http://arnab.org/blog/happy-2010-dear-readers

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/30/10-words-you-need-to-stop-misspelling/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1372

Created by The Oatmeal

Growing Gums

Originally uploaded by Dalfry

She wants to chew on anything and everything.

http://arnab.org/blog/vaccum

From a craigslist post, Letter to my dead girlfriend, via reddit:

Last weekend I finally took the step of cleaning out your clothes from the closet, which is very barren now. I invited your friends over to take your what they liked, it was an awkward session. I think they took them more as a favor to me than anything else. Liz cried when we pulled out all of your shoes, Miranda joined in and then Catherine broke down. It was strange to stand in our bedroom surrounded by three crying girls. I made a joke about them crying for joy at the prospect of some free Manolo Balhniks which they didn’t seem to find very funny.

One day, many decades in the future, some enterprising literature grad student will compile and analyze the gems Craigslist has to offer.

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/29/8-things-every-geek-needs-to-do-before-2010/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1370

Written by Jolie O’Dell

It’s one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect handbag. But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, here are eight things every good nerd needs to to before the ball drops later this week.

These tasks comprise a quick to-do list that will leave you feeling competent and prepared for the decade that approaches.Also, you can play the condescension chip and start chiding friends who haven’t checked off these items yet.

1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships.

Facebook’s maelstrom-causing privacy changes have given quite a few of us a head-scratching good time trying to figure out just how much of our private lives are to be made public. Before the new year begins, take a look at your settings on sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal and any other places you might be sharing personal content to make sure what you display is consistent with the public image you want to project. As more recruiters and employers hit the Web in search of info on inpiduals, it’s becoming ever more important to monitor and control our own identities. If you look back to the origin dates of some of your accounts, you might be surprised at what you thought was appropriate to share online in 2005.

Also, while considering what’s private and public, take time to evaluate what a “friend,” “contact” or “follower” means to you and what types of information you share with different groups.

2. Change your passwords.

Safety first, friends. Social web security threats in 2009 were sweeping and surprised more than a few users with spam DMs, hacked accounts and malware of all kinds. Check out the password management tools recommended by a recently high-profile hacker (scroll to the last few paragraphs); for free or cheap, they’ll help you generate strong, random passwords and manage them from your computer.

3. Own your name.

I’ve conducted many a web search on many a professional geek this year, and I’ve been disappointed by how few of us have staked a meaningful claim to our online identities. If you haven’t already, buy a URL – preferably one that relates to the name you use professionally – and make friends with Google. If you don’t show up in the first results when you search for your name, get a crash course in SEO and ask friends to link to you. It’s good for your social life and your career if you seize the opportunity to tell the searching world about yourself rather than relegating that responsibility to LinkedIn, Facebook or some weirdo with the same name as you.

4. Prune your feeds.

When going through your RSS feeds, do you find yourself impatiently scrolling more than you’re intently skimming? Is your list of unread items becoming unmanagable? The end of the year is a perfect time to get rid of the content you’re not reading and group the stuff you are. Take some time this week to organize, delete and add feeds, thereby optimizing your feed-reading experience. Try tools such as NetNewsWire’s “dinosaurs” and “least attention” features that weed out unread or dormant feeds, and consider implementing tools such as Lazyfeed or Guzzle.it that can bring relevant results from fresh sources. And make sure the feeds you own are easy for others to find, too.

5. Find a better mobile.

If you don’t have a smartphone already, chances are you’ll desperately need one next year. And if you already have one, think long and hard about whether you’re happy with your service, network and interface.

While you might not be able to run out and buy your dream device before 2010 rolls around, visit a few retailers, read some reviews and have your eye on a good mobile to purchase next year. Mobile tech keeps on booming, and you’ll want to ensure a frustration-free year as new apps and OSes roll out.

6. Update copyright notices on your website.

Here’s a simple, obvious and necessary reminder. Does your website currently claim a copyright year of 2007? While it doesn’t put you on the foul side of the law, it does look a bit silly as we head into a new decade. The Next Web has a good bit of dynamic code for site owners.

7. Revisit your blog.

That poor, neglected old beast might be long overdue for a design facelift, a blogroll refresh or even just a few new posts. While you’re at it, why not set automatic reminders to periodically bug you about posting in the new year? On a more mission-critical note, you’ll also want to make sure you’re using the most updated version of your CMS; not doing so can can lead to problems from broken plugins to getting hacked. And while you’re at it, the year’s end might also be a good time to consider switching up your CMS service altogether.

8. Back up your data.

Hacks and hardware failures happen. Before 2010, make sure as much of your data as possible is protected. From calendars and contacts to blog posts and work projects, more and more of us are relying on networks of servers and startups to keep us running. So, now might be a good time to download and back up files of LinkedIn contacts and WordPress posts – anything that’s valuable to you and portable. Think of it this way: You – or at least parts of you – live in the Internet. If the Internet caught on fire, what would you grab to carry with you out of the blaze?

We hope this list helps you all get a few housekeeping items squared away in time for a great New Year’s Eve filled with peace of mind and a smug sense of superiority over your fellow nerds. If you can think of any must-do year-end tasks, please let us know in the comments!

Funny, those boxes for collecting donations are modeled on Sintex Water Tanks.. hilarious

How we now have plastic baskets as an alternative to the handmade ones

The sun was already bright and we started heading towards Galibore. We did stop for a lovely sighting of Short-toed Snake Eagle feeding on the something while in flight (Geopoints). The landscape on either side of the road was so beautiful. At Muttati, we stopped by the Cauvery river to look around for Small Pratincoles (Geopoints). We actually saw several of them on the rocks by the river bed. We also saw a Praying Mantis (Geopoints) while we were walking on the rocks towards the river bank. Then there were Pied Kingfishers doing what they were best at, Hovering :). We also saw Lesser Fish Eagles, Black Storks ( red beak and red legs) , Oriental Honey Buzzard ( Dark morph) etc (Geopoints). We didn’t have any luck with the Grizzled Squirrels. After spending some time there, we started heading towards the village where there have been sightings of European Bee-eaters. Blue-faced Malkoha sightings were endless. We also saw a black hooded oriole for a brief while. Just after the village in the wooded area, we got to see the Brown-capped Pygmy Woodpeckers (Geopoints). As we got down from the car, we saw a lot of these woodpeckers. We also to see the Spangled Drongo, White-bellied Drongo, Hoopoe, Blue-faced Malkohas, Asian Paradise Flycatcher, Common Iora, Yellow-billed Babblers and a few other birds. Not much happened on the way back except for Black Ibis somewhere on the way and a lovely sighting of the Non-breeding Pheasant-tailed Jacana (Geopoints) in the water body in Kanakapura town. We also saw a River Tern in the same lake.

Short-toedd Snake Eagle

Praying Mantis

Tawny Castor

Black-rumped Flameback

Lesser Fish Eagle

Little Pratincole

Black Stork

Brown-capped Pygmy Woodpecker

Indian Grey Hornbill

Indian Roller

Non-breeding Pheasant-tailed Jacana

• Thank you RT @markquam: @swatisani I love the tag line on your website! #
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  Originally published at Swati Sani. Please leave any comments there.

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/27/how-to-talk-your-way-out-of-a-speeding-ticket/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1365

Written by Geoff Williams

It’s the holidays, we’re coming off a brutal recession, and the last thing any of us needs is a speeding ticket. And yet someone reading this — I hope not the person writing this — is going to get a speeding ticket in the next week or so. According to the National Motorists Association, between 25 million and 50 million speeding tickets are issued every year. So with that in mind, and since plenty of people get pulled over on their way to and from work, we’re offering some suggestions for talking your way out of a ticket.

