mindlace

For my own edification and to facilitate the addition of UUIDs to Drupal, I have used SchemaSpy to create an overview of Drupal’s database schema as generated by today’s HEAD.

I have begun my quest to convert Drupal over to using UUIDs instead of IDs so that merging/branching drupal databases will be easier.

The first thing to figure out is how best to generate UUIDs in PHP. The naive pure-php approaches that use rand() have quickly proven to be non-viable (generating 10 of them hasn’t completed after several minutes), at least on my test virtual machine, presumably on account of running out of randomness.

The OSSP UUID module for PHP5 is much better, generating 60k “type 4″ (completely random) uuids per second. However, the memory usage grows the more UUIDs you generate, so that could be an issue. So despite the fact that this module implies a C module that has to be available to PHP, I’m going to use it.

I will try to keep my implementation open to creating UUIDs in the DB, as PostgreSQL uses the same library to create UUIDs, so no sense in reinventing the wheel. MySQL UUIDs are broken in any sort of replicated environment (in that you can get the same UUID repeatedly from a given SELECT UUID();) so I must have a language-level version available.

So now that I’ve elected to settle on the OSSP UUID module, I can take the next steps towards making it work in Drupal.

So today I discover that, not only have I received a low winning bid on my auction of my old G5, but my PayPal account access was limited, because “We have observed activity in this account that is unusual or potentially high risk.” Initially, PayPal asked me to confirm my address and SSN, called me to be sure I was me, and made me provide a tracking number for the machine I’d shipped. I did so, providing PayPal with proof that I am the same meat person who has had an account with them for 6 years.

Here’s where it gets wierd. They decide I’m still suspicious: in fact, at this point Amber, a PayPal employee, suspects I stole the G5 I sold on ebay:

Please complete the steps below so that we may review your account further:

- Fax copies of the original bills of sale or invoices referencing your purchase or acquisition of the items you are selling along with the name and telephone number of your supplier(s)

If you are faxing information, you must use the cover page provided by PayPal. The cover page contains information specific to you and using it ensures that your documents are routed and handled in a timely manner. To print the cover page, log into your account and click on the fax documents link on the “Limited Account Access Details” page.

The best part about this email is that there is no fax documents link, nor any page with that title. (a case where an href is worth a hundred words.)
So now I have to dig up proof that the machine is mine, something slightly complicated by the fact that Vika bought it for me.

The main interesting bits here are:

1. I was declared suspicious by an algorithm.
2. The algorithm’s ‘reasoning’ is deliberately obfuscated from me.
3. The human (Amber) who reviewed the case made the situation worse, not better, and demanded I follow impossible instructions.
4. The human I called could do nothing save modify the page to show the link.

Between this, identity theft and no-fly lists, I’m feeling like we’re well on our way to computer mediated injustice, where algorithms will be judge, jury, and executioner, and the targets will be so random that no effective defence will be mounted.

Anyway, this really shows up my “PayPal is grand” perkiness of the past. I’ll use craigslist instead of ebay to sell anything else, and will try to avoid paypal if at all possible.

Weird, how pointlessly wrong one’s feelings about corporations can be. I had warm fuzzies about PayPal- they’d made my financial life much easier, in the past- but this frisking really blows it. It’s like someone you’d been casually seeing for a while turn paranoid and accusatory for no good reason.

Missed the beginning – now we’re talking about what average users do. A bunch of examples of how people are deeply confused by the frequency of crappy links.

Survey person gets deep into a survey on internet searches. They gave up because it’s too contextual. Early adopters search different from later adopters. What kind of data you’re searching for is different as well.

Everyone starts off as skeptics. Most worrisome is commercial ties. They don’t mind political bias but don’t like commercial bias. People can be fooled. People assign credibility to bells & whistles.

People get to a point where they get confused. They send the information around to get second opinion. Use links to start conversation between human beings. Many points for actually talking about what links are about.

