death and social networks

daily life

Death is a certainty with daily varying degrees of probability. I wonder if people that twitter think about what their final tweet would be. What google search results they should be remembered for.

Oh, and if you hunt for business ideas, I am sure there is one here. When people believed firmly in the progress of technology, they paid good money to have their bodies frozen. Hoping that tech would catch up. And that future scientists would have nothing better to do then to get them out of the freezer and frankenstein them back to live. Maybe one should offer a ‘digital legacy’ service. Keeping peoples musings, and if Moore’s Law keeps progressing, run some sanitizing filters over them. Of course the next step would be to figure out what you would have tweeted were your thumbs not worm feed. That would be as charming as Polar Express I guess.

Ars Technica has a more realistic and helpful article about the state of death and social media.

With digital technology it is feasible for the first time to keep a vast amount of data around that is related to dead people. How much information do you have about your ancestors? 2, 3, 5 generations back? It thins down pretty quickly. There is no more reason for this. Again: There is a business model here. Probably one that Facebook will pick up. Chances are that Mr Zuckerberg will live longer than many of us.

Time before the movie starts

media technology

This page compares the user experience of a legit DVD with that of a pirated movie. I would add to this to get the packaging open: There are often the shrink wrap + 3 ugly white stickers on each open side saying “Security Device enclosed”.

I remember that early DVDs would start into the movie right away. and then, when done would go to the menu. When you insert a DVD you do it, since you want to see the movie. Not because you want to watch all the other crud, like a menu opening that contains key elements of the movie to come, often oddly animated.

The problem with this is, that probably not enough people care. They don’t care about spam, viruses on their computer, their diet either. In turn the quality of the offerings for ‘the general public’ get worse. To the point that they are plain junk in some cases. I read that ’30 rock’ would be a good show. When I watched some of the first season the other day I was a bit shocked how little I was able to enjoy it. Probably a unique aversion since I don’t watch TV. So my tolerance for mental junk might be a bit different compared to people who spend hours in front of the TV screen.

youtube videos in gmail

daily life google internet technology

Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.

After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:

I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.

But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.

Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:

Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.

facebook login and the madness of crowds

google history internet

Readwrite web wrote about Facebook login

Which happened to bring them high in the google search results for “facebook login”.

Then facebook did a re design. I didn’t notice much difference. But some people got confused and looked for the “facebook login” on google. And as we all know
clicking on the first result is what one should do (not). Enough people were so convinced that what they actually saw was facebook they got very mad and left comments in this direction.

Two things become apparent:

Everybody has computers now. And I mean everybody.
And many people delegate everything (including their thinking) to google.

No wonder adsense scams are so profitable.

boarding pass

daily life history

A boarding pass design

I really like this. Also because it gets to show that we take too much junk in the -after all- man made environment around us for granted.

Boarding passes right now have a format that looks like a computer punch card, which came into being in that size since dollar bills in the days of Mr. Hollerith where that big.
So your boarding pass does not fit anywhere because people used to pay with paper money of that size more than 120 years ago …

While we are at it: The airlines could get an image from me, since I am frequent flier. Then they could super impose it over a QR Code and add a check sum.

An optical scan would reveal instantly if that boarding pass would actually BE for me. Quick: Go and patent that. It might be worth your time. I am busy with other
stuff and would just be happy to see better boarding passes. Among a couple of other things.

via Eric Alba, who referenced passfail where Davin Yoon’s design can be found in the bottom of the page.

Got a reel?

interdubs internet marketing media

Eric Alba shows some shelfs

And -as so often- he has a point.

enable SELinux and a reboot can take forever

misc

Adding more machines for INTERDUBS. They get tested, triaged and configured for a ridiculous long time. That way once they are production machines they do only one thing: Run.

We experimented with benchmarking the performance effects of SELinux. As we expected it is not worth disabling. But now we know. We also know something we should have known: Enabling SELinux again on a bigger file system will make the next reboot take forever. Hours. Of course it makes sense, since all files will have to be relabeled.

vans and the places they have been in

art photo

A very nice project

A small vertical slice of (Socal) life. Marvelously documented while it is fading out of existence.

cool IP, hm, maybe not so

history internet

As we are running slowly out of IP addresses addresses are being used that were deemed to be reserved. This wouldn’t be the internet if this would go smooth. See pollutions in 1/8 for the details (thanks David for the hint).

Turns that out that 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4 and not so awesome choices for an IP. Others thought so before.

forecasts

economy history politics

And they keep doing them:
Very nice visualization by the times