(Yes, of _course_ I clicked it!)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

It's the only way to be sure.

 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

This is not how to advertise your "Distinguish your business mails from your competition" service...

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Cormac Hodgkinson, Vodafone's "Director of Customer Service and Experience" fails to reassure me when he posts this:

You may have seen recent media reports in relation to customer information – please be assured that Vodafone takes customer information and data security extremely seriously. Customer information is not ‘publicly available on the internet’. Customer information is stored on Vodafone’s internal systems and accessed via a secure web portal, accessible to authorised employees and dealers via a secure login and password.

(from http://blog.vodafone.com.au/blog/news/vodafone-customer-data-security )

The "recent media reports" he's trying to defuse presumably include:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/09/3109067.htm

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/mobile-security-outrage-private-det...

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/security/vodafone-mobile-records-leaked-2...

and tweets like this one:

GODDAMN VODAFONE YOU ARE BLOODY-WELL KIDDING ME?! http://arseh.at/37n Christ on a stick! #vodafail #vodafail #vodafail #vodafail #VODAFAIL

— Mark Newton (@NewtonMark) January 8, 2011

The big claims being made (at least in the SMH and Age pieces) are:

In this new saga for Vodafone, dealers have revealed that they are frequently asked to do ''favours'' and to pass on their login details.

Because the customer database is not an intranet (internal company system) and instead on the internet, users with a password can log in to the portal from anywhere, then access any customer's information.

Vodafone retailers have said each store has a user name and password for the system. That access is shared by staff and every three months it is changed. Other mobile dealers who sell Vodafone products also get full access to the database.

Anyone with full access can look up a customer's bills and make changes to accounts. Limited access allows searching by name, which takes much longer and is more involved but can be just as effective when done correctly. ''It's scary stuff in the wrong hands,'' one dealer told this website.

So, my questions for Vodafone are:

• Is it true that “accessible to authorised employees and dealers via a secure login and password” means “each Vodafone store has a shared login/password combination that is known/used by many staff members at that store”?
• Do these "secure login and passwords" only allow access from store-specific network connections, or do they work from any internet connection?
• Is there any audit trail that allows Vodafone to identify which individual staff member has made queries which reveal a customers personal information?
• Am I going to have to get replacement credit card numbers for the 5 or 6 different credit cards that may have been used in my household to pay for any of the 6 Vodafone SIMs we use?
• Can you assure me you haven’t potentially exposed my name, address, birthdate, and drivers licence number to anyone having access to one of those shared login/password combinations?
• Who's going to pay for the time/money required to monitor for identity theft and change credit card number and drivers licence numbers where required?
• And, the bonus conspiracy theory question, did you leak this yourself to distract the media from the ongoing network problems?

 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Dear lazyweb...

What are the current alternatives to delicious and Flickr?

Instapaper has for me replaced some of what I use delicious for, but it's missing the community/collaborative thing deIcious has, and the tagging. I suspect the collaborative part could be piggybacked onto a social network, some app that leverages my Twitter or Facebook social graph, and the tagging could be partially automated by using something like metaweb, perhaps Google is the right place to expect the solution from? (perhaps they've already solved it and I just dot know about it yet?)

Longer term, what are people considering (or using) in favor of Flickr?

If I just wanted to store photos "in the cloud" I'd just stick them into Amazon S3 and probably serve them out of Cloudfront, but I like a lot of the ancillary stuff Flickr provides, both the onsite stuff like tagging, albums, exif data display, geotagging, default licensing, stats, as well as integration with other tools - iPhoto, various iPhone apps, but also the social and sharing aspect.

I understand Facebook does that well, but I don't want to lock my pictures up with Zuckerberg any more than I want them to go dark when Yahoo needs to do their next round of costcuting layoffs.

So do I give up and admit the Google "wins teh internetz", and throw everything into Picasa ( hoping the Wave fiasco was a one-off, and that the community won't abandon it like Orkut)? Or is there some recently established service all the cool kids know about that I need to get in on? Or is here somebody working on a fascinating new startup that I should be an early adopter of?

I _really_ don't want the answer to be "Facebook", I think I'd rather secede from "Internet communities" than go there...

Big

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Collected data available on Google Docs here.

Discussion in the comments welcomed and encouraged (but be respectful of differing opinions. Attack peoples arguments if you need to, don't attack the people...)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

[Update: Bryan from Rankiac got back to me today (25Nov) apologising for their lack of response and pleading mail server / google mail problems. I've now managed to pay to extend the trial into a Pro account, and to their credit they've continued to collect the data I wanted between the free trial expiry and the purchase of a Pro account, so that's good. Now they just need to convince me 14 day turnarounds on critical service queries are not "the norm"...]

