Tony Yarusso's Blog

So I had a thought recently, which seems like it may actually be useful. You may have heard the stories about ISPs inserting ads into every page their users load, as a (quite despicable) way of making extra revenue. (If you haven't, read about it here and here.) While that has no place whatsoever, the same process could potentially be used for more productive things, such as Amber Alerts. Those are already covered by radio, television, and highway signs, but imagine the response level of the Digg and Slashdot effect for that sort of thing. Simply put, the internet has a lot of users. Of course, it would be silly to get an alert for a missing child in Florida if you're in Alaska or something, so the system would need to be configured to specify it's behavior based on IP geolocation, which should be trivial to implement. So, if someone went missing in Ames, Iowa, and the timing of reports filed with police indicated that it could have happened as much as 8 hours ago, then every internet user within an 8-hour driving radius could immediately begin seeing an Amber Alert notice on pages they load. The affected IP range would increase as the time "in the wild" increased. Additionally, to minimize the annoyance factor, the alert could load only on the first couple of pages for any given computer, then go away, reappear once after one hour, three hours, six hours, and twelve hours briefly as a reminder, becoming less frequent. The same sort of thing could be used for high-profile criminals who have gotten loose.

Brilliant or useless/impractical - what do you think?

Thanks to Aaron Toponce for pointing this out; finally something that might help some of you understand the idea behind RSS. The direct link to the video is http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english. In short, the idea of RSS is to save everyone time and energy, which is why I very much appreciate it when people have RSS feeds to follow, as both of those things are in short supply much of the time. In case you hadn't noticed, my site has feeds that you can follow if you so choose (varies depending on which mirror you're reading - ask if you can't find it), in some cases both as RSS and Atom feed options.

If you don't like the online readers mentioned in the video, I recommend the Sage plugin for Firefox for those who like extensions in their browser, Liferea for a standalone application (Linux - Gnome, remember to use repos where applicable), Mozilla Thunderbird's built-in RSS capability if you want it in your e-mail program, and Planet if you're either just a python geek or want to make a publicly accessible web page aggregating multiple feeds.

The venerable Beeb is seeking our input, so take a few moments to give it to them if you can. The survey is regarding various new on-demand services and media that they intend to offer, and there are a few key points that we need to make sure they hear from the free software community about.

For one, they one of the four new services proposed is "Non-digital rights management (DRM) audio downloads over the internet (podcasting of selected radio programmes)". Let them know you're proud of them for not jumping on the DRM bandwagon, and that having fair use and playable content is important to you.

If you are limited on time, they invite people to "please feel free to respond only to those questions you feel are relevant to you" - here are a few I found of particular interest and/or importance:

Question 3 on the survey involves "The BBC Trust has proposed setting a limit of 30 days as the amount of time that programmes can be stored on a computer before being viewed....How long do you think consumers should be able to store BBC programmes on their computers before viewing them?" Many people I suspect have feelings on that, so make sure to check out that question.

Question 5 is "How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?" In my opinion, this is an absolutely crucial one for everyone to go answer, as proprietary media formats versus free ones is one of the most pressing issues in online content availability today. If you only have time for one, please make it this one. Feel free to drop them a line to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FreeFormats.

If you have time to read them, Question 11 may be of interest as well: "Do the revisions proposed to BBC Service Licences to allow the new services to go ahead seem appropriate?"

It's not often a major content provider invites input users to have some say over the direction they take in the near future - let's make this one count.

To participate in the survey, visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consult/open-consultations/ondemand_services.html, and for a bit of background see http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/research/iplayer-public-value-test.html as well.

Thanks to Pici from #ubuntu-offtopic for pointing out that my site was failing XHTML validation from the W3C. Took a quick poke at the stylesheet, and with the help of webben from #css got it all valid and still looking right. Let me know if there are any more problems!

Still a number of things to get working that will have to be for another day (I think my template might need modification to be "widget ready" for instance), but a lot of stuff is working, which is cool. Both of my cross-posting plugins are functional, as are the browser/os/country sniffing ones in the comments. Some of the others just need lines inserted (later). If anyone tries the email notifications subscription thingy, you'll have to let me know if it works - I haven't really tested it. Probably most entertaining is the statistics plugin (SlimStat), which tells me all kinds of things, including the fact that I had 225 visits on the first day of having a real post up, and that the majority of my visitors are using Firefox on Linux. Pretty cool.

Now, I did have a couple of issues with some plugins while getting going, and it seems that most of those stemmed from the fact that I'm running WordPress version 2.0 (what was in the Edgy repos), and the latest is 2.1, so a lot of the plugins are trying to use things that are only in the new version. Manually copying in some files from 2.1 seemed to do the trick for some, and some other tweaking on others for various reasons. I promised him I'd mention it, so big thanks to Cody Somerville for helping me through a bunch of that stuff, as well as alphaoide from #wordpress on Freenode.