First, however, last night, Levi and I were chatting away in #utah on Freenode about the protocols Twitter and Identica use. Levi was frustrated that Twitter has built a crappy protocol that really doesn’t do much than make noise. If you want to get any signal out of the noise, such as follow specific hashtags, you have to use a separate protocol on top of Twitter, such as RSS. I agreed that the implementation is severely flawed. The ONLY way to follow hashtags is through RSS. There is no mechanism built into the Twitter protocol to do so. As such, it could be said that hashtags themselves are a design flaw in microblogging. Furthermore, you will only see the hashtags of those you are following, not those you aren’t. This probably makes sense, in that you don’t want a flood of text from people you don’t know, especially when hashtags are not “opt-in”. However, it shows another flaw in the design- you’ll never see a broader discussion about that topic. Lastly, if you’re using the web interface, and not a Twitter “client” of some sort, there is no way other than RSS to see all the posts for that hashtag, despite who you’re following. As it sits, Twitter is broken. But we knew that already. After all, they ditched their Jabber bot, and they’ve had more birds and whales than tweets.

Enter a solution from the Laconica microblogging software. Yesterday, with the new release of the software, a new feature has been announced that’s been all the buzz- groups. Groups are like hashtags. They represent a topic at hand that someone wants to discuss. However, they address the failing problem with hashtags- using the protocol to follow discussion. First off, groups are opt-in, which means you find a group, then click the link to join the group. Then, when you want to post something to the group, you precede it with the bang. Say I joined the group Ubuntu, and I wanted to post a message about a new installation, I could do something similar to ‘installing !ubuntu now’. The great thing about groups, is even if people aren’t directly subscribed to my posts, they will see my posts directed to the group, and vice versa. I may only be subscribed to five people on the site, but if I belong to the Ubuntu group, then any message with ‘!ubuntu’ in it, will get delivered to me. No additional protocol to keep track of. Perfect, seamless integration. Now, groups still do have RSS feeds, so you can follow the posts to the group in your RSS reader if you wish, but it’s not necessary. One thing to point out, however, is that if you’re not a member of a group, then you can post your message to the group, even if you precede it with the bang symbol. You must be subscribed to the group.

Anyone can create a group (that hasn’t already been created) and anyone can join a group. At the moment, there are no private groups or invite-only groups, although I’m sure we’ll see something like this in the future. Also, creating a group doesn’t make you some account god. Instead, you can change the picture for the group, or the group details, but that’s it. No banning users from the group, or kicking existing users out (again, I’m sure this functionality will be added later). However, when you create or join a group, you’ll notice that there are some hiccups right now. As it sits, only JPEGs will be rendered for the group logo, and they’re extremely pixelated. It seems that the software is resizing the image to really small, probably to save space, then zooming the small image as necessary for the group logo, which causes the pixelation.

Looking at the groups page, what I find interesting is the groups with the most members and the groups with the most posts. It’s fairly easy to see that Identica is a service for geeks. Or, at least geeks are creating groups. No mention of a group ‘gardening’ or ‘parishilton’ or ‘nascar’. Instead, we see things like ‘ubuntu’, ‘xmpp’ and ‘archlinux’. Probably the GPL license of the Laconica microblogging software that is drawing the geek crowd. However, at nearly 40,000 users strong, Identica is becoming an alternative player. People like Robert Scoble and Lawrence Lessig are on Identica, and other big names. With the Laconica team innovating, such as groups replacing hashtags, I bet the draw will only continue to increase.

Of course, the best part of the Laconica software is federation. Want to run your own microblogging site, yet follow others under their own domain? No ploblem! Just like XMPP, Laconica can federate across domains, making it completely decentralized.

• The code powering the service is Free Software, licensed under the GNU Affero GPL.
• Create an account and login to the account using OpenID
• Stable (so far) Jabber support
• Utilizes the Open Service Definition

Wait a minute. Rehash that list. Free Software, OpenID, Jabber and an Open Network Service. Sense what I’m sensing? Identi.ca is all about openness and freedom\. Uh, yeah. Signed up, and ditched the other proprietary solutions. I would be surprised if RMS had issues with this service (actually, I probably wouldn’t be surprised, but you get my point).