Will any of this work? Your guess is as good as ours. And, of course, you can drive 90 miles an hour on the freeway and try to find out, but we don’t recommend it. At any rate, here are our suggestions, cultivated from some experts and regular folks who have managed to talk their way out of a ticket. Consider it our gift to anyone caught speeding over the holidays or in the midst of a new year.

Don’t lie. Sure, it’s understandable that you’re going to want to punt and tell the officer that your wife is in labor at the hospital waiting for you, or you’re being chased by a gang of jewel thieves determined to rub you out. But aside from the fact that lying is wrong, and honesty is the best policy and all of that, police officers are kind of trained to spot, well, you know, crooks. If you lie, they’re either going to recognize that or simply find out (“Oh, wow, sorry to hear about your wife — let me make sure you get to the hospital on time”). Instead, do what may not come naturally at a time like this and tell the truth.

That’s the approach Devra Renner, a parenting blogger, gave back when she was in college, driving from Tucson to Lubbock and was pulled over in Salt Flat, Texas. The state trooper asked Renner what she was doing “speeding through the great state of Texas.” Renner admitted that she was in the middle of nowhere, had been driving for hours, got bored and wanted to see how fast her car could go.

Maybe the officer admired that honesty, because he looked at her and said, “Darlin’, you know you’re in a Volkswagen Rabbit, not on the Nascar circuit, right?”

She agreed, apologized and told him she would “hop more slowly” from now on. The state trooper asked her to watch her speed and gave her a warning.

Drive around with something really weird in your car. We’re not really recommending this as a strategy, but it’s such an unusual story, we figured we’d offer it up. Autumn O’Bryan, from Salem, New Hampshire, has a pretty unique business. She stages sex toy home parties for women, and a few years ago, as she was leaving one such party, the hostess came running out of the house, flagging O’Bryan down. O’Bryan had left behind one of those toys.

She thanked the hostess, threw it on her passenger seat and drove away, in somewhat of a hurry to meet some girlfriends. “I was speeding and got caught in a speed trap,” says O’Bryan, who vividly recalls the officer walking up to her car with a flashlight and asking for her license and registration. “He asked where I was coming from, and why I was in such a hurry.”

O’Bryan explained that she had just finished working, and that she was on the way out to meet the girls. That’s when he flashed his light on the sex toy, and the officer then stared at O’Bryan for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Be careful and have a good night,” and walked away, shaking his head. He never even took the license or registration.

Know when to keep your mouth shut. One police officer in Virginia emailed in (he didn’t want his name used) and made the observation that “if you get the ticket, you don’t get the lecture. If you start getting the lecture, it usually means no ticket.” That would suggest that if you’re getting a lecture, it would be smart to not be defensive. Try nodding, saying, “you’re right,” and in general, being polite. Being polite to an officer of the law is a good idea in any situation, but seriously, this is not the moment to get argumentative.

COMING SOON: How to minimize the damage if you are going to get a ticket, in “How to Talk Your Way Out of a Speeding Ticket, Part II”

Geoff Williams is a frequent contributor to Aol Small Business. He is also the author of C.C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race and co-author of the new book Living Well with Bad Credit. Williams has been pulled over for speeding four times and has never been able to talk his way out of a ticket. His last ticket — knock on wood — was on January 1, 1999.

(Getty Images)

• Yeh Kahan aagye hum yu hi…. #futility #
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  Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/26/8-gifts-guaranteed-to-collect-dust-after-christmas-day/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1361

Written by Jason

We all give or receive Christmas gifts, year after year, that will ultimately be used one or two times before getting boxed up and banished to the attic to collect dust for eternity. Many of these items flood Ebay after every Christmas, or show up at a garage sale in the spring so they can collect dust at someone else’s house. Some people will even try to exchange them, even though they’re now not only USED pieces of crap, but there’s technically nothing wrong with them to begin with. It’s not that we don’t like these gifts or the thoughtfulness behind them — quite the opposite in in fact — we’re excited about these presents. Unfortunately that excitement wears off the moment they start becoming a pain in the ass to use or clean. This usually happens before we ring in the new year.

Breadmaker

Banana bread is awesome for a couple days. Beyond that, this thing is just going to take up counter space in the kitchen. You’re not going to bake your own bread every day, no matter how easy it might be with an automatic breadmaker. Don’t kid yourself.

Disc Washer/ Scratch Repair Thing

Do these even work? And can’t you just wash a disc with dish soap or rub it with a little Brasso or toothpaste to fix it anyway?

Fondue Set

Oh yay, fondue. We love chocolate fountains and melted cheese. Have you ever tried to clean one of these things? Even Goodwill is going to give you dirty looks if you try to donate this thing. Box it up immediately.

Any Board Game

After all the Christmas get-togethers are over, who’s going to have the time to sit around and play these games? It’s also almost a guarantee that some of the many game pieces will be immediately lost. It’s back to the normal grind on January 2 and what’s left of the board games will be shuttled up to the attic with the holiday decorations.

Miscellaneous Organizers

We usually get these from well meaning relatives who want us to get our shit together. It’s not happening. It didn’t last year, or the year before and it’s not likely to at any point in the future unless they also want to hire you a maid to clean and put the organizer to use — and to reorganize for you after you clutter things up again.

Keyboard Vac

Okay, these things are ridiculous pieces of shit, but nobody really knows that until after they buy them. A really clean keyboard is nice, but these things have less sucking power than your best friend’s sister, and it’s easier to just flip your keyboard or laptop over and beat the back of it than to try to get a keyboard vac to extract even the tiniest particle from it. Take our word for it. These don’t usually get the chance to collect dust though, at least mine didn’t. It went straight into the garbage.

Foot Spa

I have several in my attic, and a couple more are in my mom’s attic. It’s not exactly fun lugging water into the living room to put into one of these things — not to mention lugging the thing full of feetwater to the bathroom to dump it when you’re done. Additionally, the noises made by your foot spa are usually about as relaxing as listening to your roommate’s stomach problems after a long night of partying.

Chair Massager

These are loud and annoying unless you spend $300 on one, and even then it’s pretty iffy. Massages may feel great, but when you’re being kneaded by a robotic chair mat, don’t count on it hitting just the right spots like an actual person might. Instead, just go see the girls over at Madam Camae’s Filipino Palace.

http://ma.tt/2009/12/fireside-chat/

http://ma.tt/?p=33534

In New York last month I did a fireside chat with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts which is now available online. The video features myself, Liz Danzico, and the back of Jason Santa Maria’s head.

http://ma.tt/2009/12/veggies-are-people-too/

http://ma.tt/?p=33532

Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too in NY Times. I eat lots of beef and BBQ because I heard cows have a big carbon impact.

http://arnab.org/blog/rip-asheem-chakravarty

Indian Ocean’s percussionist and singer, Asheem Chakravarty passed away yesterday after a heart attack. This is truly sad news; Indian Ocean is one of my favorite bands and I have been to many of their concerts. Losing a member of a band as tight-knit and flawless as Indian Ocean is quite a big blow. My heart goes out to Asheem’s family and friends, Sushmit, Rahul, and Amit.

Asheem’s percussion was the backbone of the band, and if you listen carefully you’ll notice that it only stops for one thing — his vocal solos (This is why having 2 percussionists in a band is awesome). My most distinctive memory of Asheem is his solo singing of a sloka that opens a song from the Kandisa album, Khajuraho:
Brahmanandam parama sukhadam kevalam jnanamurtim dvandvaateetam gagana sadrusam tatvamasyadi lakshyam ekam nityam vimala machalam sarvadheesaakshibuutam bhaavaateetam triguna rahitam sadgurum tam namaami.

