http://www.fub.it/events/seminari/neutralitadellareteeaspettisocioeconomici

http://www.nnsquad.it/

Neutrality – “Economy is dematerializing”

Solicited by a Facebook message sent to all the members of the nnsquad.it – for a neutral Internet members on 6 May 2009, I stumbled upon this interesting event I had the occasion to participate, held in the 17th century Rospigliosi palace in the heart of Rome.

In this photo: Kenneth Carter and Stefano Quintarelli

The preface looked pretty good: technicians, Ph.Ds, telco spokesmen and politicians speaking about the internet, its inborn freedom, and how to cope with this in a society where security measures are constantly increasing, and as such contrast in a virtual world with no barriers whatsoever. Furthermore, it’s a virtual arena in which everything can be free, not only information, and people are becoming accustomed to it.

The first speech was held by prof. Kenneth Carter, directly from the columbia university, and served as a broad introduction about the matters that were explored (and sometimes repeated) through the day. In a nutshell, the big question is: might ISPs offer different degrees of performance over different sites (or charge for better performances), permit/block/surcharge access to certain sites or via certain devices?

This is my recap of the first italian facebook developer garage, held in milan on April 23, 2009, and hosted by mikamai. the morning has been dedicated to developer sessions, the afternoon to marketing & communication ones. some videos of the event are available here.

Morning: developer session

The first talk was held by James Leszczenski, facebook engineer, who presented the connect platform vision, mission, and values. interesting, besides the talk, for user participation: the audience was deeply interested about which information they get from facebook, how should they handle it, and which means connect does provide to match identities and find friends on an enabled web site.

Later I had the occasion to ask James about whether FB was inclined or not to adopt OpenID as an authentication method: he said that connect and OpenID both allow users to have unique login credentials to access multiple sites, but connect also allows to exploit the power of facebook social graph to allow users to communicate and share information. so, the short answer is “no”. Then I proposed him to implement OpenID on FB itself, so that connect could become really a superset of openID, but he said that “as a company, these are tough decisions I could not give an answer right now”. Fair enough :).

UPDATE: on April 27th 2009, techcrunch reports they heard that Facebook will embrace OpenID as a mean to authenticate users. Great news, looking forward for an official statement from Facebook! :)

The second talk was held by Vincenzo Acinapura, who described the basic means to create an application on the facebook platform. He explored the technologies behind it (XFBML, FQL, FBJS), the main integration points within the platform (notifications, publisher, ...), and he showed sample code to implement some of the most used FBML tags (fb:comments, fb:share, fb:feed, and so on). He eventually remembered the importance of automating the deploy of applications, and suggested to use capistrano to achieve it.

I’m searching for a new pet. We already have two lovely cats, but after feeling how alive a house can be with many pets (after a beautiful night @ il quadrato mansion), I’m thinking about having another one to grow and love.

But, what kind of geek am I, if I don’t add a nerdy bit to it? So, after the brain twitter interface about which we talked about so much in the last days, this evening a quite random funny thought has stumbled into my mind: what about getting a grey parrot, grow it, teach it to talk, and letting him .. well, tweet his words using a speech recognition system put right beside its cage and linked to a twitter account? How weird would that be?! :D

Thinking deeply, the weirdest thing is that in 2009, a tweeting parrot makes me think about a “parrot with access to twitter” .. and not a bird emitting its natural verse. Am I overloaded by this social media thingie? Should I take some vacation?

I guess. But not right now. The first Italian Facebook Developer Garage is just two days away.. :)

Image courtesy of @ozjulian on flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

April 7, 2009 · 3 min read

Bioniqa: We Applied to Y Combinator

• startup
• y-combinator

Back in 2007, Antonio Orlando came to me with an idea for a semantic question-and-answer platform. We called it Bioniqa — bionic Q&A. Not a search engine — search engines crawl existing pages and rank them. This would be a system where people generate the content themselves. You ask a question, the system routes it to the right person, and over time it learns who knows what, where, and in which language.

We called users “Neurons” and the collective knowledge “the Mind.” Each user is specialized — a Neuron in a particular domain, language, and geography. When connected, information flows between them and the system adapts. The software would borrow concepts from nature: diversity, adaptation, neuroplasticity. Geography and language would be first-class attributes, not afterthoughts.

The core insight was that search engines are terrible at contextual, hyperlocal questions. “What’s the mineral water with the lowest residue currently on sale in Bari?” No amount of PageRank helps with that. You need an actual person who lives in Bari and buys mineral water. Our system would find that person for you.