However, Identi.ca is a bit wet behind the ears currently. Jabber interactivity with the bot is extremely limited. SMS is planned, but not currently implemented. Subscribing to other users is a bit of a pain currently. No search feature. Other shortcomings are listed as bugs and feature requests are welcomed.

You can subscribe to my posts at my page. Happy microblogging.

Anyway, I’ve gotten off track. What I wanted to point out, is my wife is a blogger. I help set her blog up about 2 years ago, as she wanted to add it to her domain. It took a bit for her to really catch the blogging bug, but now she’s non-stop. She’s even edited the presentation HTML for her WordPress theme… without knowing HTML. Further, she gets her students involved by adding comments to her posts. She’s out setting the bar on teachers blogging, and joining the ranks of female bloggers everywhere. I think she’s worth subscribing to (she is my wife, after all. ) by adding her feed to your RSS reader.

Keri- I love you, and I’m so very proud of you!! Keep up the amazing work!

First off, I would like to thank Congressman Bishop for taking the time out of his busy schedule to contact me directly. Sometimes, even after lobbying exhaustively, you feel like you are never heard. No matter how loud you shout, or how hard you scream, sometimes, it feels like it falls on deaf ears. So, the fact that Congressman Bishop contacted me on my personal cell phone, shows that in fact, you can make a difference.

I don’t say this to brag, but rather, hope to encourage others to lobby their issues through blogging. It works, and I’m walking proof of that tonight. However, if it’s okay with Congressman Bishop, I’d like to discuss some of the conversation that we had on the phone this evening.

First, the letter that I received is incomplete. There seems to be a paragraph missing in the letter stating the position that Congressman Bishop stands regarding the issue. I am hoping to receive a copy of that letter with the included paragraph, so I can update my blog accordingly. Because to me, that paragraph stating his stance seems to be the most important, paragraph of the letter.

There are 2 bills that have been brought forth to nullify the Copyright Royalty Board’s (CRB) rate hike, but have yet to reach the floor. One is from the Senate (S. 1353), and the other from the House of Representatives (H.R. 2060). Congressman Bishop wanted to make it clear how he would vote: he would vote to support the bill nullifying the CRB’s rate hike.

This is good news on several levels, and I want to publicly apologize for my emotions in my previous post (it’s been updated a bit). It’s good to know that there is a congressman that is concerned for yours and mine best interests when it comes to this specific issue. Even if this isn’t his expertise, and he needs to rely on his experts for making these decisions, it’s still good to know that he is listening.

Most importantly, bill H.R. 2060 will be presented, as per news on savenetradio.org (PDF ahead). This means that our voice is being heard. We seem to be raising the volume levels loud enough to be heard at Washington D.C. I’m glad to know that Rob Bishop will be supporting that bill.

Next, during our conversation on the phone, I had the opportunity to voice my concerns personally about what these rate hikes mean to me. At work, we listen to radioparadise.com, an ad-free user-supported radio. All income comes from donations and purchased merchandise from users. Radio Paradise has made it clear, that if the CRB’s rate hikes take effect, they will be forced to go offline, as they will not be able to shoulder the financial burden. This would mean that we would be forced to listen to another online radio alternative, and we love Radio Paradise. Unfortunately, there aren’t many alternatives to turn to, as just about every Internet radio broadcaster is singing the same song: the royalty rate hikes will force them offline. So, where do we turn when Internet radio is effectively killed? How will we discover music and turn to new or mainstream artists and labels?

Finally, to close our conversation, Congressman Bishop assured me that he understands my stance and how this will not only affect my life and music tastes, but everyone else’s as well. He has my back, and is looking forward to see the rate hikes killed.

It was an absolute pleasure to talk with Congressman Bishop directly, and I’m glad that some of the confusion is cleared up. I am going to hold him to his word that he will vote in support of bill H.R. 2060 and I hope that his vote will be unanimous with the rest of the House of Representatives supporting the bill. I am glad that he took time out of his busy schedule to talk with me. Rob Bishop- thanks for reading and calling me.