(Rough translation from here — “I salute to that true teacher who is the source of eternal bliss, supreme happiness, who has true wisdom who is beyond the dualities, who is infinite, whose attention is always on the divine, who is unique, eternal, pure, steady, and who sees with the eyes of wisdom who is beyond thoughts and beyond three faculties.”)

I am thankful for the wonderful rendition of slokas that are thousands of years old into your songs and making this accessible to our “pop-rock” generation. You may not be with us any more, but your voice and your tabla will echo in the universe forever. Rest in peace.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/chaddickersonmain/~3/fPLmbi3m51U/chadd

http://del.icio.us/chadd#2009-12-25

• Installing Sprint’s Sierra Wireless Compass 597 Aircard on OS X Leopard - Belafonte Code
  My out-of-the-box install didn't work, so I found this and it did

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/25/20-things-that-happen-in-1-minute/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1359

http://ma.tt/2009/12/christmas-site-updates/

http://ma.tt/?p=33530

First off, Merry Christmas everybody! I’ve been doing some tweaking here around ma.tt. The biggest thing you’ll notice is that I’ve imported about 12,000 photos from my old Gallery-powered gallery, which was broken since I upgraded to PHP5, into core WordPress, and you can see them under this category. I even managed to bring over people tags and comments from the proprietary system I had written. I feel so much safer now that all this data is in WordPress, I know it’ll still work in 10 years. I might have to change how “random” works, though, to exclude the really old photos, because they can be fairly embarrassing.

I am sure the guy who pirated is really innocent :P

http://arnab.org/blog/my-year-cities-2009

To continue the tradition of two years (2007, and 2008), here is a list of cities I have been in 2009. It seems quieter than the last few, but I realized some of them were multiple trips and extended stays. I hope 2010 is a longer list!

• San Francisco, CA
• Bay Area, CA (Sunnyvale, Mountain View, etc)
• Assilomar, CA
• New York, NY
• Providence, RI
• Paris, France
• Lyon, France
• Boston, MA
• Detroit, MI

• Ann Arbor, MI

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/24/an-honest-look-at-christmas-over-time/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1356

As Christmas comes closer we can’t help but take a sentimental look at how much we’ve changed when it comes to this holiday.  Don’t get us wrong, Christmas is still cool, but it’s more like a “Free Meal” type of cool. If you’re celebrating Hanukkah or Kwanzaa this will apply to you as well. Simply note how much more you spend on gifts as you get older, while observing how the gifts you receive start to suck more.

Source

Bonus: Last Minute Christmas Gifts That Will Get You Laid

Source

Merry Christmas!

http://feeds.zawodny.com/~r/jzawodn/rss2/~3/9j50VVNKxWE/011502.html

A week ago I decided to finally get serious about putting gearman to use for search indexing. I had been batting the idea around in my head for a long time (too long, really) but figured I should just write the code and see what happens. It took less than a day to get a prototype working in our development environment, but the end result made me very happy.

Today, in our production deployment, when a sphinx cluster pulls new content to index, the master does all the work. It fetches the new and changed postings, massages them into the XML format that sphinx expects (and makes a lot of small changes along the way), invokes the indexer, and makes the new indexes available for the slaves. The second step is usually the most CPU intensive. Processing the raw data into XML involves a lot of other tweaks and changes that are very specific to Criagslist.

What I did was turn that into a gearman client/worker pair. The client (or master) simply submits processing tasks and then waits for each of them to complete. The workers fetch the data from the master, transform it, and make the transformed data available. When each task completes, the master grabs the transformed data an informs the worker that it can delete the file.

So instead of being stuck at using only the 4 CPU cores on a single box, I can run 4 workers on each of 3 machines and get 12 CPU cores involved. The end result is that I have a solid foundation for a system that can easily scale to many machines. AH-HA! Linear scaling rocks! So does relatively seamless distributed computing.

As time allows I'll have to work on deploying this in production.

(comments)

It hurts me when I read such news. An influential rapist who had raped a 14yr Old girl which also led to her suicide is being sentenced only for 6 months and ordered to pay a fine of 1,000 rupees. Don’t know what the hell is going on here. I am shocked.

The woodpecker and the squirrel

It happened on a cloudy September day, an amusing encounter

Continue reading, there are 13 more photos

Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

Out for Soup

Originally uploaded by Dalfry

Out for a hot bowl of soup at panera bread on this chilly evening.

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/23/9-sex-myths-you-shouldnt-believe/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1354

Written by mademan

Find out what you’ve had wrong all along!

We told you about foods you should eat to have better sex . We told you about the fitness you’ll need to handle that sex . But once you’re between the sheets, there are some myths floating around in there that are in desperate need of busting. Here are 9 Sex Myths You Shouldn’t Believe

1. Size matters

Your penis is of an average-to-small size? Doesn’t really matter, man. Only the lower third of her vagina has hyper-pleasure nerves, that elusive ‘G Spot’ is often only an inch or two inside AND the clitoris, the oft forgotten button o’ pleasure, is on the outside of her vagina. Don’t worry, you’re working with plenty.

2. Size doesn’t matter

But that doesn’t mean that guys with larger penises don’t have it easier. It’s sort of like trying to mow your lawn with a tractor — you can cover a lot more ground with a lot less effort. But it takes a lot of fuel to power a tractor, and the same goes for monstrously large penises. Size isn’t a hurdle for having great sex, but it’s definitely a factor, especially mentally. An anonymous female reader told us, “It probably doesn’t matter outside my own head, but I like to see a big manly man that’s also well equipped.  Seeing that

3. Missionary is boring

The vast minority of porn scenes feature the so-called Missionary Position. You’ve got lots of Doggy Style, plenty of Reverse Cow Girl and lots and lots of oral. That’s because Missionary Position is boring, right? Nope… It’s because Missionary is the hardest position to film. There’s a reason the Missionary Position is the standard move for most couples, though… It’s the easiest position to sustain over several minutes (or, uh, hours, if you’re a freak) and sustained pleasure is key for mutual stimulation.

4. Women love the top

It seems like it’d be true — a girl is able to truly let loose and get wild when the roles are reversed and she’s dominating her man from on top. The reality is that the optimal positions for a woman to reach a vaginal orgasm are laying on her back or laying on her stomach. So if you don’t enjoy her on top either, cut that position out of your routine.

5. It’s your fault if she doesn’t climax

About 30% of women say they can have an orgasm vaginally. Throw in the wiliness and diversity of the clitoris and the psychological condition Frigidity and it becomes apparent that it’s a miracle that any women have orgasms. It’s not your fault she doesn’t climax and both you and your partner should know that… It’ll take the pressure off and change the dynamic of sex from a challenge to a journey of mutual exploration.

6. You give really good oral

We’ve heard just about every guy ever claim he was great at giving head. “Dude, I’m just really, really good! Trust me.” Getting a girl to have a clitoral orgasm from oral sex is even less challenging than getting a guy to orgasm from oral sex. Being great at oral sex is like being the Ski Ball world champion… No one cares, dog.

7. The male g-spot

This myth is probably true — there’s plenty of anecdotal and scientific evidence to back it up. But a guy doesn’t need a stray finger up his butt to have an orgasm. And with sex complicated enough as is without her mythical quest up your ass.

