March 16, 2009
De-crufting the new Facebook with Adblock Plus
Like a lot of people, I'm not all that impressed with the new Facebook. It's like a half-baked clone of both Twitter and FriendFeed.
The new "Highlights" column that appears on the right-hand side of your home page is particularly-poorly thought-out, presenting a mish-mash of items that your friends have interacted with and presenting applications that they've used. Not what they've done with the applications - just the applications themselves. This is largely useless. It also has an advertisement stuck right in the middle of it.
April post update: As if that wasn't bad enough, they've started treating "Pages" (the little mini-websites you can create in Facebook for people, places or things and to become a "fan" of - quite a good idea until now) as people, and they now appear in a "People You May Know" box. In addition to being wrongly titled, this is sheer noise - 99.9% totally irrelevant. It will be worse and worse as your friend list increases, as it's sourced from your friends' "fan" affiliations.
Thankfully, the marvellous Adblock Plus extension for Firefox allows you to hide page elements based on their style identities, so here are some filter rules I cooked up. To apply them, open your Adblock Plus preferences and choose "Add Filter" from the "Filter" menu, then paste in the code snippet of your choice.
- Remove the advertisement from the Highlights column:
#*(id^=highlights_ad)- Remove the contents of the Highlights column altogether:
#*(class^=UIHotStream)- Remove the "People You May Know" box:
#*(id^=pymk_hp_box)- Remove the "Connect With Friends" box (how many times are you gonna need it?):
#*(class^=UIConnectWithFriends)- Remove the rounded corners from all the user icons (I think they're ugly):
|http://www.facebook.com/images/ui/UIRoundedImage.png
Posted by Earle Martin at 7:47 PM in: Adblock Plus, Facebook, howto |
January 9, 2009
How to watch RealVideo-encoded video files in Ubuntu
I ran into problems opening a video file - neither Kaffeine, MPlayer nor Xine could open it due to a missing codec. MPlayer spewed out a lot of error messages like "Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: drv4.so.6.0, /usr/lib/codecs/drv4.so.6.0, /usr/lib/win32/drv4.so.6.0, /usr/local/lib/win32/drv4.so.6.0" and "Could not open required DirectShow codec drv43260.dll", and seemed unable to find a codec called drvc.so. It helpfully adds, "Read the RealVideo section of the DOCS!"
Unfortunately, if you do manage to track that down - it's in the README - you're told to download an archive of binary codecs and stick it in /usr/local/lib/codecs. This won't work, because the archive doesn't actually contain drvc.so, the one needed for RealVideo. If you search around, you'll find a lot of confused forum and mailing list posts, mostly unanswered, and a number advocating things like symlinking that directory to /usr/lib/codecs or /usr/lib/win32 or variants thereof. Ignore all of that completely, none of it will work, and even if you did manage to find the magic voodoo chicken incantation to make it work it would be an ugly and tedious way to do it.
Thankfully, I discovered in the course of searching for a solution that there's a great Ubuntu package repository called Medibuntu ("Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu"), which is "dedicated to distributing software that cannot be included in Ubuntu for various reasons, related to geographical variations in legislation regarding intellectual property, security and other issues". That includes various binary video codecs, including the RealVideo one. Here's what you need to do:
- Follow the Medibuntu repository instructions. (Note: I hadn't heard of the
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/directory before, and simply dumped the repository location directly into/etc/apt/sources.list, and it worked fine; but if you're not used to working directly with that file, just follow their instructions and it'll be dandy.) sudo apt-get install w32codecs(orw64codecsorppc-codecsdepending on your platform).
That's it! Your video players should now be able to cope with RealVideo files. Happy viewing.
Posted by Earle Martin at 12:14 AM in: Linux, Ubuntu, codecs, howto, video |
December 11, 2008
Perlsphere buttons!
For those of you who participate in Perlsphere, my aggregator for Perl blogs, I made a little badge that you might want to put somewhere on your blog to show you take part, and generate a little link-love:
I also did this alternative version, for the traditionalists among us.
Posted by Earle Martin at 3:48 PM in: Perl, Perlsphere |
December 8, 2008
Why I hate Flickr
Some parts of Flickr are really well done. Like the Organize screen; drag and drop works just the way you'd want it to. But there's plenty of stuff I really can't stand.
- The interface:
- The syrupy greetings and cutesy button labels and other cheesy trash. At first it was merely annoying, now it's unbelievably grating.
- The way forking out cash to Flickr for extra storage allocation gets you a little picture next to your name that says "pro". PROTIP: unless you make a living from your photographs, you're not.
- The massive lack of styling options for your album, oh, I'm sorry, "photostream" [sic] (ecch).
- The way Flickr think they know better than you.
- They nanny-edit your comments (ever tried writing something in all upper case? Think again).
- Maybe you like making empty folders, or sets, or whatever you want to call them, and then filling them up with stuff. Flickr's nauseously-named "Organizr" won't let you.
- The users:
- The camera-obsessive parts of the user base that think they're so goddamn great.
- The parts of the user base that leave twee little pictures in comments saying WOW GREAT PIC, YOU ARE INVITED TO THE PINK STAR AWESOME KITTY KAT PLATINUM PHOTO AWARD GROUP and other similar dreck.
- The technical failings:
- Linux users are second class citizens.
- "Collections can contain collections or sets (but not both). Collections can be nested 5 deep." Arbitrary restrictions, wonderful.
- Worst of all, everything is squashed into a stream. As this is the single way that almost everyone will see your pictures, it means that any organized collections of photographs that you have and upload to the site are presented to the viewer as a meaningless jumble of images, bereft of the sorting you've applied to them. This is almost intolerable.
However, my number-one hate feature of Flickr is a single, particular user.
Me.
Because I just gave up writing my own photo management software, after failing to finish it in over two years of dribs and drabs of development; and because due to that I just paid Flickr for an account because it's the easiest way for me to put my photos on the Web somewhere, even though it is so very hateful.
I have a very low tolerance threshold for annoyance, so I may well just delete the whole thing out of hand if the Flickr crud gets to me enough. At that point I'll probably give up for good on the whole idea of having my photos online; we'll see.
Dec. 18th 2008: I deleted everything. That's that.
Posted by Earle Martin at 11:50 PM in: ha ha only serious, web 2.0 |
July 28, 2008
Ordnance Survey Ontologies: Accidental Trojan Horse
As a Semantic Web wonk with a strong interest in geospatial issues, I was pleased to discover the Ordnance Survey's ontologies, which appear to be beautifully detailed. Until now, the OS have been little but the enemy of geospatial hackers in the UK, so it came as a surprise to me that they'd made a public-spirited effort like this.
Then I saw the license statement.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
And right there at the top of each ontology's source code is the line
<dc:rights>Crown Copyright 2008</dc:rights>
The license confirms my misgivings about the Ordnance Survey, in spades. Why? Because non-commercial licenses are not free. By using the OS vocabularies, you taint all your data. It is no longer open data (part of the wider field of open knowledge). And if someone uses it, thinking that it is, in a commercial project, they open themselves up to attack from the Ordnance Survey's lawyers (who have proven themselves time and again to be unsympathetic, confused or worse).
What a pity. Clearly a lot of work has been put into the project, but as currently licensed, these ontologies are data plague. Keep your information well away.
Posted by Earle Martin at 2:18 AM in: Ordnance Survey, Semantic Web, data, freedom, licenses, maps |
