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In the article:
Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai
it is explained how twitter, blogs and social networks gave mixed results in during the Mumbai massacre.
I particular it is said:
As Twitter user “naomieve” wrote: “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.”
But then,
as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.
and finally:
As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.
Well, this could easily be avoided if we agree to just write the source of the information.
Just write (yourname) if you have seen something yourself.
(cnn) if you are repeating news from cnn, and so on.
Something that permits to track the spread of info to recover the original source could possibly be done directly at the twitter server level.
I think I found a bug in the E 90 comunicator.
I don’t really know where should I tell, and who should I ask for support, so please if this is not the correct place, just adress me to the correct place. In any case I will copy my post in my blog to be a warning for people looking to buy an E90, until it has been solved.
I will tell the whole story, even if this might be long, because I am not sure what exactly make the bug appear. As it doesn’t appear immediatly, every time you use the phone, but only some time…
I live in Europe, and the situation in europe is that each country has different telephone companies. Since for work I travel a lot, I have a number of sim cards. About 5. One for each country a work in, except for Ireland where I have two. All this will become important.
So, I bought the E90 in Christmas in Italy. And I started using it with my Italian TIm card. When a few days later I left Italy, by car through France, the Tim card stopped sending messages. Eventually I discovered that there was a
“call barring>International calls exept to home ctry.” activated.
For: messages.
The Tim card would be barred even when I would move it through other phones (Nokia 6630). It seemed a problem of the card.
Now I had this sim card from ages, and I never used Pin or Puk, so I had no password. I thought that it was my own mistake. I might have pressed something wrong. I accepted that when I went back to Italy I would get a new card, with a new pin and Puk. But I was wrong…
Some days later I was in Ireland, and I was using a Vodafone Ireland sim card in the phone. Eventually I used up all the credit of the card. I tried to send more messages, but of course it was not possible.
When the next day I recharged the card
THE SAME BARRING WAS IN THE VODAFONE CARD.
Now I have two cards, one from Vodafone Ireland, and one from Tim (Italy). Both barred against sending International messages.
But it gets better. This VOdafone card is absolutely new, and as such I have all the Pin, Pin2, Puk, and so on. So I tried to use them, and I found that while I had no way to add (or delete) any barring in the Tim card, I could do so in the Vodafone card.
The password was actually the Pin1 number. I moved that to the Pin2, to test it and it worked. (The same thing in the Tim card was not permitted).
So I then tried to take off the barring…
and it didn’t work. I tried with the Pin1, I tried with the Pin2.
I tried putting all the barrings and then taking them all off at the same time (there is a special command).
I tried to do all this from another phone.
Interestingly enough there are 5 different barrings that can be added to the
“call barring>International calls exept to home ctry.”
Of this “Messages” is only one. Still I can activate them all. But when I deactivate them all, the “Messages” one remains. I cannot (there is no way, no command) to fine grain activate only one or the other.
So the end position is that unless I find a way to undoe what has been done from the E90 to those SIM cards, it has effectively ruined 2 cards. I will have to re buy those cards, which is about 20 euro. Bad, but not terrible (athough I think Nokia should pay for that).
But what more warring is that now I have no desire to use the E90 anymore as a phone, since I can see how it would ruin one card after the other. If I cannot use it as a phone I now question its usability in general, for if I was looking to buy a palm top, I would surely chose another model. And sending sms messages is my primary way of comunication, since I am all the time abroad.
Now, I don’t know who to tell about all this.
If I go to the SIM shop (vodafone or tim), they will say that is a NOKIA problem, and they would be right.
If I go to the NOKIA shop they will say that I need to get the password from the Telephone people, and of course people who sell those phone in the Nokia shop just don’t know things at this level of details.
If I am looking for Forum from Nokia there is a lot of them, but somehow none seem to be the right one. None is a
“forum for users who found a bug in a Nokia new phone, and are looking to give information, get it fixed, or get back the money.”
Who should I speak to? Who should I ask for support, before I put all in a big box, and I send it back to Nokia with written broken.
I am just back from the airoport.
I bought some time ago a return ticket with Rayanair to Rome, going on the 4th August, and return on the 19th of August. Well, long story short I needed to change my going there ticket. I am no longer going with Ryanair to Rome, but to Athens, passing some time in Greece and coming back still with Ryanair on the 19th.