8. She knows what she wants

A big, nay HUGE hurdle for having great sex is a lack of communication. But that doesn’t mean what she says she wants is really what she wants. Women know their bodies only slightly more than you do… They know what feels good when they feel it but they’re clueless about how to get there (and for once, they’re too scared to ask for directions). So take the lead a bit and keep trying different things. If you’ve got confidence in your skills, you’ll get there.

9. Women are secretly porn stars

They’re not. Cum burns their eyes and tastes horrible. Do not copy the last scene of your favorite porn if you want the girl to be able to look you in the eye afterwards. Pun INTENDED.

http://ma.tt/2009/12/everything-is-a-project/

http://ma.tt/?p=16182

Everything is a project, even this, by Scott Berkun.

http://sigfood.org/node/595

Bangali Mashi's Kitchen (BMK) serves authentic Unlimited* Bengali
Thali in Kansha (Bronze/Bell Metal) utensils in the ghar ka khana
style in an amicable ambiance. A-la-carte menu is also available.
Evening snacks include Moglai Paratha, Rolls, Chops and Devil. Dum
Biryani is also served. We undertake catering orders for small groups
for griha pravesh, annaprashan, etc. Can also provide spotlessly clean
and hygenic pre-packed lunches for corporates. For more details and Menu
Please visit: http://www.bmk.co.in Thanks.

http://ma.tt/2009/12/permanently-deleted/

http://ma.tt/?p=16180

“The WordPress people, as good as they are, don’t seem to ken why this ‘convenient’ and possibly life-saving feature creates repercussions and consequences. Like the Senate, it’s all a game to them.” Permanently Deleted : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits. Hat tip: Joe Clark.

http://drupal.org/node/659772

GreatBrewers.com, a Drupal 6 site, powers BeerCloud, a mobile app available in the Android Market and iTunes App Store that helps you pair beer with food, track down your favorite beers in your neighborhood, and pull up a full description of any beer with a scan of its barcode. Whether you're a beer consumer who could use some guidance in making a well-educated purchase, a food lover who wants to discover new ways to enhance a meal with a suitable beer pairing, or a traveling beer enthusiast who wants to instantly map the closest stores, bars, and restaurants carrying one of your favorite beers, BeerCloud is the quintessential mobile beer app.

Great Brewers is powered by America’s leading network of beer passionate wholesalers that collectively represent the interests of the world’s best brewers by promoting education and awareness through shared resources. The mission of Great Brewers is to bridge the gap between the world’s great brewers and the consumers who enjoy their products, with a paramount focus on education and on enhancing beer distribution practices through the sharing of information.

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http://feeds.zawodny.com/~r/jzawodn/rss2/~3/fRsH3rEASxE/011498.html

Marshall Kirkpatrick is reporting that Yahoo! will shut down MyBlogLog next year. Well, color me unsurprised. The service has languished for years. I removed it from my site a long time ago. It made me a little sad to do so, but it was just slowing things down and not really "adding value" as they like to say.

It's sad because I was involved in the MyBlogLog acquisition at Yahoo! and believed in what they were doing. I worked to help get the team on board, nag the right people to make sure they got reasonable hardware on which they could grow, interviewed their first post-Yahoo engineer, and made the trek up to the Berkeley office a few times a week to help them transition into Yahoo and work on plans.

I genuinely had high hopes for what MyBlogLog could do both inside and outside of Yahoo. But as I wrote in Watching Yahoo's Transformation:

MyBlogLog</a> has all but died on the vine, right? Is there anyone left of the original team of 5 or 6 engineers still working on it? No, I think it fell victim to Yahoo's larger social strategy. FAIL.

On the one hand, it's sad that our collective time was wasted, but the members of the MyBlogLog team have all gone on to bigger and better things outside of Yahoo. And I suspect everyone involved learned some important lessons along the way.

(comments)

http://blog.s9y.org/archives/215-Serendipity-1.5.1-with-SQLite.html

http://blog.s9y.org/archives/215-guid.html

Some SQLite upgrades from Serendipity prior to 1.5 to the current version might create a problem, that the database update cannot properly update the serendipity_authors database table structure to insert the new "hashtype" (int) column. Due to that column missing, this can lead to the inability to log in.

Sadly SQLite does not easily allow to ALTER a table structure, so unless you have a SQLite admin tool to manually that column, and until the Serendipity Team can provide a proper fix, you should not yet update. Due to Christmas 2009.1 getting released soon, this might takes us a few more extra days.

If you have NOT yet uploaded the new serendipity release and executed the update, you can simply copy the file sql/db_update_1.5-alpha1_1.5-alpha2_sqlite.sql onto your installation, which fixes the upgrade procedure.

Side information: Hashtype defines whether md5 (value '0') or salted sha1 (value '1') is used for the stored encrypted password of the serendipity_authors table. Once you login with a hashtype=0, serendipity will automatically convert your password to sha1, and adjust the hashtype column. This is why once we fix this issue in 1.5.2, we must make sure that no manuall updates you might have used are overwritten, that could lead to Serendipity no longer knowing which hashtype was used for your column. That requires some thoughtful thinking, and a bit more time instead of a hotfix that might make the situation worse.

Note that this ONLY applies to users UPGRADING and using SQLite. A fresh installation as well as using other Database types is not affected.

Naughty Baby

Originally uploaded by Dalfry

Only if one could hear the yelling with that cute face she makes.

We then moved ahead after getting all excited with the first birding stop. The Kanakapura road is lovely. Green fields with tree lined roads makes it more beautiful. I always enjoy going on that road. Just past one of the villages, we saw another Blue-faced Malkoha hopping around at the top of tree. We also saw a Golden-fronted Leafbird. This was all from the car but when we got down, we only saw a Black-rumped Flameback pecking happily which them flew to a coconut far closeby. Now we could see a lone leafbird hopping around. Madhavi was suprised that there was only one of them and that we usually them in flocks. After clicking them happily for a while, it flew off too. But now again on the other side we saw a few more leafbirds. A pair of Leafbirds were doing a mating display in the air and it was pretty interesting to watch them. But nothing much happening other than the display while we were around. Our next stop was yet another water body where we saw Grey heron, Painter Storks, Little Grebes, Brahminy Starlings, Weaver birds and a lot of Red-rumped Swallows on the wires. Closeby to this water body, we stopped to walking around a semi-wooded area. We had already seen Blue-faced Malkohas, Common Iora while were parking the car. There was nothing much in the wooded area but we did see Golden Oriole, Blyth’s Reed Warbler (no forehead), Thick-billed Leaf Warblers and a lot of butterflies ( Orange-tipped and Red-tipped ). My wish to see a White-rumped Shama didn’t come true. While we were getting back, we again saw a Shikra flying towards us and very close to us. It was scary until it took a deviation. A Rufous Treepie was trying hunt a lizard on a dry tree and it was interesting to watch it do that.