I found this really useful website - it's doing something I've been on-and-off working on for a while, in a much more polished and useable fashion than I've been planning. It's called Rankiac, and it does daily Google searches for your keywords and tells you where your website is ranking, and produces historical data of those SERPs. It also does backlink monitoring, both for your site and your competitors sites. It's surprisingly cool.

 

I grabbed the 14 day free trial, and it fully lived up to it's claims.

 

So I went to pay for a subscription:

 

only to be greeted with this:

 

 

Oops! I'm sure they'll _hate_ finding they've bungled such a critical bit of a web based business, I'l let them know right away so they can fix it! So I hunted and hunted and hunted, 'cause their only contact info is buried down on the privacy page, and mailed them when I only had 5 days of free trial left, and again 2 days later. I'm now down to one day of free trial left, I haven't heard back from them, and it's still impossible to pay them.

So now I'm looking around to see if they've got any half-way decent competitors...

The thing thats most amusing (perhaps even ironic) is that I found out about this service through a discussion post on a HackerNews article titled "Things you should do immediately after launching a website."

Here's my #1 "Things you should do immediately after launching a website." tip: Make sure your "Buy Now" buttons work! (and checking/responding to customer email in shorter than 5 day windows will probaby help too...)

Anyone got any good SERPs checking websites? Ones that'll actualy take my money?

 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So I'm sitting on the balcony of a holiday house a bit north of home:
I'm idly flipping through Twitter, and Vernon Reid (from Living Color, remember the song Cult Of Personality?) tweets about Eric Johnson, who I haven't even _thought_ about in years:
So I put Eric's 1986 album "Tones" on, and think " This is a _great_ album! I wonder who this is playing bass on Soulful Terrain?".
A quick poke at Wikipedia and Itunes reveals there's a recent album which I buy:
And and also tells me the bass player is Roscoe Beck, who's also played with Robben Ford (which the iPod is unfortunately lacking, I must move his albums up in the "must get around to ripping from vinyl" list), and Leonard Cohen (there's the next select for the playlist).
And then, as this post gets weirdly self referential, I take a bunch of screen grabs, crop them with PhotoPal, upload them to Flickr with Mobile Fotos, and blog about it...
I think its pretty amazing that's possible at all. High powered mobile computing, ubiquitous wireless broadband (& _affordable_ wireless broadband), Twitters global "random thoughts" stream and my ability to "eavesdrop" on posts by people who might interest me, Wikipedia's amazing collection of random information on just about any odd query that might pop into my head, iTunes music stores practically endless catalog of obscure mid 80's bands and ability to sell me new albums by old favorite artists over the air on an impulse-buying whim.
I wonder how I used to fill the 30 or 40 minutes everyone else took to get ready to walk 70m to the beach before technology let this happen? (I guess it probably wouldn't have cost me ~$17 buying a new album...)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So, now I've got a freshly minted Apple iOS developer key (yeah, I just paid $119 to be allowed to run code I write on a device i own... *boggle!*), I'm pondering an idea (since I'm officially an iPhone app developer)...

There's now old 3G iPhones available for a couple of hundred bucks. That gets you a reasonable size touch screen, a gps receiver, and the accelerometers. You also get 3G internet connection.

I'm imagining using the iPhone as a dashboard for a motorcycle - the GPS and accelerometers can measure my speed more accurately than my mechanical speedo, and the GPS would let it be smart enough to know what the speed limit is on the current bit of road, and even know where fixed speed cameras and the RTA's designated "mobile speed camera" zones are as well as other "known" speed enforcement areas or time-over-distance-camera sections of road, and warn me about them. With an internet connection it could also check the RTA traffic twitterfeed and warn me of incidents in my general vicinity, and possibly suck the traffic layer out of googlemaps and warn me of slowdowns ahead... It could connect to http://www.trapster.com/ to warn of user reported speed traps and roadwork. If it's possible to operate the touchscreen in gloves it could allow on-the-fly reporting back to trapster or recording in the local database.

It'd take some thinking/hardware to replace the entire dash, getting a tachometer input into the iPhone, and indicator lights for indicators, ignition, and oil pressure might be tricky (possibly something through the dock connector, or if the whole Apple insistence on complete control of interfacing hardware becomes an issue, perhaps some hardware than encodes those signals into audio and feed it into the microphone input in the headphone socket?) I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy with the oil pressure light being under (possibly buggy) software and (probably jerrybuilt) home made hardware control, but I could leave that alone (with it's almost steampunk level of "wire-pressureswitch-lightbulb" technology) - none of the rest of it is safety-critical...

