System Administrators, Let's Hang Out

I found this question on one of my favorite tech help sites, serverfault.com. It's a wonderful wonderful resource for help (totally free!) for people who are system administrators by day and geeks by night. It's actually one of the "trilogy" of websites; there's serverfault for admins, stackoverflow.com for programmers, and superuser.com for "power users".

One of the things that seems to be underserved on the webbertubes is a good community for system administrators and geeks. The closest I've really found so far is serverfault, but really it's a help site; you have a question, you get answers from peers (that are vetted and voted up or down by peers as well). But a social site for geeks?

So someone asked where system admins go online to "hang out" and be geeky. There seem to be some good leads with that question, but still it's not flooded with answers. Weird...you'd think that the Internet would have some good sources of respite from neurotypicals online.

Part of me wonders if in general sysadmins are antisocial even in an environment as socially hostile as the Internet to the point where they can't even bother to show up at online hangouts made for them.

At any rate for now I get a good geek fix from Serverfault. If you're a programmer, check out Stackoverflow or if you're just a power user go to Superuser. If you have an interest in...just about anything else, check out the Stackexchange site, where there are sites using the Stackoverflow engine to run specialty sites for asking and getting advice on everything from parenting to World of Warcraft. Okay, maybe not tons of sites yet, and directories are being created but it is growing rapidly...check them out and let me know if you've found any gems in these sites! It would be great if I managed to give a reader something useful to work with.

Been Playing on Twitter

I've been playing with my Twitter account a bit. I turned to it as an alternative to Facebook, which seems to be largely a cesspool of stupid non-authoritative "quizzes" and little games that you play and brag about how many jewels you've accumulated or how your virtual garden is doing instead of actually growing vegetables in the real world. The one thing I did enjoy doing...getting updates on people I've lost touch with...becomes overshadowed by crap.
I've been playing with my Twitter account a bit. I turned to it as an alternative to Facebook, which seems to be largely a cesspool of stupid non-authoritative "quizzes" and little games that you play and brag about how many jewels you've accumulated or how your virtual garden is doing instead of actually growing vegetables in the real world. The one thing I did enjoy doing...getting updates on people I've lost touch with...becomes overshadowed by crap.

Before this goes too far off base, I started using Twitter. Here are some observations:

Bots are remarkably prevalent on Twitter. And they get shut down really fast. I was followed within minutes when I created an account by two "hot babes" that wanted to have me "get to know them better". Periodically I'm still being followed by bots. The accounts are shut down almost immediately though.

Some people really like using their celebrity status to advertise. Constantly. One person I respected as an actor kept plugging a product every other tweet. I no longer respect him so much.

I've yet to really find a compelling reason to use Twitter for an actual purpose. It's very possible that I'm simply the most boring person in the world. I hear people like Mur Lafferty and Jeff Atwood say they'll post a question on Twitter and within minutes they get replies. This leads me to suspect that Twitter is a really useful thing if you already have a small army of followers. For people like me...not so much.

I try using it to kind of keep tabs on my day. So far only my wife reads it. My own reader is kind of a pain because many of them apparently don't archive the tweets well or sort them very well. At least blog readers have archives and search.

I do get the occasional useful link or story. There one that Mur posted about that I started following because the woman literally posts new tips for writers every half hour. The problem is the previously mentioned issue with keeping up with the tweets to sort out the useful stuff after being out and about for the day.

Twitter for me seems to be like my blog only on a far more massive scale. While this blog is a small splash in an olympic pool, a tiny little ripple, Twitter is like someone peeing in the ocean. If I'm barely keeping my head above water out here on the blogosphere, Twitter drowns your voice clear out.

On the other hand, I do like some of the things I can find out there. It's a balancing act not to get inundated with information but there are good tidbits to dig out. I'm simply a little disappointed that I'm not a good producer of interesting content.

So is it that Twitter is simply littered with a lot of mind droppings from tweens and people who can't spell until the signal to noise ratio is simply too high to reasonably use if you don

Before this goes too far off base, I started using Twitter. Here are some observations:

Bots are remarkably prevalent on Twitter. And they get shut down really fast. I was followed within minutes when I created an account by two "hot babes" that wanted to have me "get to know them better". Periodically I'm still being followed by bots. The accounts are shut down almost immediately though.

Some people really like using their celebrity status to advertise. Constantly. One person I respected as an actor kept plugging a product every other tweet. I no longer respect him so much.