Location: map

Golden-fronted Leafbird

Common Iora with a catch

Common Iora - time to eat

Grey Heron

Greater Cormorant

Little Grebe

Crimson Tip

Brahminy Starling

Rufous Treepie - Looking for the lizard

Had a wonderful day birding all the way upto Galibore on Sunday, the 20th of December. I am really scared of waking up late and making others wait. So this time keeping 3 alarms within a span of 20 mins helped. Since I was supposed to leave home at 5am, I kept an alarm for 4.00am, 4.10am and 4.20am. It worked. Having reached the meeting point early, I was able to grab 2 cups of Tea and half of a bun ( a dog snatched the other half of the bun!). We finally left Bangalore by about 6am and it was still dark and chilly. The birding started when the light had set in. We began scanning the water bodies all along the Kanakapura road looking for waders until we found a small water body which had a Green Sandpiper. There were a couple of Small Green Bee-eaters, Black Drongos and a few other birds. The Grey Francolins were playing on the road. Suddenly, some Raptor flew across and perched far off on a tree. The unknown raptor which we assume to be some sort of a Buzzard ( maybe Common Buzzard ). All we could notice was it square tail. Now this had set the birding excitement. So we decided to explore the nearby fields which had Greenish Leaf Warblers hopping around, a few Silverbills, Larks and Drongos. I walked along the field looking for something. There were Rose-ringed Parakeets flying around calling out to each other. These open fields had trees here and there. In one of trees, we could see a Sirkeer Malkoha. Even having seen it a couple of weeks back on the same route, I was still excited about sighting them. They are pretty common here. It went up and sat over a branch and then flew and went and set on a rock until we decided to ‘unfollow’ it . The unknown raptor was nowhere to be seen now. So we decided to head back. The Sandpiper was back there again. We saw Black-naped Oriole, Blue-faced Malkoha too. Now we were all set to move ahead while a huge Montagu’s Harrier just came flying towards us. It took us a while to figure out which bird it was. It was flying away from us by the time we had got down from out car to have a good look at it. After a while, we saw it being chased by a crow and it was nowhere near us now.

Location: map

Green Sandpiper

Sirkeer Malkoha

Sirkeer Malkoha

Blyth’s Reed Warbler

A quick hop

Montagu’s Harrier

Ultimate chase - Harrier being mobbed by a crow

To be continued ..

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/22/why-i-pretend-i-dont-know-anything-about-computers/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1352

Created by The Oatmeal

Bonus: You Brightened My Day!

http://arnab.org/blog/how-i-improved-my-productivity-order-magnitude

Recent additions to my /etc/hosts file:


#arnab addiction -- cold turkey time
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 api.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com
127.0.0.1 www.techcrunch.com
127.0.0.1 www.engadget.com
127.0.0.1 engadget.com
127.0.0.1 reddit.com
127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com
127.0.0.1 digg.com
127.0.0.1 www.digg.com
127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 www.slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 hulu.com
127.0.0.1 www.hulu.com


http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EntrepreneursJourney/~3/YZVq3iJih9U/

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/?p=2068

If you plotted the growth of my business the chart would look like a steadily increasing line, punctuated by a handful of spikes a couple of times a year.

The first big spike in growth occurred in 2007, which was the first launch I ever did of the Blog Mastermind coaching program. Every aspect of my business grew during that two week period. My email list tripled in size and my income increased by almost the same margin.

Going forward, each new spike came thanks to some kind of launch. Whether it was a new product, closing access to a product or reopening of a closed product, each time I did some kind of launch campaign, the growth numbers shot through the roof.

This is obviously an endorsement of the launch process, and we all owe Jeff Walker a debt of thanks for bringing this style of marketing to our industry, however it’s worth taking a closer look at why the launch works.

The 80/20 Rule Of Product Launches

The launch process is a complex and subtle beast, which on the surface appears relatively simple. You release some great free stuff, have your affiliates promote it like crazy, open the doors to your offer with some kind of limitation, sell heaps, make a ton of money, and bamb!… done.

Once you do a few launches you start to see how intricate the variables are, and how important the psychology behind the process is. Everything needs to connect, to be coherent, to reinforce the same message, create excitement and flow together.

As daunting as that might sound, the process is actually quite forgiving, as long as you get a few variables right. You can “stuff up” many aspects of the launch process and still succeed. You can forget to do things, use lazy copy in your emails, and even leave parts out altogether, as long as you have the most important variables.

So, what are the 20% or less of components that go into a launch that count for the 80% or more of results? Here’s how I see it…

• Your lead resource(s), or “money magnets” as Frank Kern calls them – whatever you give away for free that sets the tone and the main focus of your launch, and demonstrates your value. This part is absolutely critical if you want your message to spread since it is key to the viral aspect of your marketing. The more valuable your resource, the more people will share it and talk about it. Your affiliates also need your lead resource to promote your launch so they can give their people something valuable and not just force a direct sales pitch.
• A means of distribution is critical, which should be obvious since you can’t sell something when you don’t have an audience to sell it to. For most people distribution is a combination of your existing audience on your email list, who read your blog and subscribes to your RSS feed, your Facebook and Twitter followers, and any other people you can directly contact who are actively listening to your messages and are targeted to your offer.

That’s really all there is to it.

If you have a great free report, a great product, an email list of targeted prospects, and/or top affiliates ready to promote for you, everything else is simply the grease that keeps the machine running. Yes you need relationships with your prospects, but often you can build this during the launch – in fact your lead resource can be all you need to build the trust and authority required to make people feel safe buying from you.

Your copywriting, particularly in emails, is important, as is how you sell your final pitch (sales page or sales video), however you can screw up this part and still have a killer launch, if you just have something of value to give to people and a means to distribute that value.

Where People Go Wrong

Based on work with my members, the greatest challenge to having a successful product launch seems to come from the following areas -

• A lack of distribution. This is by far the biggest problem because most people don’t realize how many subscribers or the type of subscribers they need to succeed. That’s completely to be expected of course, you can’t know the answer to how much distribution you really need until you launch.

  I addressed this problem and offered some basic metrics to use as guidelines in this article, which is well worth a read if you’re getting close to launching your first product –

  When Is The Right Time To Launch Your Product?

• A mis-aligned offer. This is another challenging issue because you don’t really know for sure you have the right offer until you sell what you have to sell. Worse still, you might have a fantastic product, a great lead resource and then use just one or two phrases that aren’t what your audience wants to hear, and boom, launch failure.

  Understanding your audience and explicitly knowing what their core motivations are is absolutely critical. To help you become clearer about how well you need to know your audience, read this article –

  How Well Do You Know Your Customer?

Most people get hung up with what is in their product or how to deliver their product or how much to charge for it. All these things are important, but without an offer people actually want and a way to get in front of those people, all other variables are a moot point.

How To Generate Massive Growth

There are many ways to grow something online, and as successful bloggers do oh-so-well, the slow but sure path can take you to amazing places, given enough time and effort.

I’m all for that, however it’s nice to experience rapid growth spikes too, which is something successful Internet marketers really understand well.

As I discussed in – Who Makes More Money – Authors, Bloggers or Internet Marketers? – finding a synergistic approach that combines the advantages of blogging, with the leverage points of traditional Internet marketing, is a great formula. This is what I strive for.

Now, let’s answer that burning question – what is the key to rapid growth? The answer in my case lies within the launch process.

The “easy” part of doing a launch is all the variables you can control. I say it’s “easy” because it really isn’t – it’s hard work – however because you control it, you know you can get a result simply by just getting things done. I’m talking about the components of what is in your product, what you write in the emails you send out, what goes into your lead resource, what you write on your blog to market it, etc. These things take work, but they are a function of you and only you.

It’s clear how important distribution is. The launch process, when done completely, includes a vital variable – your affiliates. Your affiliates are the key to experience rapid growth, because it is your affiliates who give you access to new sources of distribution. Affiliates also happen to be the variable you have the least control over.

If you work hard, you can confidently execute all the variables under your control. You might even have a fat list or huge blog readership already established to market to, but if you’re just selling to the same people it can be difficult to grow your business quickly (you can certainly improve your average customer value though). That’s okay of course, you can make great money selling to your existing prospects and customers, and there are ways to grow profits quickly using your existing audience, but if you don’t have much of an existing audience, affiliates you get there much quicker.