Bloggers- DON’T GIVE UP!!! Blog, blog, blog! Make some noise. Get your voice heard. I assume that my congressman contacted me by either him, or one of his team, watching his online presence with Technorati. So, mention their names directly, as I am sure that other congressmen and senators are doing the exact same thing, and you’ll most likely get noticed. If you don’t have a blog, or an online presence, then write them or call them, and let your voice be heard. The fight to save Internet radio isn’t over. Let’s pick up the vigor and stop the rate hikes dead in their tracks!

Stay tuned- DRM is next.

First off, I am excited to see Movable Type get back on its feet with respect to the community. It’s history of proprietary enterprise solutions and restricting licenses have kept it from becoming the preferred blogging platform for many. As such, a less powerful, but nonetheless Free Software solution, WordPress has taken the scene as the big daddy of blogging CMS. I use WordPress as my blog platform, and fully support it. Now that Movable Type is going GPL, however, I’m wondering if it’s too late for Movable Type to enter the market as a Free Software CMS. It does solve some of the issues that plagues WordPress installs and I wonder how WordPress is going to respond.

For example, I would much rather be running WordPress on top PostgreSQL than MySQL, due to the reputation of data integrity and scalability of PostgreSQL. However, WordPress just supports MySQL. Also, I would like to see some way to update my WordPress installation without running a separate script to handle the upgrade. From what I understand, Movable Type supports this natively with CGI scripts that perform all the necessary functions. Movable Type seems to support a number of other features such as LDAP and Oracle DBs, which could be important to others.

In the long run, I may consider making the switch from WordPress to Movable Type when 4.0 is stable. In the meantime, I’m interested in reasons why I should stay with WordPress or why I should move to Movable Type. For starters, as mentioned previously, I would prefer to have PostgreSQL powering my database rather than MySQL. Any thoughts? Vote in the poll after the jump.

This is a poll utilizing AJAX. It will not work properly in your feed reader. You will need to visit this site’s post if you would like to vote in the poll. Thanks.

Click on the image to take you to the post, and play the video.

It’s a quiet day. I’m sitting in front of Hercules (R.I.P.), my faithful laptop, coding away, when I see a new email in my inbox from Google. The title of the message- “Hello from Google!”. Curious, I open it up. The body of the text is as follows:

Hi Aaron-

My name is Dan McCarthy; I’m a talent scout for the engineering team here at Google. I came across some of your work on the Web and was impressed with your development experience – particularly the breadth of your background in Linux and your abilities in Python, both of which are extremely valuable here.

I actually recruit for the Google.com engineering team here, which is the group of engineers that’s essentially the mission control of Google. They’re responsible for the design and development of the infrastructure for all our web applications and internal services. You’d be able to tackle some of the most unique scalability problems in the world and work on the newest products we have. It’s a mission-critical role that involves a lot of coding and requires a high degree of creativity and troubleshooting expertise, so we’re looking for Unix experts and great coders with broad skill sets (like yourself)! We have several positions within the Google.com department that I feel would be a good match for your skills and qualifications. The positions are currently available in:

Mountain View, CA
Santa Monica, CA
New York, NY
Kirkland/Seattle, WA
Dublin, Ireland
Zurich, Switzerland
Sydney, Australia

I’m not asking you to quit what you’re doing now – just seeing if you might be interested in exploring opportunities with Google. If you’re at all interested in the department or in Google in general, I’d love to speak with you about the opportunities we have here – and of course, if any of your talented colleagues would be interested, feel free to forward my name and contact information to them as well.

You also may have noticed that a couple of weeks ago we were named the #1 company to work for by Fortune Magazine: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2007/snapshots/1.html

Thanks for your time, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards,

-Dan McCarthy
Engineering Staffing Team
<snip>

I was excited, needless to say. Even though it is a recruiter, and his job may be scout out possible new-hires for the company, I felt flattered. Whether it be a form mail that he sends out to anyone and everyone (insert name here), or a personal mail sent just to myself, I had to keep my options open. I replied saying I was interested, and what the next steps would be. I forwarded him my resume, and within a couple days, had a phone screening.

