James Galvin

Who decided that it was OK to send a spammy mass-invitation to everyone in your addressbook by default? Allowing some web app to access my private email account is an act of trust, and it is being abused by every site that tries to dupe me into spamming my contacts. Anyone who is thinking “it’s your fault for not reading the whole page before clicking ‘continue’”, has probably never worked in IT. You don’t log in to a server as root for the same reason the fabled “big red button” has a plastic cover over it. When you’re dealing with large amounts of contact data, you are required to take extra precautions to maintain privacy. When I was running a decent sized Moodle, I had scripts that explicitly asked for confirmation more than once so that I wouldn’t accidentally email 7,000 students.

Are you sure you want to email these 498 people?
yes
Really sure? 498 users!
yes

Most of these new web 2.0 sites have only one thing in mind: increasing the number of users in their database. So you can forget about extra precautions, by “conveniently” neglecting to show even the most basic respect for the privacy of your contacts (e.g. leaving them unselected for invitation by default) they are furthering their own agenda at your expense.

I blame Facebook for making this the norm, with apps like Flixter configured to send invitations to all of your friends by default every time you access the application (e.g., to see your movie taste compatibility with Worzel Gumimdge’s nephew). This is annoying for Facebook users (ask Doc) and will only get worse as the user base grows. What’s more worrying is seeing this crop up outside of Facebook’s walled garden. With so many web 2.0 apps now integrating with your gmail/yahoo/hotmail, it is all too easy to miss the “skip this step” button and bombard everyone you ever knew with an invitation. Today, Bernie accidentally spammed 2961 people:

Shelfari started sending invitations to many people who are stored inside of my Yahoo! address book. These are legacy addresses, some gathered from the early 90s. One hour after I pressed the button, Shelfari invited two dead people, one prisoner (he should probably read books but his warden is reading his mail), the CNN news desk, four European editors–and potentially a boatload of others who I hope I never meet.

Automatically selecting all of your contacts for invitation is very bad practice and unethical. Facebook should force the policy that all the boxes are unticked by default, and if some particularly spammy individual wants to tell all his friends about his University Diplomas app then he can tick the “select all” button, that’s OK by me. This would set a good precedent, and then we could complain about rogues like Shelfari who have no respect for privacy. I’m keeping a “name and shame” list of all web 2.0 companies that abuse your trust by deliberately setting out to spam in your name.

From Techcrunch UK:

The finer details of the long-awaited Skype phone announcement from mobile operator Three break this morning, but quite a lot is known already about the deal which the network hopes will revive its flagging fortunes.

A mobile phone from Three will be available in UK, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau and Sweden, allowing you to make and receive phone calls using Skype, by pressing a ‘Skype’ button on the handset. I’ve always been amazed by the lack of options we have in Ireland for wireless Skype handsets. In the past, I tried some wi-fi handsets from Linksys and Belkin, and they were both atrocious. As much as I can’t stand Three, I will be keeping my eye out for this one, although it is a shame that you are only allowed to make Skype calls to other Skype numbers by the looks of it.

Very big organisations tend to stick rigidly to a logical naming scheme made up of short location codes and numbers. That’s fair enough, since you need some structure when you have over a thousand servers on site. I personally would argue against it, because I have done my time as a lowly server technician at Intel. I was the guy who accidentally reboots the production server, IRSF24XHIJ1000MUP025 instead of the backup server, IRSF24XHIJ1001MUB025, costing the company thousands. Twice. I did suggest renaming the hostname on all production servers to include the string “_DONOTREBOOTTHIS_”, so that the new guy will think twice when as he’s typing the hostname into ssh/rdesktop to give it a kick.

But those of us on a small or medium-sized network don’t need to glean any information from the hostnames, and naming your devices (along with inserting witty comments in scripts) is about the only creative outlet a sysadmin has. Trying to think up a clever theme is not as easy as it sounds. There are rules.