If you’re just starting out affiliates can be the super-boost you need to grow your business rapidly. Even just one or two successful launches is enough to establish six or even seven figure businesses. What’s even better, once you’ve done some launches and built up your list, your reliance on affiliates decreases. You can run your business relying more on the variables you can control (your own list) and less on what you can’t (your affiliates).

How You Can Tap Into Affiliates As A Source Of Leverage

Let’s start with some basic techniques first. Here are some practical ways to find affiliates…

1. Write a blog post and email to your newsletter inviting people to join your affiliate program
2. Contact other bloggers and internet marketers in your niche and ask them to promote your product
3. Search forums for quality people who sound like they have a successful business and ask them to promote
4. Tap into networks like Clickbank, Commission Junction, PayDotCom, etc to either find affiliates or act as brokers to find affiliates for you
5. Ask your existing affiliates to introduce you to potential new affiliates

I could go on and on with little tips like these. These techniques work, but what I see over and over again is advice like this and people not getting results.

I think part of the reason why is the hard work that is required to use these techniques. There can be a lot of manual labor involved, sending lots of emails, spending time in forums, and so on. However I think the real problem is an attitude that has come about because people believe in order to get the big affiliates to promote for you, you need to be a “big player” yourself. A catch-22 situation.

If you’re new to an industry and you email someone of significance in your market asking for a potential joint venture, chances are they won’t reply or will say no to promoting your product. If that happens often enough, you get jaded.

Let me state a fact, a hard truth that everyone has to accept when it comes to affiliates and joint ventures. If you want someone to promote your product you need to be deserving of that reward.

You need to ask yourself – why would this person want to promote your product in the first place?

Try and get in their shoes. You might offer hefty commissions, promise great conversion rates, offer prizes, incentives – but if you’re talking to the big players they don’t need these things. They’re already successful, they don’t use money or material items as their currency anymore, and they have their own stuff to promote, their own content to publish, and established agreements already in place to promote other products. You’re just an annoying distraction stopping them from getting what they want to get done, done.

Ok, it’s not quite that bad. I have some advice for you coming up next if you want the support of the “big player” affiliates, but as an introduction I really recommend you read this first – How Not To Approach A Potential Joint Venture Partner

How To Join The Inner Circle Of Top Affiliates

As I was growing up as a blogger and eventually released my own products I didn’t think twice about whether I could or could not convince people to promote for me.

I wasn’t oblivious to the effectiveness of affiliates, I simply knew that when it was time, the right relationships would be there. I was confident because I had already, and was continuing to demonstrate why a person would want to work with me.

This is like the difference between cold calling to get customers versus them coming to you already wanting to work with you because of your established reputation.

And there’s the answer… Did you miss it?

To gain access to top affiliates you need to do something to deserve it. Yes relationships are critical, but relationships at the top level often start first based on reputation.

Even if a potential partner has never heard of you before, having some form of demonstrable proof that you’re the real deal and not just looking to make a buck off of their list – in other words, it is worth knowing you beyond just the potential to profit from sales of your product – is the real secret.

So how can you obtain a reputation that opens doors to relationships to the best people in your industry? Here’s some ideas that have worked for me and many other people.

• Start a blog and grow it into something special. Just having a blog with a nice design, some good content and a small following is not enough. You need to be a trailblazer, a thought leader, a maven – someone with meaning and attention in the minds of a significant proportion of people.
• Capture a following and prove that you can move people to action. I know plenty of bloggers who appear on the surface to be significant players, speaking at events, maybe even publishing books and showing nice email subscriber, RSS and Twitter numbers, yet when push comes to shove – when it was time to deliver and demonstrate a result – they had very little power to actually move their audience to action. It’s great to have people who pay attention to your stuff, but if a significant proportion of them don’t respond to calls to action, then you can’t make an impression that counts.
• Publish a book or report and make it a hit. Writing a book today is easier than ever before and thus the mantle of “published author”, while definitely a credibility boost, is not as big a deal as it once was. Creating a free report is even easier. However, if your publication becomes a hit, if it dominates the conversation in your market for a period of time, or redefines how people look at an issue, or is referred to as fundamental study, then you’ve gained a reputation that can last a lifetime.
• Use the top-down method to become credible by association. What I mean by this is enter a market with completely new ideas based on your previous experience, then offer to teach your ideas to some of the heavy hitters in your industry. You don’t have to go straight to the mass market with your best stuff, just take a small group on, refine what you know and really blow them away, and then when it comes time to go mainstream your initial group of students will be more than happy to promote you and recommend you to other top affiliates. Presenting at an event and selling private coaching is a good method to attempt this technique, but bear in mind you do have to be the real deal – you better know something of ground breaking value.
• Leverage your past success stories. Can you imagine if the guy who started eBay, or Flikr, or Twitter, or any number of significant web presences came to you with a JV offer – you’d listen, because their previous success demands your attention. If you’ve had a past life where you have achieved something, use it as a leverage point to open doors.
• Locate your peers who show promise and start working with them before they become famous. This is a technique I benefited from tremendously with my own launch because I “grew up” as a blogger during the same time my fellow bloggers Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, John Chow, Jeremy Schoemaker and Daniel Scocco did. During the years that our market matured, our blogs matured and our relationships with each other matured. Even if we don’t communicate often, we all know each other, respect each others work and have a direct line of contact, so if we need to propose something we know it will at least be considered. This technique can be tricky and works best in emerging markets, but don’t let that stop you – even if you find one good person today, they might be your top affiliate next year as their reach expands.
• Be a good affiliate yourself. This solution is probably the hardest, since if you can make a lot of affiliate sales for someone else, you’re likely established already, however it is worth mentioning as you might find yourself knowing some solid techniques to make affiliate sales, but no one knows who you are…yet. James Schramko comes to mind as a great example of a guy who figured out some really clever ways to make a lot of affiliate product sales for other marketers, who instantly paid attention to him because of it, thus he had a door into the inner circle.

There are other methods to tap into the top echelon of affiliate marketing circles, but these ideas should get you started. None of these techniques are quick fixes. If you want a reputation, credibility, respect and the networking advantages that lead to top affiliates taking notice of you, you need to work at it to demonstrate your worthiness for these benefits.

Don’t Assume You Have Respect

One last very important point – you shouldn’t ever assume anything is a guarantee. Just because you’ve written a best seller, don’t email someone out of the blue and expect them to know who you are. Don’t push a free report, or your blog, or your new book, or access to your course and expect that person to instantly drop everything and check out your work, simply because you think it’s the greatest stuff since sliced bread.

If possible an introduction from a person who already knows the person you are looking to connect with is a much safer way in. I’ve found that people come to me through the natural course of networking. You tend to find the right people, especially after you set out an intention to do so, when the time is right.

It’s even better when some of your work ends up as the study materials, or even manages to help and inspire a person you want to connect with. In this case they may come to you first after being so impressed by your work. This is why the next point is absolutely critical – it’s the most important lesson in this whole article…

I hope this article has helped you feel a better sense of clarity about how affiliate marketing works at top levels. It’s not a cut and dry subject as you are dealing with the most varied variable of all – other people – which is why that last point on no expectations is so critical.

Good luck!

Yaro Starak
Inside The Circle

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http://ma.tt/2009/12/stealth-startups/

http://ma.tt/?p=16178

Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets on TechCrunch.

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/12/21/15-biggest-internet-controversies-of-the-past-decade/

http://www.bspcn.com/?p=1350

Written by Cameron Chapman

The Internet has been a breeding ground for controversy from the start. Part of this is a result of the fact that the Internet is the great neutralizer; it empowers everyone to have a voice.