I was asked where my strengths lie, how I felt in certain areas of technology and software development and where I would best fit given the talents that I had. After everything was in order, I was asked a few technical questions to review my competency, then the review was left to the Hiring Committee. After a week of review, it was determined that I was not a good fit for Google.

During the phone screen, I was given the opportunity to ask any questions that I had. I seized the moment, and asked Dan how I was discovered. The initial email mentioned that he was impressed with my work on the web, and my Linux experience, but other than that, I was curious just exactly how he found me.

The response? My blog.

Because I blog, regularly and consistently, and stick with very specific topics, I was weeded out from the millions, and given the opportunity to work for one of the greatest companies, if not the single greatest, on the planet. Who would’ve thought that blogging could create such opportunities? I certainly didn’t. So, should I pass up the opportunity to work for other companies? No way! Keep my options open, and ready to respond. I never know who will be on the lookout next.

Am I bummed that I didn’t get a job at Google? No, not really. I work for a fantastic startup company, namely introPLAY, which I am confident will take off and do fairly well. I love the environment that I am currently working for, and love those that I work with even more. I don’t know if I would enjoy going back to a M-F 9-5 environment with corporate management and rampant politics. Then again, it is Google. Who knows? Maybe Google will acquire introPLAY, and I’ll end up becoming one of the borg anyway.

Please, PLEASE…use black on white not white on black for the web page. White on black is much harder to read, especially if you are older and using spectacles. Some of the worst are yellow on black…… Just ordinary black text on white background is easy and simple to read. It’s why books are printed the same way. Linuxformat magazine also has this ‘thing’ about printing critical text on coloured backgrounds so it becomes almost impossible to read…artistically correct, but practically very bad.

The concern is having white text on a very dark background, and that for the older generation, it becomes difficult to read, especially if wearing vision correction. I do not dispute the validity of that argument. I can imagine that it may be more difficult to read the text. As such, there are a couple solutions for overcoming this, without me changing my theme.

1) Most modern Internet browsers will support increasing and decreasing text sizes. For Firefox, it’s as easy as navigating to the “View” menu, highlighting the “Text Size” submenu and clicking “Increase”. You will notice also, that there is a keyboard shortcut bound to increasing and decreasing the text. This is done with ‘ctrl-+’ and ‘ctrl–’ respectively.

2) Being a blog, it has an XML-based feed. I syndicate 3 different XML feed standards, so you can choose one to your liking. I would recommend using the feed through Feedburner, as it helps me track some statistics about my readership (click on the large square button on the right beneath “Subscribe”). With this XML feed, you can use it to read my posts through a different application, rather than your browser. Liferea is a great feed reader for Gnome, with Akregator for KDE. With these applications, you can read several feeds in one spot without having to navigate to the web pages. But, the point of this, is most XML feed readers use dark text on light backgrounds. So, if it’s easier for you to read text in that manner, I would suggest using my XML feed with a feed reader that can syndicate the content.

The reason, simple put, is this: staring into a computer monitor, means looking into light. Light is powering your display, whether be plasma, LCD, CRT or whatever. The technical details behind producing the light may be different, but the result is the same: light waves entering the pupil. Now, in all seriousness, you wouldn’t stare into a Philips light bulb trying to read the text while the light is powered on, would you? So, why do we do it with our computers? Well, I don’t really know, except, maybe we are trying to reproduce printed text, such as a book page or a newspaper. But, unlike printed text, staring into a bright monitor while trying to read text is bad for your vision.

Studies have shown, and I don’t think I need to cite sources, that staring into a computer monitor all day long in degrading to your vision. People who generally sit a computers for their career most the day end up needed correctional lenses to fix their vision. This is due to the nature of the computer screen being brighter than the environment. Just as looking at the Sun can permanently damage your vision, so can staring at a computer monitor.