Things to work out:

• Can I operate the touchscreen in bike gloves (and does that change in the rain?)
• Can I get signals into an iPhone app from the dock connector (without paying an Apple tax)?
• If not, can I cheat and encode data in an audio signal and process the info out? (Shazam does.)
• If I started my DashBoard app, could it run indefinitely, or will I need to be able to reboot and restart the app somehow? (which might be hard if I've made a suitable motorcycle dashboard enclosure for it)
• Can I build a water-tight enough enclosure which still lets me operate the touch screen? (is there ay "magic" about screen protector films?)
• Can I build an enclosure that disguises the iPhone-ness enough and/or secures it well enough that I could leave the bike parked and expect it to still be there when I returned?

I wonder if this would be of any interest at all to anyone else? Its more complicated than "just buy the app on the app store" since there'd need to be at least an enclosure/mount for it that'd require custom building for each person's bike, and extra hardware if you want a tacho or indicator lights to work on the phone screen. Maybe just adhoc distribution of the code would be enough (I think that limits me to about 100 other people), or perhaps go the whole hog and used jailbroken iPhones and ignore any of Apple's attempts to control what I do with hardware i own?

Now I just need to carve out some copious free time to build it...

 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

But check out this asian inspired interior decorating...

 

When I grow up, I'd like to think I'd have a lounge room like that! (It's in the gallery at www.piprooke.com along with a bunch of other pretty Asian and Oriental furniture, art, and homewares...)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Check out these wonderful hand welded exhausts on the HRC RC212V MotoGP bikes. I estimate theres around 40 separate pieces of titanium welded to gether just to make the 360 degree turn there... Exquisite attention to detail! I love that brown and blue heat adonizing look - I somehow don't think it'd suit my bike too well unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, given the likely cost of one of these!)

From mototribu.com and motomatters.com via: http://bubblevisor.blogspot.com/

and:

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

It's been _way_ too long since I saw live soul/funk music, but last night at The Basement I saw (and heard) this:

Tina Harrod, Virna Sanzone, and Lily Dior, with Arne Hanna on guitar, Hamish Stuart on drums, Alex Hewetson on bass, James Greening (and someone else who's name I've embarrassingly forgotten) on trombones, Matt Ottingnion on sax, and Stu Hunter on keys.

 

 

All of a sudden it wasn't September 2010 any more - it was 1989 on a Saturday night at The Harbourside Brasserie, or a Sunday night upstairs at Kinsela's, or 2am on a Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning) at Round Midnight in Roslyn St. Jackie Orszaczky was sadly missed, and I wondered where Chris Abrahams and Monique Morrell and Cameron Undy and Jeff Duff and Glen Rhodes and Doug Williams and Craig Calhoun were? It's been a long twenty-odd years. A long and fondly remembered twenty years. Thanks for the memories to all of Sydneys late '80s/early 90's funk/soul/jazz musos...

 

The music was booty-shakingly good (which is _really_ _really_ good when the booty is attached to a 40-something year old Sydney-raised white-boy)...

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

From this _great_ article on "big numbers" by Scott Aaronson, I found this delightful paragraph:

If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

 

Beautiful! (and, if you've got time, the rest of the article about numbers is a fascinating read...)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

There's a discussion here on Hacker News about a 2 year old blog post about "Smart Drugs", specifically Provigil. In the middle of that discussion thread, I found this _fascinating_ subthread about people who have had their genes sequenced, and are discussing how particular genes (rs4680(A, A), in this case) affect their response to particular drugs...

 

That's something new for me...

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

http://blog.freebase.com/2010/07/16/metaweb-joins-google/

As of today, we’re very pleased to announce that Metaweb is now a part of Google.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/deeper-understanding-with-metaweb.html

Today, we’ve acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world.

 

This could be _very_ interesting. There's a video and transcript of a Metaweb presentation here, which explains what the do like this:

 

You know what drives me crazy about words? They have a million different meanings.

Like, check this out: someone says, “I love Boston.” Now, they probably mean, “I love Boston, the big city in Massachusetts”, but they could be referring to one of the twenty-six other Bostons that are scattered around the globe. But, if it’s during the playoffs, they’re probably referring to the Celtics [basketball team]. Of course, you and I both hope that they’re talking about the Boston. You know. [Image of rock band, sounds of electric guitar.]

But, I guess there’s really no way of knowing. The problem is that the same word can mean so many different things. Because of that, when it comes to finding, linking, reconciling, or organising multiple layers of information, words are not the best solution. The guys at grocery stores figured this out back in the sixties when they started putting barcodes on everything, so that products with the same name wouldn’t get confused.