Must be unique

You cannot copy anything from the last place you worked, you cannot rob them from someone else. Esatclear were my inspiration, bloaty.esatclear.ie, slimey.esatclear.ie, fester.esatclear.ie, some of their names if I remember correctly. Bloaty. The perfect hostname. Six letters, easy to pronounce, broad vowels, two strong syllables. I would laugh out loud whenever I saw someone connect to IRC with bloaty in the hostmask. I assume that bloaty was swallowed by the BT acquisition, and no longer exists, but this does not mean it is back on the market.

As tempting as it may be, you cannot resort to naming your servers:

• wiggum
• moleman
• flanders
• scorpio

The unfortunate reality is, the exact words “I scp’ed a backup of the database over to wiggum yesterday, should I restore it to flanders or to moleman?” have surely been asked at least twice in recent history, somewhere in the world.

Similarly, you can forget about anything relating to Star Wars, Tolkien, Battlestar Galactica. I would rule out sci-fi completely.

Should be grounded in geek culture or mythology

There are some exceptions to this rule:

• In-jokes
• Personal interests: If you’re a WWII buff, it is totally acceptable to go with a theme of American Generals of WWII, or Soviet tank nicknames

Must be pronouncable

And relatively easy to spell, too. There’s nothing worse than frantically trying to connect to iphigeneia or clytemnestra when some service is hung. I’ve heard of people using old discarded root passwords as hostnames. That’s a nice idea, but how are you going to tell someone to reboot x41BnnT994p in a hurry? Remember, a maximum of three syllables, ideally two, and as little room for misspellings as possible (”is that ist or est“)

Take, for example, Bond villains:

• zorin
• blofeld
• graves
• lechiffre
• goldfinger

While zorin and graves are definitely solid choices, blofeld and lechiffre are likely to cause some problems.

Other Examples

If you still lack the creative spark, this site will provide some inspiration.

Cheeses

• brie
• cheddar
• colby
• edam
• feta
• gorgonzola
• gouda
• mascarpone
• mozzarella
• parmesan
• roquefort
• stilton

Ciphers

• affine
• arnold
• atbash
• scytale
• vigenere
• elgamal
• anubis
• blowfish
• lucifer
• serpent
• skipjack

Chess World Champions

• capablanca
• euwe
• botvinnik
• smyslov
• tal
• petrosian
• spassky
• fischer
• karpov
• kasparov

Pirate Jargon

• avast
• plunder
• hearties
• matey
• arrr
• argh
• lubber
• ahoy
• bilgerat
• scurvy
• wench
• saltydog

Remember

It is not necessary to encompass all of your devices with one unifying theme. A series of loosely related themes is OK. For example, if you opt for an elephantine theme (dumbo, manny, ganesh, stampy) for your servers, then you might name your routers and firewalls after famous rats (nicodemus, roland, cluny, splinter).

Within a theme, it is also worth carefully considering that each device is given the most suitable name. In the criminally over-used Greek Mythology theme, you certainly wouldn’t want to waste an Olympian name like zeus on a lowly mp3 server. Unless it’s meant to be ironic… which would be the only excuse for using this theme to begin with.

The most important thing about your naming scheme is that it means something to you personally, or to the guys who would be using it. Nobody said it would be easy, deciding on your naming scheme requires work. At some point you might ask yourself “why am I wasting my time on this?” Just think of the cold winter days when food is scarce, would you rather ssh to proxy2 or to deathadder? Your legacy will live on in years to come, when the new guys are still trying to figure out which host does what.

I’ve signed up for Mashup Camp, 11-12 November in Dublin. At first I couldn’t believe that this was a tech conference, because the website was so bad. I have no problem with the minimalist style of websites preferred by university professors and the like, but you’d never expect to see anything like this anywhere near a room full of web developers. Having said that, the design and usability of the website are my only concerns, because it looks like a good event and only €25 to sign up if you’re a developer. And even if you’re a starving student who can’t afford the €25, there’s a system in place to let someone else pay for you.

Got a mail on the Irish PHP Users Group saying that Tim Berners-Lee would be a keynote speaker… can’t see it anywhere on the Mashup Camp flyer though, so I don’t know if that’s true or not.