So I tried to move my first flight to another date. I know for sure I will go to Rome for Christmas, so moving it to the 21st of December seemed the best thing. You can’t actually do it online because the system would not accept a going ticket (21st of December) later than the return part of the ticket. I thought, fine, it sounds like something that really needs an operator.
And the operator just confirmed me the same thing. We can’t move a going part of a flight later. We can’t twist a flight around making what was the coming back the going, and adding a flight after while deleting the first.
Those things make me boil, it sounds like machines are in charge.
The crazy thing is that if I had bought the ticket as two separated flights I would have paid the same and had the possibility to change them. Crazy, eh! And ths limit is a total nonsense imposed by some wanker programmer, who imposes on other useless limitations.
So the first take away message is: when you buy a ticket alway buy each separate flight as a stand alone flight, and never buy two tickets as a return ticket. You never know when you might need to change the ticket.
As I was discussing the issue with my collegues, I was further told that when you buy a return ticket you still pay double taxes on each credit card transaction, so you are really paying the same. And then I was told other stories of how Ryanair handled everybody much worse. From mother who are required to submit the babies trolley as a “outsized” package. While in all other companies they can go with the trolley up to the plane and are then uploaded in a place where they can easily taken back. How then they have to walk with baby, handluggage and baby carseat to the plane (which in Dublin is about 1 km, sweet). And so on.
So generally the agreed wisdom from the office is:
never fly with Ryanair when you have a choise, and if you don’t have a choise wonder if your flight is really necessary.
I know I haven’t written anything in ages. And maybe it is a good thing. Part of it is due to the fact that this blog has become so serious, so high level, that I felt I did not have anything worth enough to write on it. On the side my other small blog, the one on which I presented pictures of my life has come to a stall too. This happened long time ago, when I left Italy, as connecting to the internet through the mobile in Germany was just too costly. For some time I kept on posting pictures on Flickr by hand. That stopped partially as I got annoyed to Yahoo behaviour who required me to pay for the service (while they also put ads on the side), and when I went for a visit in Buchenwald. The wight of those last pictures prevented me from adding anything.
So little by little I stopped recoding my use of life and my internet life. I did not stop having a life, I just stopped speaking about it.
Those days I am mostly on facebook. In my life I left Jena, submitted my thesis, and went to Dublin City University, to work with Barry McMullin’s group, in the Artificial Life Lab. It is a one year contract that is now 4 months through. And I am actively looking for what to do next.
Funny enough my father is blogging way more than me, those days. He blogs in Italian with a short summary in English. If you can read Italian it is quite interesting.
We seem to have made it.
The website is now hosted on different servers, at dreamhost.com.
Of course what could not be done was to resurrect the wiki, which now should instead be recreated from scratch. And, much worse, the mindmapping tool. The page from which it was possible to make a mind map of a delicious account. Right now I have unfortunately no time for much, as I am in the last months of my Ph.D., yet I hope to find at least the time to put back the program to make the mindmaps. So at least people will be able to make the mindmaps themselves. Apologise to all the spammers that sent me spam in the last 2 weeks. Knowing that all the latest comments were going to be lost anyway I avoided to mark them (about a thousand messages) as spam. Please don’t feel ignored, just sent your message again and I shall trash it asap.
I just came back from the vacations to discover that my website is now a mess.
All the delicious mindmap data have been deleted, and so did the MySQL data of the wiki.
I am not really sure how it could happen, but I am just not going to investigate.
I am, more pragmatically, moving my website to another host. It will take some days, and a lot of the data will in any case be lost.
Please if you came to my page looking for any of the previous services: the delicious mindmap, the wiki aggregator, have patience.
As soon as the transfer have been made, I shall post a new message.
So if this current message is the last one, you know that we are still using the old host.
Pietro
It is 2.30 am and I just woke up. I went to bed at 2.05 am.
I am not crazy. Not yet, not anymore, at least not more than usual. I am just trying a new sleeping technique. It is called polyphasic sleep. I actually wanted to become polyamorouse, but I got confused during the googling process, and now it is too late.
What follows is a brief intro to polyphasic sleep for the general bear audience. Continue reading Polyphasic Easter
It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.
Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.
Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.
- Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
- TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
- TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
- Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
- Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.
The natural use of the site
- For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
- A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
- Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
- Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.
There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!
Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.
- Public vs private tags:
Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
- Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
- I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.
TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.
So, here is the quest. You need to discover the password of your best friend. Although this might seem morally reprehensible you are moved by nobel and deep reasons. You need to check in his email and discover if he is having an affair with your wife. You can’t just confront him if you are not sure. Nor can you run the risk of confronting your wife before you are sure.
We will assume that you have access to your best mate computer. After all he trusts you, right. And with reasons, you would never do anything against him… normally. But this time it’s different. If he has been seducing your angel, he deserves the worse.
We will also assume that your best friend is really into security, and since firefox is a more secure system, he uses firefox. Daily. And as a final assumption we shall assume that since he keeps his mail on the web, and accesses it through the browser. Let’s assume it’s on Yahoo.
This is what you need to do:
- Get his computer, in a moment he is out for launch (with your lady, bastard!), and lock yourself for the work. You will need privacy for this. If you are confronted you can always say Continue reading Reading your mate passwords in Firefox
Some of you might remember my rant, once del.icio.us was bought. And some others, who where with me from before might remember the entries I wrote on tag clouds. Some time later I was contacted from an Italian developer, Fabio Vescarelli, who asked me some help in developing some algorithms to find the distance between users in a del.icio.us like program. We had an exchange of email first , and we met in chat some other time. He was building a del.icio.us clone, Smarking. But with some interesting differences. Continue reading Review: Smarking
I think it’s the time to present what have I been doing in the last days. A number of improvement have beed added to this web site. In short I have upgraded to wordpress 2.0. I also moved to the next version of wikka. Some of you might remember that I offered some money to whoever could write some code to get the tag plugin to generate an rss list. I didn’t, at the time, explained why. I will now.
Wordpress 2.0 gives the possibility to start categories on the fly. Just adding them, by listing them. Essentially this makes the category in wordpress work like tags (or keywords, for academics). But categories in wordpress also have an rss feed connected to them. Albeit with some bugs, like linking to the whole blog and not to the particular category. So I passed most of the first of January adding to the entries the relative tags as categories. So now I have no need of an rss feed for the tag page, as the tag page has been substituted with the category pages.
You also will rememer that I installed Wikka. The wiki engine. Now wikka is not only open source but also easy source. It is so simple that even I could hack the code. That is very simple! So I changed the code and inserted the possibility to have default pages. In short if before if you were to look for the url http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage and there is no page in the wiki called “someunexistingpage” the result would be that the wiki would ask you to edit the page, and you would be redirected to http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage/edit.
Now he would create on the fly the page someunexistingpage with the default content. And the default content I chose was the 4 rss feeds:
- the feed from my blog from the category: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my technorati from the tag: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my delicious bookmarks from the tag…
- and the feed from the popular pages in delicious, always from that tag
So for each tag I now have a wiki page with the most relevant rss appearing there. But being a wiki page I also can add other rss feeds, write definitions, comments, todo lists. In short modify it as I see fit.
Still it is not perfect. As it writes the page the first time, from that moment the page is set. I can delete it, but I cannot, for example, change the default content for all the pages that only contain the default content. I tried to write a plugin to do that, but I failed when I confronted the fact that I needed to write a plugin {{defaultpage}} who should have activated other plugins:{{rrs}}, for example. Something that I ignored how to do.
Also having the same string to work for delicious (as tag), wordpress (as category name) and wikka (as pagename) puts some heavy constraints on what the string might contain. For example I am already running ashore for all the tags that contain a dot inside (aaargh, del.icio.us!) or an accented letter (aargh, dear italian).
If you want to see how the pages look like just see the idea page. But any link from the right column (provided they have no dots inside or accents) will work fine.
I suddenly relised I don’t have the time to do all the things I was interested in (and keep what remains of my mental sanity). So out of need I decided to make the following offer.
The technorati tag plug in gives the possibility to have technorati tags, and for each tag a different page. What instead it does not offer is the possibility to have also an rss feed for each tag. So I offer 20 € for whoever makes the necessary changes to the plugin so that side by side to the tag page (here available at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/tag/… ) I can have an rss feed of the entries in my blog with each tag (possibly at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/rsstag/…).