New gent – information seeking process is iterative. Helped create new field of information architecture. Spent last few years helping sites organize their stuff. Heart of his practice is to enable people to move between modes of browsing & searching.

Looked into human computer interaction. Learning to use human testing was humbling because people have problems. Noticed power of words; single words in a link or title helps. If they recognize a word they’ll click.

Started looking into various dimentions of the experience and hit on “findability” as the thing he wanted to follow. Wrote a book called Ambient Findability (Must be Peter Morville.

New gent says “links are the architecture of the web”. Says NYTimes is filled with links that point inward.

Another gent starts talking about how google is all about popularity and that infamy/fame are equivalent.

Went to the loo, and now they’re talking about how it might be nice to add additional information to links. There’s some agreement that it should be available.

35% of adults have created content, 57% of teens have.

Question: how to improve users. One answer: “the users use the wrong keywords” Another: “Taking thing as face value” – he suggests that people clicking on first 10 links are taking things as face falue; it seems rather to me that people clicking on the first 10 links are just trying to optimize their time.

Most people don’t live lives online like we do. Audience participant is saying that a study has shown that people will prefer the convenient answer over a better answer. A response is that people sometimes do search diligently. Another answer is every 100ft you get away from library, the # of people using it drops off. He also mentions that many people aren’t willing to slog through the dross to get to databases that have quality information.

A bit of a tangent onto sex info. Now they’re talking about how using web resources often makes it hard to get information (e.g. citation information) about a page.

We’re getting an overview of mapmaking and how its useful – the Mark Monmonier discusses weather sites. Then he gets into political remapping- the impact here is quite large.

Jeremy Crampton talks about “transformation” as a motiviation for blogging. Personal transformation (self discovery, Focault’s technology of the self). Second is sociopolitical transformation, or changing people’s thinking. This gathering is taking place at same time as Yearly Kos (daily Kos con). Kos wrote a book about trying to get around the traditional political approach.

He’s talking about map mashups as a transformative tool, particularly as a political one. Shows us a map of pennysylvania showing the voting records from the last presidential election, showing turnout + who voted- referring to the Atlas of US presidential elections.

Martin Dodge discusses how the internet graphs aren’t really a map but an algorithm perspective of nodes. He’s interested in bringing these points back onto the map and further looking at how the place that internet conversations are occuring is relevant.

Alexander Halavais starts with “If you fly on JetBlue, gradually you will come to believe that Chicago doesn’t exist”. Satellite photo of the conference location is nice but useless b/c it doesn’t show you where you can go. Information maps help show us where we could go in society.

How often do links cross world boundaries. Shows us a map of the US that show where they link. Turns out that all links lead to NYC. He says that listening to people have dinner conversations.
Mary Hodder starts in with this rocking video that says “we are the media” that really pumps out on the speakers in this room until some soul turns it down to mellowness; it ends with a link to josh leo’s blog.

Shows off this click-tracking website that lets you see everything some person has clicked on and see click trends and that sort of thing.

Stefaan Verhurlst talks a bit about famous Belgian map makers (eg Mercator) then gives a nice little graphic on mapmakers as change agents. He says they’re codifying and mediating existence by framing the perception of reality and also by guiding and navigating people.

Shows the european history of maps … I’d like to see the knot maps of polynesians and incans, but it looks like that’s off the board.

He argues that we now have the paradigm of interdependence(?!) because of … something about internet maps, I didn’t quite catch it.

Three unresolved issues: Identity, location, and policy(?). Policy/mediators are important. Dual use of technology- good and bad he says.

I asked about mapping non-earth info into some sort of sensible form; response was “no good way to do that yet” and “we’re trying to figure out how to take thousands of dimensions and mapping them to two, and there’s a lot of information loss”

Hodder makes the point that links need to be able to indicate more information – a lot of subtleties are lost in the simple links. It’s nice to finally hear something about how links might evolve at this hyperlinked conference.

