Categories
Cousins meta technology

A Central Family Website

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Photo by James MacDonald

Starting  right after my dad’s funeral in May I have had multiple conversations with multiple cousins and siblings wondering about creating something online where members of the various families could share news together to help us all stay connected. One suggested solution was to create a Facebook page but seeing as the common theme seems to be having a place exclusively for family news and considering that not everybody uses Facebook (despite what it sometimes seems like) the feeling has been that Facebook has two drawbacks: it leaves the news mixed in with anything shared by the many other friends any of us may have on Facebook and it completely locks out anyone who isn’t on Facebook.

While I haven’t started any of the conversations on this topic that I have participated in I have the advantage of having conceptually designed just the kind of collaborative family website that would allow family members to easily share their news to a central location. I began designing the concept a few years ago in anticipation of my own family growing up and becoming geographically dispersed. The two key features I wanted to ensure were easy content creation and easy content consumption.

Categories
politics technology

Net Neutrality vs Open Infrastructure

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Image by Steve Rhodes

Adam Kenigsberg did a very brave thing in posting a case against Net Neutrality and inviting his friends to “start a vigorous debate in the comment thread.” As someone who has long been interested in Net Neutrality and who has vacillated between favoring it, opposing it, and being undecided about it I was interested in what would follow before I even saw the comment thread.

Notes and Context

The case against Net Neutrality was written by David Veksler who has written quite a number of interesting cases for and against a variety of things. If you enjoy thoughtful consideration of issues his cases deserve a look. I wanted to make that clear lest anyone think that my deconstruction of his case indicated any lack of respect for his approach to this or any other topic. I would also note that his case was written more than 7 years ago. Much has changed about the internet and the surrounding industries in that time. For example, AOL was still merged with Time Warner at the time and Facebook had been open to the public for less than a year and wouldn’t have its IPO for another five years after this case was published.

Categories
life technology

Online Event Planning


Image by: Christian Scholz

I learned a lesson over the weekend regarding using Facebook as an event planning platform. I stopped actively using Facebook early this year so I’m only vaguely familiar with the event planning tools that the site offers but from what I’ve heard and seen they’re very functional for most event planning needs. The caveat that became glaringly obvious over the weekend is that when planning an event on Facebook it is easy but unsafe to assume that those you might want to participate in the event are using Facebook at least enough to be aware of the event. That means paying careful attention to whether they are responding to the event invitation or event related postings or else, more effectively, you should reach out with event details in some was that is more targeted than just adding it to your Facebook.

Categories
technology thoughts

Collision of Worlds

While reading an article on Google Glass in Wired I was struck by one idea:

I wore the future across my brow… The future is coming to your face too. And your wrist. (emphasis added)

The “brow” is obviously a reference to Google Glass. The wrist is easily a reference to the iWatch. Both of these products are expected to be available this year. What struck me though was remembering the words in Revelation 13 about the mark of the beast:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads. (emphasis added)

Google Glass and iWatch
The forehead and the right hand…

I thought of being more blatant by adding “666” to the image on or above the respective devices but my intent isn’t to disparage either of these companies or even to honestly suggest that such devices constitute the mark of the beast. (For one thing, the passage in Revelation 13 seems to imply a mark that isn’t removable.) My intent was to share the connection my mind forged while reading the Wired article.

Categories
meta technology

Hiding the Castle Gate

After reading a post about WordPress login security by J. Max Wilson I finally took the step of adding a security plugin to protect my site from brute force attacks. Since installing the plugin I have been made aware of the attempts to hack into the site. If I had not been warned in the original post about how such attacks are more frequent than expected I would have been worried when I started to see the frequency of such  attempts.

Over the months since installing the plugin and being made aware of the details of the attacks I was facing I have come to one conclusion about a simple trick to make sure such attacks do not compromise your site – don’t have a user named “admin.” With one exception so far, every attack on my site has tried to login as “admin” and so all such attempts have been futile since I have never had a user by that name. (The one exception was when they tried to login as “david” which also does not exist on my site.)

No matter how weak your passwords may be, an intruder will be unable to log in if they are trying a non-existent username. Of course this does nothing to protect you from the problems of server resources being consumed by repeated login attempts so I still recommend having plugins or other methods of securing your site against such intrusions but if you have a user named “admin” get rid of it. If you need help with how to do that look here. That resource should have suggestions that people with various levels of skill and access to their server can make use of but if you have direct access to the database the simplest thing is to change the username for the admin user at the database.

Categories
life technology

Free Google+ Invites (no strings attached)

When Google+ started there were a lot more people wanting to get in than there were openings—it reminded me a lot of the launch of Gmail in that way. One big difference for me was that I got an account less than 24 hours after the launch where I had to wait weeks for Gmail (thus preventing me from getting simply my name as an email address which was one of the major reasons why I wanted an invite). With Google+ I was in early enough that there was no link to invite people most of the time.

