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 intolerable.
- 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 |
May 13, 2008
Minor niggles: inconsistent Firefox add-on options
I love Firefox, and have for many years. One of the best things about it is the ability to use add-ons to extend what the browser can do, or modify the way it already does things. However, this bugs me:
Would it be too hard for some of the authors of these add-ons to get together (possibly even mediated by someone from Mozilla) and agree on what their Tools menu entries look like? I think having them all in an Add-on options sub-menu would be a start.
Posted by Earle Martin at 2:09 PM in: firefox, niggles, software |
May 12, 2008
Drive-by OpenID advocacy
Of late I've been noticing movement in the OpenID world, with more and more sites beginning to take part. Unfortunately, more often than not, this has entailed sites setting themselves up to provide identities, but not accept them (as well critiqued by Chris Messina a few months back).
As the contented owner of an OpenID identity, I've come to appreciate the facility of being able to log into multiple websites with a single username and password. Who wouldn't? The legacy model of having multiple user names across different sites - am I hex, downlode, earlemartin, or earle? - to remember, and worse still, multiple passwords*, is looking increasingly outdated and confusing. Sites that don't give you any option but to enter your details (and often way too many details at that), and then not letting you transfer any of that data out, are disparagingly becoming known as identity silos.
An identity silo has been defined (interestingly, by the Information Commissioner's Office of the British Government) as:
An identity that is used to represent an individual in that person's dealings with a particular application and is not integrated with other identities that the person has.
So I decided the other day to make the rounds of some projects that I use on a regular basis, and ask them what they think about OpenID.
First up was LiveJournal. LiveJournal is where OpenID began, and an early first place to allow OpenID logins in some form. However, it is still impossible to link an OpenID identity with a LiveJournal account. In this post to the lj_dev community I ask what's happening. Official response comes there none; and some interesting replies point to much earlier (two years earlier, in fact) discussions in which, allegedly, promises were made to go further (and volunteer patches received) but nothing was done. Conclusion: LiveJournal no longer cares.
Next I stopped by the Wikimedia Foundation's wikitech-l mailing list for MediaWiki developers. The situation there appears to be that once they've concluded their work on unified login for all Wikimedia projects - which is close; as an admin on Wikipedia I've beta-tested it and it seems good - they can look into it. Which is great.
A query to FriendFeed's newsgroup got an enthusiastic user response, but nothing from the developers. The same for this thread in the Ohloh programming site's forums.
Asking the del.icio.us mailing list got no response at all.
Get Satisfaction are working on it (they already have OAuth support, which is good). Brightkite will "probably" do it, but they don't have a timescale for implementing it yet. Twitter have yet to reply a month after someone asked them in this GS thread.
I also asked the wiki-standards mailing list, which is comprised of wiki engine software authors, if they were looking to implementing support, and got a generally positive response.
So that's what I did. You can help out, by asking the people whose software you use if they're planning to implement support. Be sure also to stop by OpenID, please! and vote for your favorite applications.
*Or even worse than that, having a standard password for web stuff (come on, most people do) that varies in some small way across sites due to local restrictions on possible passwords. Ugh.
Posted by Earle Martin at 6:04 PM in: Brightkite, FriendFeed, MediaWiki, OpenID, Twitter, identity |