A gent is asking a question wherein he bags my “ball of string” metaphor and says they can be useful because “maps display information”… but it seems to me like the line graph map we’ve seen so far has been a bundle of lines… and the whole problem is I don’t get what it’s supposed to be telling me.

Missed the beginning of the third talk while searching for watts – now I’m off in another room with a video feed and watts.

After a presentation about political linking, we get to hear from the very first woman: Lada Adamic. Needless to say she’s actually talking about social influence of linking. She starts with a reference to a viral marketing scheme, then goes on to follow the spread of links to Giant Microbes. Then there’s a discussion of a meta-blog thread- her main point is that as a network it stayed within a community.

Then a political blogs distribution, showing political people don’t link to each other.

Next is the CEO of Sphere.com, Tony Conrad. He talks about using temporal attributes as a way to track some of the metrics of influence.

Up next is Matthew Hurst, who at Nielsen BuzzMetrics maps how people perceive companies. He attempts to infer communities from blog links.

When he gets to the core of the blogosphere, and rates them according to their inbound links. Looks like a big ball of string and has the usual suspects.

Mark from MSFT points out that observation leaves trails in the net vs. no record in meatspace. He shows patterns of replies in newsgroups. Indicates there’s not very equivalent participation. Talks about answer person- 2/3 of everyone that participates in usenet post once and never again. 2% are folks that reply to everyone (he calls them answer people) that live in certain ecologies – q&a web boards. Also talks about dissussers.

Took a brief break to post another part of my biomass-for-fuel schtick.

Tom Conrad made the point earlier that the best way to get noticed by his searchiness is to stay monofocused on one topic. This probably explains why he has such a simple view of what blogs are about (news, tech, politics). Might also explain why I’m off the radar

Now trying to figure out Consumers with blog analytics… to me that’s as boring as dirt, but whatever.

Microsoft fellow suggests that Personally Identifiable Information is “plutonium” for MSFT and they try hard to avoid it.

I guess the bothersome thing about this discussion was that “influence” stayed implicit. From what I can tell “influence” revolved around links created after a link was created. This is a fairly interesting notion, but it doesn’t address the issue of how people are influenced behaviourally by web content.

Saul Hansell talks about how “web 2.0″ unbundles content. Talks about how pieces have to justify their economic existence.

Martin Nisenholz of the NYTimes talks about driving people to the package from the pieces as a counter to that.

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) talks about how he has a very small number of employees and a larger reach that About.com. Communities can build content that people are interested in and be self-supporting.

Ethan Zuckerman – A lot of the old models haven’t done a particularly good job of covering the developing world. Aggregation of individuals in developing world can enhance the communication from developing world. It is incredibly subversive, blogging happens in countries with closed media but some digital stuff. Suddenly it allows you to reach an international audience. Watching Ethiopia closely- had open media, cracked down. Now online space brings together Ethiopians in the country, Ethiopans in the diaspora, and people interested in Ethiopian issues. Makes linking part of the community which changes the way people write.

Throw out all communally created goods and you wouldn’t miss them(?!), says Nicholas Carr. Individually created goods are the ones that matter. He thinks that Wikipedia is bad because it sucks the air out of commercially produced encyclopedia.

Jimmy Wales comes back saying that their process has become more open. Also points out that german-language encyclopedia has increased sales 30% despite the german-language wikipedia being more popular than the english one.

Nisenholtz talks about how he has different readers on nytimes.com that want different things.

Ethan Zuckerman says that non-professionals have a different view of things.

The whole thing gets derailed into a professionalism-non professionalism debate and some sillyness about the quality of wikipedia pages. Not sure what this has to do with links.

Niesenholtz poses the notion that we’re creating a society where people can’t pay attention because we’ll just skim. Amounts to a “kids these days” argument; pretty much everything he’s said has been controversial via simple and largely inaccurate contrariness.