As the first decade of the new millennium ends, let’s examine some of the most infamous and scandalous events that started, happened, and/or escalated on the web.

If we missed something, tell us in the comments and let’s have the last great Internet controversy of this decade.

1. Climategate

When hackers gained access to a server used by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, they leaked over a thousand emails and other documents that call into question much of the data that has been used to support climate change models and predictions.

This controversy is still ongoing, with one side calling it a smear campaign, and the other, asserting that it shows collusion among scientists to manipulate data. Some have even begun to contend the validity of man-induced climate change.

The situation challenges the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, and whether this is an isolated incident or rampant practice among all fields of science.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Climatic Research Unit E-mail Hacking Incident – Wikipedia
• Climategate Computer Codes are the Real Story – Pajamas Media

2. The Great Firewall of China

Censorship has always been a hot button issue in society. China is probably the most notorious country to practice strict online censorship garnering the moniker, “The Great Firewall of China”.

Other sites have cropped up to try to get around the censorship and provide access to blocked sites. There are also sites that let you test whether your site is blocked.

Censored material includes sites that incite Chinese citizens to resist or break their constitution, criticism of laws or regulations of the Chinese government, sexually suggestive material, talk about gambling and violence, and more.

The censorship has come under fire from governments around the world. President Obama has openly criticized China’s censorship programs. The biggest event that brought the situation to light occurred during the recent Beijing Olympics, where foreign journalists’ ability to report freely was blighted.

More coverage of the controversy:

• The Great Firewall of China – BusinessWeek
• Opera Plugs Hole in Great Firewall of China – The Register
• Slipping Over the Great Firewall of China – The New York Times

3. Amazon removes sales rankings of gay and lesbian books

In the spring of 2009, a number of authors and site users were outraged when they learned that Amazon had stripped the sales rankings of thousands of gay and lesbian oriented books on their site. This meant that books aimed at gays and lesbians would not be able to show up on Amazon’s search.

The issue was proclaimed as a technical error that affected more than 57,000 books in other categories. Amazon issued an apology and restored the sales rankings.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Amazon Follies – Mark R. Probst
• Amazon Error Removes Gay, Health Books from Search – Wall Street Journal
• Why is Amazon Removing the Sales Rankings from Gay, Lesbian Books? – Jezebel

4. Google Street View invades privacy

Google Street View takes photos while driving through various towns and cities around the world, creating an alternate view within Google Maps.

via Google Sightseeing

That also means they’re snapping photos of people, often on their private property, and sometimes in not-so-flattering situations. While so far Google has prevailed in lawsuits targeting the service, it does raise a number of interesting privacy issues.

More coverage of the controversy:

• All-Seeing Google Street View Prompts Privacy Fears – Times Online
• Google Zooms In Too Close for Some – The New York Times
• Swiss Say Google’s Street View is Too Revealing – The New York Times

5. Google Books indexing copyrighted material

When Google announced in 2004 that they wanted to index the content of millions of copyrighted books from university libraries as part of the Google Books project, publishers and authors took to protesting the decision by claiming copyright infringement.

In 2005, a group of publishers and authors, including Penguin and McGraw-Hill, sued Google over the project. A settlement was reached where users will be able to purchase out-of-print books in digital format through Google or access them in subscribed libraries and universities. The settlement has been given preliminary approval, though final approval is still pending.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Google Settles Books Lawsuit – The Washington Times
• Publishers Battle Google Book Index – Boston.com

6. The Net Neutrality debate

The prevalence of Net Neutrality is a big concern to people who use the Internet. In the U.S., net neutrality is practiced universally though there are no laws in place to guarantee that it remains that way. Nothing prevents Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from charging consumers different rates based on the sites they visit or the services they use.

via Looking Glass News

There have been five different bills in the U.S. Congress over the past few years, and heavy lobbying by corporations on both sides of the debate. So far, no laws have been passed regarding net neutrality.

For the most part, many technology bloggers and other sites have come out in favor of protecting net neutrality.

Full disclosure: the loss of net neutrality affects websites such as the one you’re reading now. Help us by reading up on the issue and being proactive in voting for government representatives that support your rights to a free Internet.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Network Neutrality in the United States – Wikipedia
• Save the Internet – Coalition in favor of net neutrality
• The Net @ Risk – Moyers on America, PBS
• We Are The Web – Another coalition in support of net neutrality
• U.S. as Traffic Cop in Web Fight – Wall Street Journal
• McCain Moves to Block FCC Net Neutrality – PCWorld
• Facebook and Twitter Founders Join Net Neutrality Wars – Wall Street Journal
• The Net Neutrality Debate All On One Page – TechCrunch

7. Internet Service Providers throttle bandwidth consumption

Bandwidth throttling is a common practice among some ISPs to restrict excessive consumption of service resources, specifically when they’re using file-sharing services. ISPs proclaim that it helps ensure all their customers have reasonable bandwidth access, but critics assert that it’s unethical and unfair to consumers that have to pay the same price for less service.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Google Launches Tools to Test for Bandwidth Throttling – Sitepoint
• Comcast to Throttle Biggest Bandwidth Hogs – PCWorld
• 5 Questions About Comcast’s New Bandwidth Throttling Plan – GigaOm

8. The Digg Revolt

In 2007, Digg users posted the encryption keys for HD-DVD. Digg took the keys down on advice from their legal team. Digg’s users revolted, posting links to the codes and voting them up to the front page.

In the end, Digg listened to its users, stating they’d rather do what their users wanted, even if it meant the site would be shut down.

• Digg Suffers User Revolt – Wikinews
• Digg Surrenders to Mob – TechCrunch
• Looking Back on the Digg Revolt – The Huffington Post

9. Pedophiles on MySpace

MySpace has long been popular with teenagers. Underage children use the social networking site to share photos, post videos, and document their events in their lives. At one point of MySpace’s existence, adolescent users could make their profiles public, accessible to anyone.

Parents, and those concerned with child welfare, were outraged when incidents emerged of adults preying on young users of the social networking site. As a response, MySpace took measures to protect users under the age of 16 by making site adjustments such as restricting anonymous viewing of their user profiles and blocking unknown users from sending them messages.

While the problem won’t be resolved completely, MySpace has taken a more proactive role in ensuring the safety of its younger participants. Of course, MySpace is not the only social networking site out there that is experiencing this problem.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Why Parents Must Mind MySpace – MSNBC
• Parents Fear MySpace is Playground for Pedophiles – Dallas Morning News
• MySpace Predator Caught by Code – Wired

10. Prostitutes on Craigslist

Craigslist has an adult services category that allows users to solicit adult-oriented services from site users. It’s really no surprise that prostitution rings conducting illegal activities would eventually take advantage of the favorable situation of anonymity on the web. It has made the job of cops so hard that some have sued the site for being the largest source of prostitution.

Though Craigslist’s purpose for the category is well-intentioned, promoting free speech and a fostering an open-minded community, the Internet is the biggest magnet of unscrupulous characters, and it was only a matter of time before the situation would escalate into the eyes of mainstream media.

More coverage of the controversy:

• As Prostitutes Turn to Craigslist, Law Takes Notice – The New York Times
• 7 Charged in Alleged Prostitution Ring on Craigslist – CNN
• Judge: Craigslist Not Liable for Prostitution Ads – CNET

11. Filesharing gets hammered down for copyrighted materials

Online file sharing has been happening since the early days of the Internet. But 2000 brought the first major lawsuit and take-down of a file-sharing service. Napster was sued by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) for facilitating the transfer of copyrighted material in December 1999, and was finally shut down in July 2001.