Once things settled down I thought it was interesting that unlike Gmail invites in the early days there was no number indicating how many invites I could offer. I don’t know when that changed (I don’t look at the invite link generally) but I just noticed today that I have 150 invites available (I only have 96 in Gmail—as if they had any purpose anymore).

When I saw that I thought I should try to find people who wanted invites but in trying to find requests all I found were a bunch of articles talking about the current status of invites and a few posts of people offering invites. I noticed that they generally asked for something in return (“like me on Facebook” or “follow me on twitter” for example).

I decided to make my own offer: let me know that you want an invite and I’ll send you one at the email address of your choice. I don’t care how you let me know but leaving a comment is probably the simplest way. Anyway you choose, I’ll give them out on a first come, first served basis.


UPDATE: I’m not entirely sure how simple this will be but here is a direct link to use one of my invites. If anyone tries that link I would appreciate at least one person leaving a comment to tell me how well it worked.

UPDATE 2: Lots of people used my direct link without making comments as evidenced by the fact that I have no more invites and nowhere near 150 comments here. If anyone still wants an invite you can let me know and I will send invites as they become available.

Categories
culture State technology thoughts

GRAMA Answers – A First Pass

I really appreciated the 36 questions that came out of the first meeting of the GRAMA working group and wanted to offer one perspective on a first pass at answering those questions. I will say upfront that the answers provided here are subject to modification or revision based upon more detailed information. Consider this the legislative intent or deliberative process version of any final answers. Before answering the questions I wanted to make one related comment.

When I saw that Common Cause was running a full page ad in the Salt Lake Tribune today calling for the repeal of HB 477 I worried that they were positioning themselves to take some credit after it gets repealed tomorrow (and it will). As citizens we need to be careful in our consumption of information. We need to make sure that we are not fooled by the claims of any interest group. Common Cause appears to be using this situation to help them jump start the reopening of their Utah chapter. I don’t know whether that will be a good thing in the long run or not – I don’t know much about the group – but we should not confuse their core advocacy for open government with any significant work to get this repealed. It was the uproar by the citizens of Utah that brought about this legislative reversal, not the political astuteness of some interest group.

Now, on to the questions:

Categories
National politics State technology

Orrin Hatch’s Insurmountable Obstacle


photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Two years into his bid for re-election (yes, he has already been in obvious campaign mode for two years), in a recent tweet Orrin Hatch invited people to let him know if he was on the right track. My tweet length response was that he could not get on the right track unless he were to publicly admit to the errors in his past voting record. Upon further reflection I have a very non-tweet-length reply as I realized that, at least for me personally, that may not be enough.

Anyone who has been in office for 34 years will have votes in that time which should have been different. Anyone who has been alive for 34 years will have grown and changed within the last 34 years of their life. In other words, I would not expect a pristine record from anyone in Hatch’s position. I don’t consider seniority to be an insurmountable obstacle any more than I consider it sufficient reason to grant him another six years. To mitigate such a long tenure, I will only consider Hatch’s last two terms and pretend that his first 24 years in office were impeccable.

Categories
technology

Best-Of Comments

Have you ever wanted to share your favorite comments on the front page of your site? I’m not talking about the most recent comments, or the most frequent contributors, but the best comments (most funny, most thoughtful, most appropriate, most rash – whatever your criteria may be). Now you can.

Best-Of Comments allows anyone with the ability to edit comments to mark a comment as “featured” and then featured comments will be randomly selected and displayed anywhere you choose to place the php call to best_of_comments(). You can select how comments are displayed, how many to display, and how much of a comment to display (if comments are longer than the specified word length they contain a link back to the original comment). In the future you will have the ability to limit how far in the past to look for featured comments.

Latest Version 1.2 (December 15, 2009)

Discovered a function call that allowed other plugins which alter the content to possibly interfere with the display of featured comments.

Categories
life politics technology

Meet the Other David Miller – Torontoist

Let us tell you a few things about David Miller.

He’s wary of socialized healthcare. He’s in favour of weakening the federal government, and he also supports strict caps on income tax for individuals and corporations. Yeah, turns out David Miller’s a really conservative guy. How’d he ever get elected mayor of a city with such a strong lefty contingent? Oh, right. He didn’t.

Actually, he doesn’t even live in Canada.

David Miller of Bountiful, Utah, a conservative blogger (his site is actually a pretty good read), has politics very different from those of our own soon-to-depart Mayor Miller. But the two men do have one thing in common, aside from a name: they’re both active on Twitter, where Mayor Miller uses the handle @mayormiller, and David-from-Utah goes by @davidmiller.

This was how I was publicly introduced to the people of Toronto by the Torontoist. They picked up on the fact that I was being incorrectly linked in messages to/about the mayor of Toronto and thought it was funny enough that they asked me if they could do a story about it. It was a fun read – and I got a few random tweets out of it today – thought I’d share it here.