So here I am at the hyperlinked society conference put on by the University of Pennsylvania. I’m mostly riding my wife’s coattails, as she is a Humanities Computing (nigh) PhD, and I am a mere Biology undergraduate.

However, I’m interested in implementing a bidirectional hyperlink system using a distributed hash table. So it is interesting to me to see what the august speakers at this conference have to say on the subject.

So far, my impression is that everyone is fully enmeshed in unidirectional links. It should be interesting to see what “Web 2.0 links” is going to be about. They’re definitely talking about the social implications of links, and that will be very helpful.

Many of the speakers are old media folks that have embraced new media, and people that have spent a lot of time thinking about marketing on the internet- only a few are coming from scientist backgrounds or non-journalism industry; Jimmy Wales seems to be the only “pure play” fellow on the panels.

Here goes Tony Gentile, talking from the perspective of Healthline. He’s talking about the importance of purchasing good links from google etc, optimizing pages for search engines to get free links, and contractural linking requirements.

So the next Tom is a marketing fellow who is “trying to help clients get more ‘linked in’ so to speak” but he’s also a net-citizen. He thinks google is a turning point.

Complains about link-spam, argues that search engines made it happen by making links valuable w/r/t PageRank. IMO this is just a side effect of unidirectional linkage & lack of attribution (don’t know who posts “really”).

Spamblogs are eroding value of links.

Now Eric Pichard, a guy who works for Microsoft’s ad-farm. He talks about how for the “very first time” there are ads in games. This comes as a surprise to me, as I was sold .

Microsoft is an “ecosystem company” according to him … he says they “support the ecosystems” they work in. I would call them good gardeners of their walled gardens, esp. the OS does. Claims web properties support the ecosystem and the MSFT search engine does too.

Moderator is back, suggesting that mass-media is coming apart, that people aren’t masses. Mass media connected us “up” to bigger groups – cov’t, producers, etc. Disruption of internet is connecting us across.

Weblogs lets him write without editing.
First questioner spends most of his time making declarative statements. There’s a discussion of how one can’t get a linkback through talking.

The MSFT guy says people blog for three reasons: Family, Fame, and Fortune. I think that is a bit misleading, as my primary interest is in collaboration and… I dunno, informing? Teh Internets of things I’ve learned. I guess that can be folded into fame but it seems to oversimplify.

I asked how one disambiguates the value between advertising links and spam links. A good reply from the Medlink fellow is that you can differentiate between your contribution and others. The moderator says he gets to skip it.

Dave Weinberger says the web architecture is links. Talks about social vs. commercial value of links. Says he’s set up a channel. Not sure where he’s going- there might be a question here somewhere.

Joshua Greenberg finally brings up the point of increasing the semantic value of links and cogently explains the dilemma of the binary unideractional link. The Medline guy agrees. MSFT fellow says “we’re working on it” says MS Spaces helps “Family” type bloggers. He talks about how MS Spaces supports livejournal-style visibility constraints.

That’s the end of my blogging for the first talk; will start a new post with the next.

If anyone has had trouble with my site lately, I apologize.

I’ve had this ongoing problem with the default .htaccess file provided by Wordpress 2.0. It wants to match every incoming URL either to a wordpress page or to a 404 document. Since I use directives in the configuration file to map to things (like trac) that have no ‘real’ filesystem location, and directives (and, by extension, their .htaccess rules) take precedence over directives, I was always getting 404’s for these virtual locations.
I spent a rediculous amount of time trying to get the Location directive to be handled; as close as I came was trying to use RewriteCond to check for a valid URL. I think, in the end of it all, there’s a problem with the way that RewriteCond handles the -u flag; I expected a “valid url” to include Location-registered urls, which the documentation implies but apparently is not the behaviour (on Apache 2.0.55) I get.
Anyway, finally I gave up: I added

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

to the VirtualHost. This kinda sucks because it means every permalink falls all the way through the url-mapping process before finally being rendered, but at least it means that pages render properly and my virtual sub-paths work.