(As read on full-disclosure)

Subject: Notice to all employees
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:06:14 -0500

Dear employees,

Due to the current financial situation caused by the slowdown
of the economy, Management has decided to implement a scheme
to put workers of 40 years of age and above on early retirement.

This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged People Early).

Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to management to be eligible
for the SHAFT scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination).
Persons who have been RAPED and SHAFTED will be reviewed under the
SCREW programme (Scheme Covering Retired Early Workers). A person
may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as
Management deems appropriate.

Persons who have been RAPED can only get AIDS (Additional Income
for Dependents & Spouse) or HERPES (Half Earnings for Retired
Personnel Early Severance).

Obviously, persons who have AIDS or HERPES will not be SHAFTED or
SCREWED any further by Management.

Persons who are not RAPED and are staying on will receive as much
SHIT (Special High-Intensity Training) as possible. Management
has always prided itself on the amount of SHIT it gives employees.

Sincerely,
The Management

(I hope you enjoyed this :D There is also an USAF version from 1997).

On VisitaCSA we’re using defunkt’s facebox to show places images at large. Facebox is a great general-purpose lightbox, because it is fast, stable, is based on jQuery and has got a really clean API.

But we needed more than a simple display lightbox, because we wanted our users to navigate easily between all images, possibly without modifying facebox at all. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, thanks also to the will_paginate plugin we were already using. It all boils down to having:

• A Photo model, instrumented with the has_attachment method
• Resource routes for photos (map.resources :photos, :only => :show in config/routes.rb)
• A show controller method in the PhotosController that calls .paginate with a :per_page argument of 1
• An HTML view for the photo resource, that has pagination controls using the will_paginate helper
• Some jQuery code hooks onto the pagination links and makes the browser load via AJAX the next photo directly into the facebox.

Here is the relevant code, simplified from what’s actually online, because the photo model is actually polymorphic (using STI) and many different collections are handled by the photos controller (photos, flyers, etc) for different models, with different thumbnails :P.

Model [app/models/photo.rb]¶

class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_attachment :storage => :file_system, :path_prefix => 'public/photos',
    :processor => 'ImageScience', :thumbs => { :thumb => '600x800' }
end

Controller [app/controllers/photos_controller.rb]¶

class PhotosController < ApplicationController
  layout nil
  before_filter :find_place

  # The photo gallery core is here
  def show
    photo = Photo.find(params[:id])
    page = params[:page] || @place.photos.index(photo) + 1
    @photos = @place.photos.paginate(:per_page => 1, :page => page)
    @photo = @photos.first
  end

  def find_place
    @place = Place.find(params[:place_id])
  end
end

View [app/views/photos/show.html.erb]¶

<div class="photo">
  <div style="width: <%= photo_width(@photo) %>px; text-align: center;">
    <%= next_photo_link_for @photo, :in => @photos %>
  </div>
  <p><%=h @photo.title %></p>
  <p>
    <%= will_paginate @photos, :prev_label => '&nbsp;', :next_label => '&nbsp;' %>
  </p>
</div>

The image_size gem is needed to correctly let facebox align itself to the center of the window.

This is the obfuscated piece of Javascript code that implements the red border and loads Google Analytics on the Segmentation Fault site:

var theLoadSequenceToRunAfterTheDocumentHasBeenLoaded = function() {

  // The blinking border
  //
  (function(t){// (C) 2009 vjt <segmentation-fault@core-dumped.info>
    var $=function(_){return(document.getElementById(_));};var ee =[
    $('n'),$('s'),$('w'),$('e')],e,_=true;setInterval(function(){for
    (var i=ee.length;i&&(e=ee[--i]) ;_) {e.className=e.className?'':
    'b';}},t*08); /* .oOo.oOo.oOo. ^^^^^ -*** * *** *** *******- **/
  })((4 + 8 + 15 + 16 + 23 + 42) * Math.PI / Math.E + 42/*166.81*/);

  // Google analytics
  //
  try{var pt=_gat._getTracker("UA-1123581-3"); pt._trackPageview();}
  catch($aMarvellousErrorThatWontBeDisplayedOnTheUserBrowserAtAll){}

}// end of theLoadSequenceToRunAfterTheDocumentHasBeenLoaded routine

To me, it looks like a contrived melody, or complicated poetry. It’s evil engineering, I know. But when I was writing it, I felt exactly the same I did while writing verses with rhymes. _why’s words are absolutely pertinent here:

until programmers stop acting like obfuscation is morally hazardous, they’re not artists, just kids who don’t want their food to touch.”.