I've yet to really find a compelling reason to use Twitter for an actual purpose. It's very possible that I'm simply the most boring person in the world. I hear people like Mur Lafferty and Jeff Atwood say they'll post a question on Twitter and within minutes they get replies. This leads me to suspect that Twitter is a really useful thing if you already have a small army of followers. For people like me...not so much.

I try using it to kind of keep tabs on my day. So far only my wife reads it. My own reader is kind of a pain because many of them apparently don't archive the tweets well or sort them very well. At least blog readers have archives and search.

I do get the occasional useful link or story. There one that Mur posted about that I started following because the woman literally posts new tips for writers every half hour. The problem is the previously mentioned issue with keeping up with the tweets to sort out the useful stuff after being out and about for the day.

Twitter for me seems to be like my blog only on a far more massive scale. While this blog is a small splash in an olympic pool, a tiny little ripple, Twitter is like someone peeing in the ocean. If I'm barely keeping my head above water out here on the blogosphere, Twitter drowns your voice clear out.

On the other hand, I do like some of the things I can find out there. It's a balancing act not to get inundated with information but there are good tidbits to dig out. I'm simply a little disappointed that I'm not a good producer of interesting content.

So is it that Twitter is simply littered with a lot of mind droppings from tweens and people who can't spell until the signal to noise ratio is simply too high to reasonably use if you don't already have an audience? Or is the blame squarely on the twitter user if they're not interesting enough to gain an audience of anything that isn't a bot?

I Hate Blogger Usability Bugs (and Website Bugs in General)

I've spoken about neat features with Blogger involving pre-writing blogs and posting them with a "Scheduled" feature so I can write, say, blogs for the next three days and have them automatically appear. I can take a weekend off while still keeping content flowing.

But there are real glitches that, to put it lightly, tick me off.

I decided to find out what would happen if you have a brain fart and forget that September has 30 days. I scheduled an entry for September 31st.

The intelligent thing to do is for the application to see that you scheduled something for 9/30+1 day, and wrap it to 10/1 automatically.

This doesn't work. It publishes it immediately. That review for Diet Myths I did on 9/13? It was supposed to be today's entry.

Oh! I'll go back and edit the date so it appears later on. No harm, right?

No dice. I could probably delete the post and put it in as a new one, but otherwise...nope. Oh, it changed the date alright. On 9/13, when I wrote it the entry was still there but the blog entry was still visible. It just had the date set to 10/1 at the top.

Argh! So what then? Every day it stays at the top, since the date is set in the future, and visitors to the site will see it every day as my most recent story?

Not only is it bad form but my Aspergian mind would probably warp itself until it imploded at seeing something so out of whack. I immediately changed the date back to 9/13 and kept two blog posts for the day, resigned to the fact that I would just have to have it appear earlier than I planned. I filled in the entry that it was supposed to take with a bitching rant on poor usability. This entry.

Seems like Blogger would be better fleshed out. Apparently not. So if you're taking advantage of the pre-dating and pre-scheduling features of Blogger, keep in mind it's too stupid to adjust for your mind farts when it comes to dating items.

Along the same line glitches and bugs can occur in more serious forms. I noticed a bug in my primary bank's website. I was logged in checking on funds for paying bills, a really wonderful fun activity. I saw my wife hadn't transferred funds in yet. I asked her about it, she sighed, signed in on her computer, and transferred some money in so I could pay bills.

I viewed my accounts. No money changed. I viewed account details, and I saw the amount she transferred in; but it wasn't showing up under the totals. I switched views, refreshed, everything. The amount she transferred showed up under details but would NOT show up under available amounts. I logged off the bank site and logged back in, then everything showed up just fine.

Apparently the bank software doesn't handle changes made to the joint account when the two owners of said account are manipulating it at the same time. This is a DEFINITE possible exploit, and given enough time I'm sure there's some way to use this information to a black hat hacker's advantage. At a bare minimum it shows some poor programming protection for the site, and it also is annoying as hell to think they didn't think that it would be possible for a joint checking account to be accessed by the owners at the same time, and apparently it may have issues with handling changes in amounts showing up properly.

I'm sure there's plenty of behind-the-scenes reasons that this is a problem. I don't care. For the end user, this shouldn't be an issue.

That's the end of my complaints for web applications for now. It's a little scary that sites accessible by so many on the webbertubes could possibly take advantage of glitches, bugs, and outright security holes on websites holding my personal information. At worst, they're annoyances, like the one I found in Blogger. It's elementary that the application should compensate for something as simple as the user screwing up a date, and when there's a mistake it should be able to know that the user is trying to schedule the entry to show up in the future and thus if the date is greater than the current date, hide the damn thing. At worst, the site is showing a potential condition that can be taken advantage of, like the one I found with the banking site. It could be innocuous but glitches like that in the hands of math and logic geniuses can lead to some really interesting exploits (don't believe me? Read the story about Mac keyboards having their firmware exploited. Yes, that's right, your keyboard would be used to spy on you.)

