Tag Archives: internet

the culture and technology of, and participants in, the internet

(URL) Hacking Facebook

I got a Facebook invite from someone I haven’t seen in years. Awesome! Unfortunately, my long-lost friend used a very old email of mine. This is to be expected; I haven’t seen or corresponded with him in years. Facebook wanted me to sign up using this jurassic email in order to accept the invitation.

I tried logging in to Facebook and looking at the invitation again. No luck. Viewing the invitation while logged in silently failed, sending me to the Facebook home screen, with no error message.

Next, I tried searching for my friend on Facebook. Armed with his first and last name, and his email, I found that there was no way whatsoever to find him. I don’t use any of the popular web-mail programs or email clients that Facebook can import from, because I’m a hella old-school motherfucker.

My options now seem to be limited: spend the time to write a program to create a fake exported address book in one of the formats that Facebook accepts, or download and install a converter, like abook, in order to invite just one person, or just send my friend an email, explaining that Facebook sucks, and by the way, how the hell have you been?

I’m about to send that email, when I notice the invitation URL:

http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=XXXXXXXX&k=ZZZZZZZZZZ&r&v=2

That XXXXXXXXX looks suspiciously like a user id. So, I copy the id onto the facebook user profile URL:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=XXXXXXXXX

Voila! My friend’s profile, complete with a button to add him as a friend on Facebook.

Why is this so hard? What would be wrong with sending me a link to his profile in email, or detecting that I’m already logged in and showing me his profile rather that silently failing when I click on the invitation? Why can’t I just type in his name or his email and add him that way?

Facebook started out focused on the somewhat closed, school-oriented social scene, so the lack of ability to add people outside of preordained networks made some amount of sense, at some point. But they are clearly going for the whole market now, so it’s time to drop the draconian network boundaries entirely. The vast majority of my friends aren’t friends from past universities or previous jobs — they are friends from Real Life. No wonder I only have a paltry three friends on Facebook. Hell, I even have more friends on LinkedIn, and I hate LinkedIn.

What’s that? Facebook hasn’t noticed this problem because their users don’t have real lives? Come on, I’m sure that can’t be true. At least not anymore.

Eat your heart out, Google Browser Sync

I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend Glyphobet Browser Sync as an alternative to Google Browser Sync. Here it is:

rsync -av --delete user@remote.host:~/.mozilla/ .mozilla/

Some of the great advantages to Glyphobet Browser Sync include the fact that all your browser settings are transmitted securely over SSH, are password protected by UNiX file ownership and permissions,1 and do not require the presence of a large corporation with a dubious privacy & security track record. Plus Glyphobet Browser Sync takes advantage of industry standard technologies, just like MacOS X.

  1. Not all features available under MS Windows. [↩]

Why god Xerox PARC invented laptops

This afternoon, on the corner near my house, I noticed a homeless looking guy with a hand cart covered in black plastic bags holed up in the bus shelter in front of the corner coffee shop. Something didn’t look right, and on second glance I saw a cord hanging down from the bus shelter connected to his cart. At first I wondered if he had one of those intravenous bags on wheels. But it turned out he was getting online.

That’s right. Five minutes later, on my way back from the store, I took a closer look. He had plugged in to the light fixture inside the bus shelter with an extension cord, and he had a terribly beat-up flat screen hanging off of his cart. A keyboard lay on his lap as he sat cross legged on the concrete inside the bus shelter. Another keyboard stuck out of his cart. I can only assume he picked that spot because of the free wireless from the cafe behind him.

He also had all the stereotypical hallmarks of a homeless person — beat up clothes, dirty hands, scruffy beard, disheveled hair, tanned skin, and a cart wrapped in ripped black trash-bags. I couldn’t see what was on the screen — it was too bright out. I guess everybody needs their MySpace fix.

Get out of the way

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the W3C is stuck in 2001. Shape up. Quick. We don’t need to wait another five years for a grand unified theory of document presentation and mark-up. We need incremental improvements, and we needed them six years ago. If you don’t get with the program quickly, the industry is going to move on (CSS 2.2) without you (HTML 5).

It’s not you, babe. It’s not me either. It’s the website.

This is the story of a girl, a boy, and the website that came between them.

Many years ago now, I signed up for every online dating website I could find. I’ll spare you the list of excuses and protestations that I am actually capable of meeting girls in real life; all that matters is that I like to check out every website I can — because it’s my job, and because it’s interesting.

I once paid a little bit for what was, at the time, the best of the sites. To protect the icompeten– I mean, the innocent, I’ll just call this site www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com.

There’s a kind of paradox of profit in the online dating industry. To be a successfull company, you have to actually successfully connect people, which means they are no longer customers. Your customers are paying you — even if your site’s entirely ad-driven — to make them non-customers as quickly as possible. If there’s a clever way around this, I don’t know what it is.

Over the years, www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com got worse and worse. Although I initially paid for “credits” which could be used to send messages at any time, they converted to an exorbitant monthly fee system, and instituted a rigid caste system much like India had for centuries, with “Gold” (Desperate and loaded), “Silver” (Desperate or loaded, but not both), and “Standard” (Broke, sexually confused, deceased, or untouchable).

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Programming in GIF

I just got a spam job offer in email. One of the responsibilities was:

7. Programs in all common Web HTML formatting tools such as animated GIF and Java.

Guess I am behind the times with my Python and XSLT ski11z and PNG.

Ooh, and this position is in St. Louis, Missouri. Rad.