The changes will have to be open source, so that they can then join the mainstream wp program. And be on that plugin. I know 20€ is not a lot, but I reason that for the right person this is a simple hack that might take half an hour. For me it would take ages (mainly because I need to understand how wp is working, and it’s not that trivial).
Oh, yes, I can pay via paypal. Or buy you something via Amazon, LJ, Flickr. Whatever.
And now to comment the above:
It’s interesting how the spreading of open source software also means the opening of a whole new market of people helping each other. I could never have made the above offer if I was using blogger, or lj.
Addendum: Since the new release of wordpress 2.0 includes the possibility to use categories as tags, the above offer is no longer valid. Sorry.
I have to say that I amvery impressed with Wikka. Wikka is a wiki software that I just installed on my web page. It is simple, yet full of plugins. Open source (or I would not consider it). It also permits to integrate freemind mind map inside it. More than this: for each page the administrator, (ehm, that is me!) can decide who is allowed to read, write and comment. I installed it about one week ago, and I avoided to make it public until I would found a way to deal with wiki spam. I already have too much spam on this blog. Finally I found what I think is the perfect solution:
- only registered user can comment and modify the wiki. It might not make it very fast, but at least I know who said what.
- I inserted a plugin such that to register people must write a password in the ‘registration code’. But the password is written on the same log in page.
- To write spam in the wiki they have to manually register. Which I feel is fair. I have no anger toward those that manually spam. Are the mechanical ones that ought to be stopped.
- If the spammers write something that automatically register, I will change the registration code.
- And if they write something that automatically grabs from the page the registration code I change the context (the phrase in which the code appears), making their software useless. I will move from:
- registration code:”pippo pluto” to
- registrati0n code:”pippo pluto”
As you cannot code for something that blocks all permutation of the word “Viagra”, so you cannot code for something that codes for all the permutation of the phrase: “Registration Code”. Ah! And this is the revenge of the mass!
I think the idea is so brilliant that I will look if I can find a similar plugin for wordpress.
The next think that impressed me in Wikka was the use of rss. It is actually very easy to integrate an rss in a page. Maybe it is the same in other wiki engines, I don’t know. But on wikka it is absolutely trivial. You just need to write {{rss url=”http://the.rss.net/address.rss” cachetime=”30″}} and the rss gets taken shown, and cached for 30 minutes. Now 30 minutes cache is what del.icio.us requires from you if you are going to connect an rss to your homepage. So now I have started to integrate all sort of rss from delicious to my web page. Check for example my Tag Cloud page. With the rss from my personal bookmarks tagged with tagcloud, rss from the popular page in delicious delicious/popular/tagcloud, and the rss from technorati (i.e. people who have blogged on Tag Clouds).
And all this is in the floating right bar. So I still can use the rest of the page as place for me to write content, and notes…
And as notes taker this wiki is slowly becoming. I started moving my Reading List to the wiki. And I added to the reading list, the rss of popular reading lists. You see, how it all comes together.
But this is not all! Wikka (and they should pay me after a post like this!) gives the possibility to set the privacy for each page. That is for each page you can chose who can read it, who can comment on it and who can change it. In this way I can use this not only as my personal notes but as the notes for project that I might be sharing with other people.
Come and say hello: http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it
I have been Handelsblatt-ed.
Yeeee! 
I don’t know much about virus and trojan, but please, all take precautions, because today as I installed Flock I got the following message from AntiVir guard:
C:\PROGRAM FILES\FLOCK\UNINST.EXE
Is the Trojan horse TR/Dldr.IstBar.LU
I hope it is nothing serious and I am really admiring the work of the Flock guys. So I suppose it will be fixed soon. In the meantime use maximum protection and update your antivirus if you want to use Flock.
ADDENDUM: I updated the antivirus file, then left it in the night to check for the whole system. It found no virus inside of any kind. In the morning I reinstalled flock after a couple of comments from people (in the comments section) who tested it with other antivirus files and found no trace of Trojan. So I would say that it was probably a false positive. I really hope so, since I am going try it myself. Sorry for the unnecessary allarmistic post.
Pietro
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