Twitter as a Teeny Bit of Microblogging Fun

I finally did it. I broke down and created a Twitter account.

For those who have been hiding in the desert for the past couple years, Twitter is a microblogging site that lets you post quick messages, 140 characters or less, to legions of fans (or in my case, myself).

It's another social networking site; the kind I sort of blasted previously regarding Facebook. Twitter only has spambots, so far...I had three "girls" following me within two minutes (following means they're monitoring your "tweets", or updates) telling me how they loved hot guys. I blocked them right off the bat.

It's kind of neat in that it is convenient; I can send updates from my phone (unlimited texting to number 40404 after you register your phone), my iPod over wifi, my computer,...there's only about have a metric f***ton of applications dedicated to monitoring and updating your twitter account.

The truth is that I started monitoring several accounts from the web, and eventually it just got to be a pain in the butt. I had started checking in on a college student with a real knack for utilizing social media in ways most authors could probably take notes on (I don't know how she does it and still has a life to blog about!), a local journalist that gives some interesting insights to what people are like offscreen, Mur Lafferty (an author I have blogged about several times before), and a few others that are just really funny. I'm still expanding the number of people I'm following.

I wanted a way to consolidate them all from a simple interface; everything I installed, however, required me to register an account. So I registered. I set up my phone. I figured if I was going to have another account, I might as well give it an honest try before hating it.

I'm thinking of using it for notes, like web sites I want to make note of or notes to myself. I don't know yet. It might be a good tool for trying to get rid of my "wordiness" problem, since each tweet is limited to 140 characters.

The only thing I REALLY have to careful of is being too honest. It's too easy to want to spew some random brain fart that could land you in hot water, especially if it's about work or personal things. You can hide your tweets (make them "personal") so only friends can see them...but still, it's a risk that too many dippy teenagers (and a worrying number of adults) don't think about now. So basically I only post things that I wouldn't mind my mother seeing.

(Another issue is that with my brain's goofy wiring, I still say things that are inappropriate...so says my wife, anyway.)

Anyway it's an experiment. No, I can't share the link here since it can reveal a bit too much about my superhero identity. Some of you already may know who I am. Others, if you're really curious, feel free to leave a comment with info on how to contact you and if I am adequately removed from you professionally I'll let you know who I am.

MyLife.com : Be Careful Who You Sign Up With Online

I had an email arrive from a friend recently that raised an eyebrow. It said that my friend wanted me to confirm that I knew him to a site called MyLife.com.

Hmm...

This isn't the first time I've seen emails like this before, and the're almost always trouble. Usually the person named as the sender doesn't even know that "they" sent it to me...and like most of these sites, my suspicions were quickly confirmed.

Check it out:
"Just Say No To Mylife.Com"
"MyLife.Com: A New Tool for Bargain-Seeking Stalkers."

Things are rarely really "free"; in this case, these sites take it to a new extreme in order to invade your privacy. This website downloads your contact information on your email and social networking sites then contacts people in your name to try getting them hooked into their snare to further marketing efforts; and once you're in, good luck getting back out.

Much like urban legends perpetuated with emails by everyone and their grandma, these underhanded websites spring up all the time with various names and never seem to go away. By the time people realize what they're really up to it's too late. Your information is out there, and everyone you have in your email has been spammed. It's not like there's one or two of these...they change tactics periodically to escape having their tarnished name hinder profits; the articles I linked above reference a few other names that website company is associated with, for example.

The lesson here is to double and triple check the fine print of sites you're looking at signing up with. Do a Google search for the name of the site and the word "spam" or "scam" to see what, if anything, pops up...before you click that ok button. You may not know what you're actually allowing and all the security in the world won't protect your computer when you give permission to install or upload their weaselware. It should became a second nature just like verifying your emailed "I can't believe this outrageous claim" should be verified on Snopes before you help pass it on with the forward button.

I'm not mad at him. If anything I'm mad at the company for using such weasel tactics to take advantage of people on the Internet. Those web weasels are no better than spammers clogging our junk filters and choking our bandwidth with attempted hijacking of our computers and emails attempting to evade filters.

Facebook and Other Social Networking Value

I have a Facebook account. I was curious about just who I might know on the network; thought maybe I could find out some interesting things my classmates are up to now after so many years.