It also looks like I’ll be heading out to Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo on 5-8 November. There’s so much stuff going on at that event that I haven’t been able to read through the schedule yet. Anyone else going that might be able to predict some of the most worthwhile talks?

Like so many new Linux users before him, Grandad has asked the question that sets you on the road to beard, sandals, and hats with built-in propellors.

The Linux I installed is called Ubuntu and it uses a thing called Grub.

Where the f*ck do they get these names? Are the people who write Linux high on acid or something? They have the most obscure names for everything. You don’t ’search’ or ‘find’ - you ‘grep’. And the desktop is called ‘Gnome’ or ‘KDE’.

Before you even download Linux, you’re faced with an assortment of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Gobuntu, nUbuntu, and that’s just a few of the Ubuntu variants. There are countless other releases from Gentoo/Pentu to Debian/Xebian, and I won’t even mention Yellow Dog, Puppy Linux, or my favourite: Tinfoil Hat Linux (for the extra-paranoid).

Most of us have got so used to this over the years that we don’t even notice the unusual choice of names given to most open source software. Making phone calls through Asterisk, receiving mail thanks to Dovecot, chatting on Pidgin, and daily exposure to the likes of Bash and Apache for so long makes you forget what it was like as a first-timer having to google search Yahoo to find out what everything did.

One of the great thing about open source software is, if you don’t expect to be lining up in front of a bunch of corporate fatcats selling it, you can name it whatever you like. The guys responsible tend to have a particularly nerdy sense of humour, which is why Guido van Rossum opted to name his programming language “Python”, in honour of Monty Python, and why we see web frameworks springing up named after anything from Gypsy jazz guitarists to… cake.

Here are a few of the more common programs with questionable names:

• Gimp: Image manipulation program, similar to Photoshop
• Snort: Intrusion detection system (lets you detect hackers and unusual activity on your network)
• Oinkmaster: Used for updating snort rules
• Barnyard: Event processing for snort
• Clam: antivirus software
• Squid: proxy server and web cache
• Putty: a telnet/ssh client
• Seahorse: a front end for GnuPG encryption/decryption program
• Nautilus: file manager, similar to Finder or Windows Explorer

In honour of Head Rambles, I’ll have to mention Gramps, the open source genealogy platform. By the way, can anyone explain the recurrence of the maritime theme? Actually never noticed it before…

Two weeks since Radiohead shook the earth with their release on In Rainbows. Two weeks in which the blogosphere hopped like popcorn to the funky beat of ‘15 Step’.

Hire professional web designers

A good user experience is critical. Over on the iQ Content blog, they have outlined some of the shortcomings to the In Rainbows site from a design perspective.

• Make buttons look like buttons
• Use clear labels and call to actions
• Don’t present your users with unnecessary obstacles
• and most importantly, as the book says, don’t make me think!

More creativity is needed

In the age of torrents and social networks, bands need to move on from the 1998 homepage concept. The music industry saw the value of web design very early on, and even in 1997, a lot of bands and musicians had stunning websites. They should be leading the next evolution, away from your two dimensional internet brochure and discography, to something more like a band’s clubhouse, interactive and rewarding to its visitors. MySpace made a good attempt at modernising the way bands interacted with their fans, bringing them closer to each other, but it was also a load of shite and it crashes my browser, and I will instantly boycott any band that uses a MySpace page as their primary website.

People got In Rainbows from Torrents because there is no benefit to gain from navigating that awkward website and filling out forms only to download it for exactly the same price (€0). I don’t know what kind of incentives Radiohead should have offered to convince more people to download from the In Rainbows site - that’s something they’ll have to think up. Even if thousands of people who got the album from Bittorrent weren’t willing to pay anything, that’s OK - you still have your audience under your control, and you can more accurately track the number and nature of downloads.

