shikora.org

If you’re having virus or adware issues I would first run this:

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

then this:

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html

if it’s slow or just not working right or if those programs don’t work, backup all your data and reinstall windows, then avast, then spybot, before you install anything, surf or read any email. Most of those programs that “clean” your system are worthless. When dealing with viruses and adware on windows, prevention is key.

If your browser is doing funky things, try a different one. The main free ones are IE, Firefox, and Safari.

If you never want to have to deal with these issues again, buy a mac or install Ubuntu. You might have other issues, just not these.

So… what does it really take to create a trust network? I’m thinking not a lot, at least not a lot to get useful information. When we say we trust someone, what information are we really conveying? Really only 4 things. 1) I 2) trust this person 3) about this 4) this much.

An example of this would be <@manimal, @donpdonp, #rubyonrails, 9> or <@manimal, @strangelovelive, #podcast, 10>. Here I’m using twitter handles for unique identifiers and the hashtag format for subject taging. Is this perfect? Of course not. Will this data need updating? Absolutely. Does having even some of this information become useful to us? I think so.

As a simple use case, what if we wanted to be able to sort our email, not by some algorithmic means like a Bayesian metric, but by out own trust relationship with people. We could give all the people we receive email from a spam rating from 1-10 and our email would be sorted from most to least probable spamishness.

One more piece of information would make this a much more powerful tool. If we added how much we trust that person to trust others about the same subject, we can make inferences about people we might know nothing about personally. For example <@manimal, @donpdonp, #rubyonrails, 9, 7>. This says that I trust Don quite a bit to know Ruby on Rails, but less to know about trusting others about what they know about Rails. In this way we can share trust networks and gain information about others.

I talked a little bit about this at both the Bar Camp PDX 09 conference and on the Strange Love Live show at the WebVisions 09 conference. The video of the last can be found here.

Like twitter, I think the power here is in keeping the information simple, and allowing the clients to add the complex usage patterns. It so happens there is a format for sharing social network information in tuples called FOAF data. One way of accomplishing this would be to just add a tag and value tuple to standard FOAF data. Thankfully the RDF allows redefinitions pretty easily. One link that descriptes RDF and FOAF data is here.

I’ll be posting more about this as I have time, but I have lots of ideas for clients applications and sites to allow adding of data. Ideally this would be part of the DISO project, but again, we’ll see how much time I have.

@Donpdonp put some pictures up of Hawthorn Blvd in Portland during the recent snowpocalypse. here’s a link to his flickr stream.

So OpenID is now working on Shikora.org. What is OpenID? You can read about it on Wikipedia. Basically it means you can login to leave a comment without creating a new user name and password, only your OpenID, which you can use at other places around the internet.  Thanks a lot @donpdonp for walking me through this and @factoryjoe for creating the OpenID WordPress plugin.

I recorded and edited a bunch of Personal Telco videos awhile back. It was fun being a videographer. The video files used to be posted somewhere, but I can’t find them any more. March 2007 pt.2 is where Caleb and Russell talk about their findings on their metrofi analysis. Now that metrofi is gone and buried, it’s probably only interesting as an academic paper, but still, here they are.

March 2007 Monthly Pt1

March 20o7 Monthly Pt2

April 2007 Monthly

May 2007 Monthly

June 2007 Monthly Pt 1

June 2007 Monthly Pt 2

September 2007 Monthly

Hey I made it on  StrangeLove Live! wOOt! Ok, it’s just a cameo appearance and I’m just acting goofy, but still I think it’s funny. Check it out.

http://strangelovelive.blip.tv/#1640897

I took a bunch of photos in font of my house so I could try and stitch together some panoramic snowpacalypse shots. Here’s the first result. Some things I’ve learned in the process, iPhoto doesn’t do image stitching and photoshop does a resonable job but gets confused if you don’t do it right. In case you want to do something similar, here are the instructions I found helpful.

There was question posted on craigslist recently that coincided with some discussions I’ve had with people recently. I figured I’d try and answer it here.

The question is: “The rapid increase in computing technology has greatly benefited mankind in many obvious ways. However, over-reliance on programs and formulas has also allowed for disastrous financial strategies such as credit default swaps. How do you strike a balance between the benefits and risks of computing technology’s growing role in our daily lives?”

My answer isn’t really cut and dry, but more the start of a conversation. Computer technology is just a tool, another tool in a long list of disruptive tools created and used throughout human history. It is how we use the tools that determines our quality of life, both as individuals and as a society. Tools do not change the essential nature of being, that is created by our actions to ourselves and others. As an example, it wasn’t financial instruments that caused the mortgage crises, it was people using them in unethical and illegal ways. The real question isn’t how we strike a balance with technology, any more then we need to strike a balance with hammers and can openers. The balance we have to find is within ourselves. That balance will be reflected in how we use the tools around us and what we accomplish with them.

Hey there. I finally spend some quality time with my site. It now runs off of Wordpress 2.7 . It was a Joomla 1.0 site. I realised it was going to be just as much effort to upgrade to Joomla 1.5 as it was to switch over to Wordpress. After some annoying glitches, some having to do with me setting up the site in one folder, then moving it to another, others with using cform to set up the Contact Me section, it looks like its working. You still have to register to leave a comment unfortunately. I trust spammers to leave me alone as much as I trust George W. Bush to be able to speak in complete sentences. If you have something to say though, please leave comment. I’d really like to hear what you think of the new site.