Other popular P2P services have suffered similar fates. The Pirate Bay, a torrent-indexing site, has been involved in a number of lawsuits. The site’s servers were raided by Swedish police in 2006.

In 2009, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were all found guilty of “assistance to copyright infringement” in Swedish courts and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of over $3.6 million.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Judge Expands on Napster Shut Down Order – CNET News
• Napster Judge Calls for Major Copyright Reform – Wired
• Pirate Bay Trial: The Hottest Ticket in Stockholm – Wired

12. Protesters use social networks during Iran elections

Iran’s election protesters and demonstrators took to Twitter and other social networking sites in the wake of the 2009 election to organize themselves and garner support for their cause. Though the situation precipitated out of the web, it was escalated and brought to mass media attention via the Internet.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Iran Elections: A Twitter Revolution? – The Washington Post
• Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement – TIME
• Iranian Election – The Huffington Post

13. Facebook’s Privacy Policy changes

In February 2009, Facebook altered their Terms of Service to allow them to use and retain any content posted to user accounts indefinitely and without limitation, claiming ownership of its user’s content once it’s uploaded to their site even after a user’s account is deleted.

Unsurprisingly, this caused quite a stir among users. Others formed groups on the site itself, calling for the ToS to be reverted back.

Facebook asserts that they never intended for the change to be that far-reaching, and that it was a misinterpretation of the new terms.

Users weren’t buying it, and in the end, Facebook changed the ToS back to the original version, and has seen sought user input before implementing changes.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Facebook Changes Terms of Service to Control More User Data – CNET
• Changes to Facebook Terms of Service Outrage Users – Mlive.com
• Facebook Yields to User Outrage, Reverts to Old Terms of Service – Macworld

14. Facebook deems breastfeeding as offensive

Facebook has a strong policy against what they term “obscene” content, something most parents would embrace. But many mothers went crazy when photos of breastfeeding moms were removed from the site due to the policy of censoring obscene content. It sparked boycotts, user groups, and even a protest (a “nurse-in”) at Facebook’s headquarters. The most popular group, “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” has nearly 250,000 members.

Facebook wouldn’t budge on the policy.

More coverage of the controversy:

• Breastfeeding Protest Over Facebook Policy – ZDNet
• Facebook Won’t Budge on Breastfeeding Photos – The New York Times
• Facebook Nudity Policy Angers Nursing Moms – MSNBC

15. Blogger, Dooce, gets fired for blogging about work

In 2002, Heather Armstrong, aka Dooce (also the name of her blog), was fired for blogging about the company she worked for and some of her coworkers in a less-than-flattering manner. She’s possibly the first person ever fired for blogging, and definitely one of the most well known. There’s even a term that spawned from her experience: dooced (which means to lose one’s job because of one’s website according to Urban Dictionary).

Since being fired, she’s turned Dooce into the sole source of income for her family. She was even named as one of the most powerful women in media by Forbes. The site still drums up plenty of controversy, as her posts are brutally honest.

More coverage of the controversy:

• 7 People Fired for Blogging – Mental_Floss
• About Dooce – Dooce.com
• Dooce’s Dilemma – Forbes

Conclusion

It’s unlikely the Internet will ever be controversy-free. And would we really want it to be? Many Internet users enjoy (at least in part) the controversy that is so prevalent on the web. We all have a chance to be heard, whether it’s in matters of global importance or the latest celebrity gossip.

If we missed something, tell us in the comments and let’s have the last great Internet controversy of this decade.

http://blog.s9y.org/archives/214-Serendipity-1.5.1,-bugfix-release.html

http://blog.s9y.org/archives/214-guid.html

It's been a long time, and the Serendipity Team is proud to present the Serendipity 1.5.1 release...

...All bad things come in triplets, except this one, which came in a duplet: First the uploaded release file contained the current development version, the second issue was found due to just 3 mixed up characters, which prevents any plugin that has a HTML/WYSIWYG-Config-item (like the HTML Nugget plugin) to be properly displayed.

The fix is quite easy: include/functions_plugins_admin.inc.php. The cause for this problem was introduced only a few days earlier and sadly slipped by unnoticed. We're awfully sorry for the trouble this may cause you.

Due to this version mixup earlier and this annoying bug, Serendipity 1.5.1 (Codename Colin AKA If everybody else is doing it, why can't we; but well, it could be worse) has been released.

If you're lazy and already upgraded to 1.5, you will only need to download and replace the file found here: include/functions_plugins_admin.inc.php.

Now have a merry christmas, and let's hope that our best friend Murphy has no surprises left for us freezing germans.

http://t3.dotgnu.info/blog/misc/thing-of-pure-beauty.html

eiπ + 1 = 0

Euler's Identity. 'tis a thing of pure beauty.

Three very suspicious numbers in a menage-trois, creating something real. How can two irrational numbers and an imaginary number work together to make a very real integer? It boggles the mind entirely. Somewhere in a past left behind, this was the first equation to make me sit up and consider imaginary numbers as something more than a trick.

http://blog.s9y.org/archives/211-Serendipity-1.5-released.html

http://blog.s9y.org/archives/211-guid.html

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release of Serendipity 1.5. While the earlier beta versions are proven to work fine for many people, it was finally time to package up a real release. ;)

This version mainly addresses login security by changing our method how passwords are stored to use salted SHA1 checksums instead of plain MD5 checksums. This makes password retrieval (rainbow attacks, see special blog posting) through the database virtually impossible. Another thing is improved PHP 5.3 compatibility.

For users of our Bundled WYSIWYG-Editor Xinha users now have the ability to easily customize the appearance of this panel through a "my_custom.js" file inside the template directory (a draft of such a file can be found as fallback default in the htmlarea/ subdirectory).

One cool new feature for developers is that now also templates can register themselves inside the plugin API hooks to execute specific things, that don't require installation of an event plugin.

Other news include:

• new event API hooks
• fixed PDF thumbnail generation
• ability to auto-scroll on borders when Drag/Dropping plugins
• UTC server time zone support
• improvements in the Smarty functions to easier use Serendipity as a CMS for individual entry output.
• quicksearch improvements for doing a wildcard-search when too few searchresults were found on a fixed searchterm
• support for Typepad anti-spam server-checks, additionally to Akismet

Minor improvements since the 1.5-beta1 release:

• more PHP 5.3.0 compatibility improvements
• Disallow uploading any files that contain ".php." in the filename for extra security with Apache MimeMagic-Modules
• expermiental PDO:SQlite support
• usability improvements for the comment moderation panel (bottom-navigation, removed border increase)

The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Upon first login with an old password, Serendipity will store your old password in the new format - please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading, and read the upgrade pointers on Upgrading Serendipity.

Have fun using Serendipity, and let us know on the Forums if you have any issues!

Update: Accidentaly, the 1.6-alpha release file was uploaded with the wrong file name. This has been fixed, the real files are now available -- users who had already downloaded this 1.6 release can either re-download the new release bundle, or stay at their current version. 1.6 has only 2 minor changes yet, and is 99,9% identical with 1.5 at this point. The most major difference would only be the version number. ;-)
I'm sorry for this fault, I blame it on the german weather...

http://jace.zaiki.in/2009/12/21/a-year-in-recap

Long time, no post. So much to say, but where’s the time to write with all this activity? Remind me to post on:

• What it cost me to take a year off,
• What I’ve been reading through these months,
• What I did with the time and how I ended up doing each, and
• What I’m up to now, back here in the land of the gainfully employed.

The view from my new office window.