Must be more accommodating to ‘tryers’

Dahamsta outlines the difference between scroungers and tryers. I paid nothing for this Radiohead album, but in fairness, I am a tryer. I occasionally purchase fully functional shareware software, and sometimes I even donate to non-profit websites that I use. I didn’t really like the last couple of Radiohead albums, so I had no intention of paying for this one. I’ve only listened to it a couple of times, but it sounds like a good album, and definitely worth at least $6 to me. What would it take for me to retroactively pay that $6? As far as I can see, I’d have to navigate that ugly awkward website again and mess about with shopping carts, and fake email addresses, and pretend that I’m buying a new album. Not a chance. There should have been a follow-up email a week after I bought it, “So, what did you think of it?”, linking me to a feedback portal/discussion forum. It invites me into the Radiohead online community, it tells me when they’re going to be playing in Cork next, and it has a big button allowing me to easily hand over my $6. A little bit spammy, perhaps, but I’m certainly not going to complain, because I enjoyed the album, and now I want to support them.

Online surveys more skewed than usual

Nialler9 references the results of the What Price Did You Choose survey, which was fundamentally flawed if it depended on volunteers to mention how much they paid. Some reports are confirming my assumptions that a large portion of mildly interested people like me who idly downloaded the album for free would not be as inclined to actively partake in a survey to label themselves as cheapskates.

Can it work?

Yes, despite some flaws in the execution, it appears to have done fairly well on this occasion. Give it another two years and it will all be worked out.

Does it work, in general like

The jury is still out on this one. How big a part did the hype and ‘Snakes on a Plane’ factor play in the success of the In Rainbows release? I’m guessing a good chunk of people paid for this album because they wanted to support this progression. Others wanted to give a smack in the face to the record industry… kind of like voting for the McElhinney twins in You’re a Star. That novelty has worn off now, and the reality is, if the Frank and Walters allowed you to pick your price for their new album at ARenewedInterestInHappiness.com, they would be lucky to get a couple of thousand visitors, let alone paying customers. Which brings us back to the most important point: #2 above - more creativity is needed.

I changed the theme a few times over the past couple of weeks. Never realised that the last one I had actually didn’t work in Internet Explorer, which probably explains why my site traffic has plummeted. I was alerted to the fact that something was wrong when I stopped getting my usual €0.05 per day from the Google ads. All those guys searching for naked night elves no longer end up in the archives of this site. At least I’ve still got all those slightly disturbed Irish people searching for the “Bank of Ireland pixie” (this one).

Tired of having someone else’s theme break on me, I made the Kanagawa theme so that in future I only have myself to blame. Based on the Great Wave off Kanagawa. And I have decided to forsake anyone who still has less than 1024 x 768 resolution. Please let me know if you find any bugs.

The Leopard has been spotted and will be available in 8 days, 4 hours, 55 minutes from the time of writing this. Tom Raftery points to this poll on GigaOM trying to pinpoint a reason to upgrade.

• New Apple Mail: Like Tom, I switched to Thunderbird because Apple Mail didn’t impress me enough, despite my best attempts to get to like it. When I first started using my Mac, most programs lived up to the hype and “just worked”, but Mail.app was awkward with spam filtering, and awkward with GPG support, and inferior to Thunderbird in many ways. I was reluctant to leave behind Mail.app because of its inherent compatibility with every other app on my system. But Thunderbird has been chugging along nicely for the past year, and I’m not going to upgrade my system just to have Mail.app fail me again.

• Spaces (for multiple desktops):Multiple desktops have been standard in Gnome for years, I’m surprised it has taken Apple so long to catch up. At the moment I use Virtue Desktops Application which gives me this functionality in Tiger. However, it sounds like Leopard’s “Spaces” is more than just multiple desktops - you can split a desktop into rows and columns, and bind an application to any particular space?

  “Add rows and columns until you have all the real estate you need. Arrange your spaces as you see fit, then choose the function keys you want to control them. You can assign an application to always open in a specific space, if that’s more convenient — so you’ll always know where, say, Safari or Keynote is”

  That is really good. One of the biggest problems that “switchers” face is shrugging off the “alt-tab” paradigm, maximising all your windows, using one program at a time. Apple try to force their way of doing things by making it difficult to maximise windows. Spaces will reduce the distracting visual clutter which goes along with this.

• Time Machine (for backup and restore):

  Time Machine takes care of everything else. Automatically. In the background.