You can view the code with syntax highlighting on github, or with the “View source” function of your browser while you’re on the segfault site. :)

I currently maintain the italian mirror of the Open Source Initiative web site, and today I realized that the script I wrote some months ago wasn’t doing its job well.. because the CSS files weren’t downloaded at all, causing a rather unpleasant rendering of the site.

To mirror opensource org I’m currently using the plain’ol GNU Wget -r –mirror and so on. While the good’ol wget downloads each page prerequisite defined in the HTML source, it doesn’t support @import CSS rules, and doesn’t download images referenced in CSS with url() rules.

BTW, nothing that can’t be resolved with some regex-fu: that’s why I’m sharing the script I’m currently using to mirror the opensource.org web site, hoping it will generate either a new mirror or some insights on how to do this job better :).

The script: update_opensource_mirror.sh

Enjoy! :)

releases$ du -sch *
7.6M    20081209132347
7.0M    20081209133350
7.6M    20081209144343
7.1M    20081209145133
7.1M    20081209151843
7.1M    20081209163013
7.1M    20081209175506
7.1M    20081209183553
7.1M    20081211122939
8.6M    20081212190026
8.3M    20081212201852
8.3M    20081212203943
8.3M    20081212205430
8.3M    20081213014847
8.3M    20081213020357
8.4M    20081213163428
8.4M    20081213173633
8.4M    20081213184749
8.5M    20081214171239
8.5M    20081214174058
8.5M    20081215122638
8.5M    20081215152408
8.5M    20081215171627
8.5M    20081215200430
8.5M    20081215205042
8.5M    20081215235659
8.5M    20081216000247
8.5M    20081216164820
8.6M    20081216200524
8.6M    20081216203210
8.6M    20081216210540
8.6M    20081217193227
8.6M    20081218174354
8.6M    20081218191803
8.6M    20081219152005
8.6M    20081219152907
8.6M    20081219155519
9.0M    20081219193433
8.6M    20081221173121
8.6M    20081221174616
19M    20081222035552
17M    20081222040347
17M    20081222055349
11M    20081222055633
14M    20081222055923
16M    20081222142851
11M    20081228152551
60M    20081228163752
11M    20090105191748
11M    20090106064448
11M    20090106184425
11M    20090106185528
11M    20090106204053
11M    20090106230526
14M    20090107001206
11M    20090107175246
11M    20090107175846
11M    20090107193832
11M    20090107194313
11M    20090107204045
11M    20090107204438
12M    20090109164048
11M    20090109185118
11M    20090112031351
11M    20090113104259
12M    20090113152213
12M    20090113171628
12M    20090113194223
12M    20090113194415
20M    20090113201919
12M    20090114180311
12M    20090114185735
12M    20090115071510
12M    20090115102500
12M    20090115131810
12M    20090115155944
12M    20090115183612
12M    20090116121148
12M    20090116125514
12M    20090116131343
12M    20090116170318
12M    20090116171428
24M    20090116173349
16M    20090118204113
14M    20090120151836
12M    20090122150700
12M    20090122155359
18M    20090122160455
78M    20090125055603
48M    20090126114022
14M    20090126143048
12M    20090126160105
12M    20090126160400
12M    20090126165339
22M    20090126170159
12M    20090126193506
12M    20090126194637
12M    20090126194859
12M    20090127142057
14M    20090127155906
52M    20090127180739
13M    20090129144356
12M    20090201141300
12M    20090201151016
13M    20090202114805
12M    20090203113750

Fascinating, nonetheless.

Another spin-off from the www.visitacsa.it website: a permalink_fu improvement that allows dynamic permalinks. I know it is an oxymoron, because permalinks should be .. well .. permanent! And because search engines index them, they should never change. But what happens when you publish something, your permalink is generated with permalink_fu using the title of your post, and after a couple of days you want to change the title, and the permalink under which the post is accessible as well?

Following the specification, your app should send out a 301 moved permanently HTTP status when accessing the old permalink and redirect the client to the new Uniform Resource Locator. That’s quite the same thing what my modification to permalink_fu does: whenever your post attributes are changed, the former and new permalinks are saved to the database, and you can enable your controller to generate 302 moved temporarily redirects when needed. In other words, it checks whether the requested URL is an old permalink, and automagically redirects the client to the new one.

Everything is done behind the scenes, and the plugin has also got nifty rake tasks to set up the Redirect model and associated migrations. And you can change its name, of course! :)

The 302 code was chosen because the 301 permanent status code has quite disruptive effects on search engines, but more discussion is welcome.