 

and

Metaweb is a service that helps you build your website around entities, and not just words. Whoa, what’s an entity? Well the simple answer is, it’s a singular person, place, or thing.

OK, well, let’s compare that to text. Did you know that on the web there are more than 50 different ways people write “U. C. Berkeley”? [Examples listed: Cal Berkeley, Berkeley University, UCB, California, U of Cal, etc.] And they’re really just talking about one single place, one entity. By mapping all those words to a single entity, as if it had its own barcode, you can combine all that information about U. C. Berkeley into one place.

But that’s just the beginning. Because entities represent unique, real-life things, we can build a map that shows how they’re related. So, you can look for things that share certain attributes, like “actresses under 20 from New York”. Can you imagine trying to find that with a keyword search? [Shows typical keyword search results, with keywords highlighted: "NY blogger under fire for criticizing actress", "March 3 2004: New! 20 steps to be an actress", "Kid actress eats 20 York peppermints".] Entities are just smarter than words.

 

So Metaweb "understand" (for some values of "understand") about "singular people, places, or things", and the relationships between them. 

And Google knows all the words on your website and the sites linking to and from your website, and is extremely experienced in running recursive algorithms over trillions of webpges, and they now own a company which'll allow them to distingish connections between "I love Boston" and Boston-the-city, Boston-the-football-team, and Boston-the-band based on which of those interpretations are most likely not just from your website, but also from the websites that link to you and to which you link...

I wonder just how ugly the upcoming "universal ontology tag SEO/webspam war" is going to get...

 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

So Kristina Keneally tweeted[1] earlier today:

Having coffee @ Gloria Jeans, Shanghai. An Aus owned global brand, 37 countries, winner of many exporter awards. 5th store in China (1/2)[2]

(2/2) Australian owned, Sydney-based Gloria Jeans plans to open 600 stores in China in next 15 years.[3]

This is the same Gloria Jeans owned by "senior members" of Hillsong. The "church" who went out of their way to arrange to get $600 into Keneally's election coffers while staunchly denying it was "a donation", though apparently not to either Keneally's or the NEW Electoral Commission's satisfaction...

http://www.crikey.com.au/2008/03/25/hillsongs-holier-than-thou-attitude-fails...

And that Hillsong Church is the one Keneally wrote a letter of recommendation for (scroll to the bottom of this):

http://www.redwatch.org.au/media/080312cena/

Hmmm...

Then later her staff tweet a link to this:[4]

http://hillsong.com/clarification-regarding-hillsong-church-gloria-jeans

Which says "Hillsong Church is not associated or implicated with any pending legal proceedings before the NSW Supreme Court. Any suggestion otherwise would be highly defamatory."

Which is probably _technically_ true - I'm not sure what the legal definition of "associated or implicated" is, but I'll point out this article:

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/legal/20100618-court-finds-gloria-jeans-breach...

Which says "Judge Justice David Hammerschlag has also criticised the evidence provided by Gloria Jeans founder Nabi Saleh, who is also a senior figure in the Hillsong Pentecostal Church community, by rejecting his claims that he did not believe the agreement with the US coffee supplier was binding."

And the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Jean%27s_Coffees

"In 1995, Nabi Saleh, a member of the Hillsong Church, and Peter Irvine,[1] a high-profile Hillsong member and former Managing Director of advertising agency DDB Needham, visited the United States to sample the Gloria Jean's Coffees brand. Saleh and Irvine identified the opportunity for this brand in Australia, purchasing the international licensing rights from Diedrich Coffee, Inc."

That certainly sounds "associated or implicated" to me...

I don't suppose, Kristina, you'd have a bit of time to investigate, say, the clearly flawed new NSW motorcycle greenslip insurance? Perhaps a quick chat with the good people at the NSW MAA about the lack of data supplied by the RTA, the Police, and the insurance companies - which if it existed might show what a rort the new pricing scheme it? Or maybe it'd be a good use of your time to ask some of your more marginal seat warming colleagues how they feel about the new RTA plan to raise an extra $138 million dollars in speeding fines, which means they plan to issue additional fines to the tune of 1/3rd of all license holders per year? I know I'll be writing to Anthony Albanese about this, he might wonder if the 15,000 additional $90 speeding fines the RTA is planning on giving to his electorate in the next year might be remembered at the polling booths...

[1] http://twitter.com/KKeneally
[2] http://twitter.com/KKeneally/status/18391617392
[3] http://twitter.com/KKeneally/status/18391653276
[4] http://twitter.com/KKeneally/status/18398048395

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

http://openca.mp/blog/paypal-hates-conferences-especially-opencamp/

Permalink | Leave a comment  »