  Any time I hear “automatically” and “in the background”, I think of a degradation in performance. Even programs that allegedly only run when the system is idle have driven me mad over the years by slowing the system to a halt for no reason (e.g., “beagled”, “SETI@Home”, “* Antivirus”, and probably the worst culprit in recent years: “Google Desktop”). Just about the only task scheduler that has never let me down is cron, and thats why I have my own backup scripts managed by cron. But I have to admit, this Time Machine looks great, and if it works well then it is the ideal solution for your mother’s computers.

• 3D Dock with Stacks: Great - I can’t work with cluttered desktop, and Apple’s insistence on defaulting every download and subsequent extraction to my desktop has always really annoyed me. I’ve had to set up every application to download to a new directory, (each web browser, FTP, IRC, Peel, Bittorrent), but even this is inefficient. Have to say, it looks like Apple have solved that nicely here with the stacked dock.

  A stack is a Dock item that gives you fast access to a folder of files. When you click a stack, the files within spring from the Dock in a fan or a grid, depending on the number of items (or the preference you set). Leopard starts you off with two premade stacks: one for downloads and the other for documents. The Downloads stack automatically captures files downloaded from Safari, Mail, and iChat, and the Documents stack is a great place to keep things like presentations, spreadsheets, and word processing files.

• Updated finder with cover flow: aka “Finder meets iTunes”. Perhaps I’m too stuck in the Linux organised file system mentality, but this fancy new Finder doesn’t appeal to me. I think of a folder by its absolute path, and I get mildly ill when files are in the wrong folders. I was very upset when Windows 95 or 98 starting messing about with “My Documents”… it took me ages to find that “C:WindowsProfiles” folder. In Finder, all the folders I regularly use already have shortcuts on the left navigation. What does the enhanced Finder offer me? Well, this “cover flow” gimmick will probably give my PC half second stutter everytime I go to browse a folder. I already know what’s in the folder, I’m not going to be using the searching, and I never really liked the iTunes navigation to begin with.

• Everything: I’m not going to spend €120 or whatever it costs, and an hour of my time to upgrade without any solid reason, but this amounts to another good step forward for Apple, by the sounds of it.

Anything else?

• Improved Safari:

  The fastest web browser today, Safari loads and draws pages up to 3 times faster than Firefox 2 and up to 5.5 times faster than Opera 9. And it executes JavaScript up to 2.7 times faster than Firefox 2 and up to 2.6 times faster than Opera 9.1

  I love how Safari is so fast. It is a cool web browser and it’s really nice to use. So why am I forced to use Firefox and Camino? Because Safari doesn’t work properly, unfortunately. It renders images badly, it fails to cope with some CSS that works perfectly in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer, and it is not compatible with Google Apps (at the moment). For me, this means that Safari is quite simply not an option. Does the new version fix all these issues? If not, then doesn’t matter how fast it is, it is fundamentally flawed beyond use.

• Bootcamp:

  Leopard is the world’s most advanced operating system. So advanced, it even lets you run Windows if there’s a PC application you need to use. Just get a copy of Windows and start up Boot Camp, now included with Leopard.

  Today, thousands of people are going to be downloading Ubuntu Gutsy upon its release. How many MacBook users are going to miserably struggle with their keyboard backlight for hours, or fail to get their iSight working? Windows guys get a full suite of drivers, what would it take for Apple to dedicate a couple of guys to work on behalf of all us who want to run Linux? I suppose it’s probably not as easy as that, but when I first got my MacBook Pro, I got it with the intention of installing Ubuntu Edgy on it. At the time, due to some very slight incompatibility issues, I was not able to run Linux comfortably without sacrificing some hardware functionality.

• The new iChat screen sharing functionality:

  Thanks to iChat screen sharing, you and your buddy can observe and control a single desktop with iChat, making it a cinch to collaborate with a colleague

  Combined with all the other features of iChat… killer app? Yes, it sounds like it. Worth upgrading for? Maybe in 6 months when all my colleagues have fancy new Macs running Leopard.