So, by reducing the light that comes out of the monitor, you can effectively reduce the chance for eye damage. By reducing light, less light colors should be visible, with dark colors taking up the majority of space. Turning down your monitor’s brightness can be one solution to achieve this. Another, can be reversing your desktop theme to use dark colors (charcoal gray or black) as backgrounds, and light text. The same contrast is received, as is with black text on a white background, but you are saving your vision for degradation.

There is a side effect, however, to light text on dark backgrounds. You will read the text about 30% slower than you would, reading the same text, but reversing the contrast. I don’t know why this is, other than to say, that you will recognize a positive exposed photograph about 40% faster than the same photograph exposed as a negative. It is probably something to do with what we recognize as familiar versus foreign.

So, being concerned about my own vision, and the vision of my readers, I chose a dark background with light text. I still find the text readable and contrasting. I’m not concerned, really, about the speed at which you read my posts, but more, the safety of your vision. This theme is an excellent theme, that maintains that level of safety. Trust me, however, when I say, that I did not pick this theme, because it was artistic or aesthetically pleasing. The reason was based solely on my health, and the health of you.

In conclusion, I won’t be changing my blog’s theme anytime soon. If I do, it will be only because the functionality of this theme has gotten outdated or I have gotten sick of it. But, it would still be replaced with another similar theme of dark backgrounds and light text. Again, I mean not to offend or hurt the sender of that email, but rather, wish to inform my readers about why I chose this theme. Hopefully, our vision will be better off, because of it.

This is a blogging tag game, where, if tagged in a blog post, you must post as well. In your blog post, you must provide a trackback ping to the post that tagged you (a permalink to the post). You can only tag 2 people. For example, if I were to tag Alice and Bob, then Alice must post tagging two more people, but also put a link to my post tagging her. Same with Bob. In essence, the goal is to create an exponentially growing tree, with me at the trunk tagging two, then each of those tagging two more, and so on. Yet, regardless of where you are in the tree, you can trace the links back and forth seeing what others have posted. Makes sense? Okay. Let’s start.

I’m always in the lookout for new RSS feeds to read related to technology, Linux, Ubuntu, programming, technocrats and other things similar. Lately, I’ve been growing tired of my feeds, so I thought I would go out on the lookout for new feeds to put in my RSS reader. So, in this game, an RSS posting game, if you’re tagged, post your subscribed feed list in some XML-based clear text format. So, here is my list, in OPML format, of the feeds that I subscribe to.

As you can see, most are planets, and I don’t have very many feeds. I have also taken out a few feeds that were driving me nuts, mainly, Digg and Slashdot. So, with that said:

Steve Dibb and Richard Johnson- you’re up!

    1. Financially support the cause to fight for and protect my digital freedoms.
    2. Raise awareness about the legalities and rights of blogging and online journalism.

EFF is something that I am looking forward to being a member of and being involved with. I have toyed with the idea of becoming a member for sometime now, but finally made the plunge yesterday. It’s money put to good use. I would, of course, encourage you to join as well. Don’t let congress, corporations, lawyers or anybody/anything else control how your digital lifestyle should be defined.

Make a change!
Take a stance!
Join EFF.

First, I should mention that this script comes with no warranty what-so-ever. Use it at your own risk. If you foul up your database or WordPress install, don’t come crying to me. Although this upgraded my 4 installations without hitch, this does not necessarily mean that it will work for you. Please use caution when upgrading the files and the database. If you do run into problems, I will try to provide necessary support as possible. However, I am very busy, so it may be faster for you to figure out what happened, and to fix it on your own. You’ll learn better that way anyway.

Next, this script follows the detailed instructions as closely as possible. Namely:

• Your existing WordPress install is backed up, just in case.
• All databases are backed up.
• All necessary and important files (.htaccess, wp-config, etc) and directories are backed up.
• The latest release is downloaded.
• All files are upgraded.

Of course, it is your job to navigate your browser to the appropriate PHP upgrade page for every WordPress installation that is upgraded, and verify that all plugins, permalinks and themes work.

At any rate, here is the code: a simple Bash script. The version of the script is 0.1.2.