Small confession...if there's a Barry Atric there, it's not me. I'm techy, and occasionally techie, but not like here.

Anyway the primary reason I made the plunge was because I was looking for a few specific people from my college alma mater; I didn't find him there, but I did find many others that I thought had disappeared.

The web has plenty of tools available for people to use for expressing themselves in various ways (no, not talking about porn...although I guess there's venues for that too). Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, even Blogger...all wonderful sites for stroking your virtual ego to no end.

I lately have questioned the value of using Facebook. I occasionally see something interesting, like finding out about an old aquaintance being attacked by a dog or someone else getting lost on a hike in the woods and having to spend an extra day in the wilderness with her husband until finding their way out the next day.

Far more often, however, I see updates about how Billy wants me to join a mafia war (what the hell is that?), or some other bulb managed to get a high score playing a virtual gardener. Worse are the quizzes; I think they're originating from some dimwitted kindergarten class. I took one quiz off Facebook when I first saw an interesting one about Star Trek; one of the questions had an answer that was one-hundred percent wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

I was rather curious about this. That's when I discovered that other people write the quizzes. You don't need to be qualified in any way, shape, or form. Any idiot that can type can create some "wunderful" quiz for others to take and pass on like a meme-virus on Facebook.

So people are spending tons of time into a black hole of playing crappy games (get a Pogo account, people) and taking quizzes that are as meaningful as what any 12-year-old could come up with when they're not sharing small tidbits of their lives to their "friends". At least, I think they are friends. Apparently there's a group of people that make it their mission to "Friend" as many people as possible. I think it's like some form of virtual street cred or electronic Viagra for them to be able to say they can share the fact that Furball went poop on a pile of clean clothes (hee hee!) with 984 seemingly random individuals.

It's getting harder and harder to cull useful material out of Facebook. I went there hoping to reconnect with old friends. I did that to a degree. I found one person who I was remembering from old albums by finding a mutual friend. The person I was originally looking for? Again, friend of a friend, finally. I found out that the mutual friend was still in touch with him when I saw him post pictures of my lost aquaintences' second wedding on the website.

Yeah. He got married again. He was my best man at my wedding...and I wasn't invited to the second wedding.

Another friend I reconnected with acted like kind of a jerk to a ribbing I commented on. He deleted the whole thing and replied as if nothing had happened, but I was rather offended that he'd have said what he said. Well, written. Rather than make it worse I just didn't say much of anything other than, "Man,...that was harsh, don't you think?"

He erased that with his other comments, but still...it bugged me.

Really. What good is Facebook?

I contacted a few people, but they rarely say anything. It's a cacophy of people advertising themselves or some small highlight of the day, and once in awhile making comments about what someone else does. The little blurbs take on a life of their own for a few minutes before being drowned out by the latest game score someone managed to achieve in VeggiePatch or on some meaningless quiz.

Meanwhile I'm sinking time into Facebook that I could have used to write a story or try getting some time in learning a programming language. It's my own fault, I acknowledge that. But I think that maybe I should cut some of that time on Facebook.

I've noticed that most of the people populating it seem to be more concerned with themselves more than what their friends are up to. Maybe I'm just imagining it, but really, what do I accomplish by using it? Most people don't say much of anything about what I'm up to. Most probably don't even care. Once in awhile I'll get something from someone as feedback, and I try commenting on other active status updates, but most of the time...nada.

Lately I've just been posting song lyrics and whatever music video I happen to be listening to as a YouTube link. I don't bother investing energy in trying to use it as a conduit for keeping up with people's lives or having them keep up with mine. If it were something they were intersted in I think they'd have emailed me.

Or they'd already know about this blog. The only one that knows more about what's in my head is my insurance-mandated psychologist with my journal (yeah, I keep a journal...it's easier than running through things in-session most of the time and I don't think he spends enough time on the Webbertubes to read my blog. I'm not so sure even my doctors at the baritric office still read it at all, to tell the truth...)

So do you use Facebook or Myspace or the other sites? Why? I mean, do you get any benefits from using the site? Feel free to share...

A Search Engine That's Not Google?

I heard about this on a podcast recently and after trying the site I highly recommend it!

It's called Kosmix. It's a search engine that will sort information out for you...you put in a query and it will search Google and put results in one spot, it searches blogs and puts those in another, commercial sites, video sites, image sites, etc...neatly separating them out for you and presenting them in an easy to read format!

I may start using it more than I use Google since Google is one of the engines it uses in turn. Very nice. Just going to their home page (linked above) will give you some interesting news stories and feeds, and you can customize the page for your computer. Take a look and see what you think.