?”

ESL speak: The change in speech that happens (sometimes unconsciously) when an EFL speaker is talking to an ESL speaker. The EFL speaks louder & slower, uses clearer syllables and sometimes adopts the accent of their ESL audience. Useful when ordering Chinese or Indian takeaway over the phone so it is more easily understood. Has no racist motivations at all but is simply a practical way to assist communication.

EFL: “I have one beef-a-black-been, laaj spesha frai raice, tree dim sim.”
ESL: “Ok, be ten fitteen minnas. Ba Bai.”
Friend-of-EFL: “Dude, that was some nice ESL speak.”
ESL: “Tayn-you. Mehbe I shudda orda sam sprin roos a well.”
Friend-of-ESL: “OK you can stop now you friggin racist.”

Now don’t worry friends about this ever getting through parliament. The motivation is most probably a grab for conservative votes, and if it pisses too many people off, the lost votes will offset any gains. So we’ll most likely see some form of watered down filter, which may not be entirely evil.

In its current form, the filter simply has too broad a scope, which is the main point raised by  Google, and one I half agree with. While a tightly scoped filter (as used by Germany and Italy) which excludes specific material such as child pornography may appear to have benefit, it does not address the real crime, which is the fact that this material is being created in the first place. What are the governments of the world doing about that? Blocking child porn sites is akin to the government putting fingers in its ears and going “La La La! If I don’t know about it, it isn’t happening!”

If we can agree (UN-style) on specific classes of materials that no one should access, and if filtering does not impact speed, then It might be OK. However, when dealing with the Internet, blacklist filters simply don’t work. They are impossible to maintain and proxy sites pop up faster than they can be blocked. I’ve seen 10-year-old kids circumvent the NSW Department of Education’s filtering system like they were punching through a wet paper bag. The Department switched to a whitelist filter in 2008, but that doesn’t stop VPN’s and future loop holes that haven’t even been discovered yet.

In schools, it then becomes a discipline issue. Filtering students inside the school network is a requirement, as there is a clear duty of care and it is not feasible to manually police kids on the internet, just as one can’t police everything they talk about in the playground. But restricting the surfing of every adult Australian citizen is a completely different ball game and dangerous territory. We are responsible for ourselves; it is not the government’s job to decide what information we should and should not access.

UPDATE: This is the ultimate irony:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew

FUCK. OFF.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JxcBH_rA2Y

The interface is simple. You can click an “I like this” button for each item. This is the most important UI feature Reader has introduced to date. Using the shortcut keys, I can read articles with acceptable speed and use the L key to quickly flag interesting items. However, what Google does with this “user X likes item Y” training data needs a lot of work.

Here’s some improvements that need to be made, ASAP:

• It shouldn’t show me items from feeds I subscribe to and have already read (syntactic duplication).
• It shouldn’t show me reposts of news stories I have already read (semantic duplication). If a story is deemed relevant, show me the most authoritative reporting of it.
• It shouldn’t show me useless no-content feeds that require you go to the original site to view the story.
• If it’s going to recommend YouTube videos, then it should use the mountain of data it already has on the YouTube network already, not just recommend based on popularity.
• Recommendations need to have much higher precision. Currently, I estimate its less than 0.1  (for every 10 items I read, 1 is relevant).
• It should apply the relevance filtering to posts in my existing subscriptions, most of which have similarly low precision.
• However, there are some feeds such as web comics which should not be filtered. I want to read every single XKCD whether I find it funny or not. If a system could predict which I find funny before I read them I’d be thoroughly impressed!
• Ranking of items (by “magic”? please…) is NOT important. I want to read stories from oldest to newest. I want recall of 1.0 and precision of at least 0.8 or I’m not interested.

To be successful, it needs to merge StumbleUpon’s classification system (which has the logic right) with the Google Reader framework (which has the interface right).

To make a parallel with Gmail and spam classification, the reason Gmail’s anti-spam shits all over other spam classifiers is that Google added a simple “This is Spam” button to the web interface, effectively outsourcing the training of spam messages to its enormous user base. Similar techniques can be applied to Google Reader, but on an individualised basis.

Key to the success of such a classifier is social analysis, which is used by StumbleUpon and Last.fm recommends music I might like, based on what people with similar taste listen to.

OK, so this is pretty old news but I hadn’t really noticed until recently as they don’t show a link for all documents. But why is this so awesome? PDF is a rich format that offers many features not really relevant to web search. Most often searchers are just looking for some information, like MSY’s latest price on that Hot New Intel CPU.

But this only affects search results. But you can install a Greasemonkey script which opens all links to PDF, PPT and DOC files using the Google Docs Viewer. We’ve had online apps for a while, but I consider Google’s  step of opening up the GDocs Viewer to be THE official singularity, or “beginning of the end” for the humble desktop application. After this, there is no turning back. And I for one, want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Or as a friend of mine once said “Firefox + Internet = Operating System”.

That said, one feature that needs improvement is searching within documents. This is only enabled for some documents, presumably the one Google has had time to index the metadata or OCR. And search hits are only highlighted with no feature of iterating through them.

Today I received this email from Last.fm, whose personalised radio I’ve been enjoying FOR FREE since 2007.

Hi frostnova,

Your free trial to Last.fm Radio is about to end. If you’re enjoying it, why not
subscribe for only $3.00/month and continue listening to non-stop personalised
radio.

http://www.last.fm/subscribe

Best Regards,
The Last.fm Team

When I first joined, there was no mention of this “free trial” bollocks they’ve pulled completely out of thin air as if they are some kind of Ministry of Truth.

To be honest, I value Last.fm mostly for tracking my listening habits and haven’t used the streaming radio very much so I’m not ready to completely jump ship just yet.

What I’ve really been waiting for is for Apple to make “Genius Live” for iTunes, so you could listen to suggested tracks which aren’t in your library.

You can read about what other disgruntled users are saying, although I won’t be surprised if this thread gets censored.

http://userstyles.org/styles/20377

After some furious Googling, this Australian has successfully purchased content from the US iTunes store. And without a credit card!

The biggest hurdle was getting a US iTunes account (trivial, now I know how).

1. Open iTunes and go to the Store.
2. Sign out of your “real” account.
3. Find any free iPhone application and Buy it.
4. When asked to sign in, Create An Account (make sure you select  US as country). Tip: if you use Gmail,  use username+us@gmail.com as your email address.
5. Fill in your fake US address details as generated.
6. When asked for a payment method, choose None.

If you just wanted a free app not available in your country, you can stop here.

If you want to buy MP3′s not available in your country, you need some US iTunes credit.

1. Find a store that sells online iTunes gift cards, such as OffGamer. Note, you can expect  to pay a premium for the online service. Some have  reported success with eBay but OffGamer were quite speedy.
2. Pay with your PayPal account. If you don’t have one… uh, why not?
3. When you get the gift card code (online), simply redeem it in iTunes.
4. Purchase your content!

I still have US$12 left in my fake iTunes accounts, which I’m sure will come in handy later. It’s not going anywhere.

Oh, and your US iTunes account can also be used to download iPhone apps that aren’t yet released in Australia, such as the Last.fm app. I can’t believe I didn’t realise this sooner!