Twitterfeed got me thinking. How long could I get a twitter-twitterfeed infinite recursion loop to go for? I created the infinatwit to put that question to the test by setting twitterfeed to follow infinatwit and post to infinatwit. I think the next step will be to see how many web 2.0 services I can combine to produce this effect. I think feedburner is next…

As one of the administrators for the ACM mailing list, I am used to dealing with a lot of spam at this point. Even with spam filtering, it used to be pretty terrible, until we made it more aggressive. Of course, none was going out to the list; it was really a difference between spam to review and spam that is auto-deleted. Mailman sucks, so my inbox gets filled with a lot of the bounces, which gmail spam filtering can handle nicely, but a select few can still get through. Spam is one of the most pointless things I can imagine, but at the very least, it usually includes a link, or some sort of ad. I got the same spam message a couple of times that didn’t quit follow that convention:

Subject: best
your life is crap

There were at two different from addresses and names, so it was pretty clear it was spam. The only purpose I could see to something like this spam is to reply back, desperate for answers. Maybe they were writing some huge long spam and hit send by accident a little too early, or there spam creation software sucks. What a strange piece of spam….

I was randomly browsing last night, when I came across some eBay sniping service. I was recently sniped in the last 5 seconds on a VAX I was bidding on, so I viewed the site with a mild degree of interest. I started to read through the user testimonial page when I noticed a little gem on the page. Each one seemed to be fine on its own; I never really trust these pages, but I could believe that these were real, until I noticed these two:

Not your Daddy’s Sniping Service!!!

March 27, 2007, by lambykins

Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Wm. Howard, citro_cell

This is the best one

March 24, 2007, by lobster_soss

Hello, I have used a few sniping services and none of them really did it for me. I found BidSlammer and it was just totally different. Very intuitive. I can move fast. Good job guys. Slam-It is awesome, BTW. Thanks, Jeff

It seems that the only things they bothered to change in these two were the title, month, “username,” and end line. The worst part is that they put these two right next to each other. I guess it just goes to show how much you can trust advertising.

I am not a huge fan of ads. I say that somewhat hypocritically as adSense proudly barfs somewhat random ads out on this page, none of which I really expect will ever click on, but that is besides the point ;). Anyway, I can normally block ads with adBlock, but social ads are trickier. Every social ad div has for a class:
feed_item clearfix social_ad
Each one is a seperate class. They do some trick so it is hard to override with a page wide css that doesn’t take out everything, so userContent.css and similar tricks are out. I ended up brute forcing it and writing a greasemonkey that does the job.

Download it here: hidefacebookfeedadsuser.js

Update: There is another class used as well. If I remember correctly, instead of social_ads, its ad_capsule with everything else the same.

Bill Gates came to the GSB today to speak about random crap.I was one of the 400 “lucky” students who got to see it. There was a lottery that was supposed to be randomized, but it definitely wasn’t. Extreme preference was given to CS people; it seemed like half of those from the department who applied got a ticket. I know at least 13 people from our department who got tickets, and I know just a couple on non-majors who got in. Business students likely also got preference. I had no complaints, and it does makes sense to give preference to us (maybe more if people actually used M$ crap in the department, but that is besides the point), but it was supposed to be random.

The talk touched on a lot of random. The talk was framed around the fact he was leaving M$ to work at his foundation full time. He had some “comedy” video made with lots of big names (Al Gore, George Clooney, Bono, Brian Williams, Hilliary Clinton, Obama, Warren Buffet, etc…); it seemed like it had a fairly high production value. He drives a Ford Focus in it, which just strikes me as strange since he is loaded; maybe it was meant to be funny. At one point, he is in a recording studio, where you can clearly make out a Mac in the background. Perhaps it was just a tactic to ease the audience into the ensuing bullshit.

He talked about his foundation a decent bit, which was somewhat interesting. I think he has picked a lot of very good and important things to fund, but I do not think it a great act of humanitarianism. I think it would have been near a crime to not give most of it away; it is only his duty. Besides, I do not thing the non-merits of his career give him the right to decide how much of the world’s philanthropy. Apparently, he is pulling many of the same games with the foundation as he did at Microsoft. I think that, in large part, Gates has hurt the software industry far more than he is helped it. The main thing that I think Microsoft has done for the computer revolution is make computers cheap; without Windows, the cheap knockoff would have probably never been successful.

As far as his other comments, I thought he made far more points against Microsoft’s role in the future of technology than for it. At one point, he discussed rich, intuitive graphical interfaces on the web; he started to list things: “computer maps, computer Earth…” I think he continued, but it was clear, I think including to him, that if he had said Google instead of computer, it would have made more sense. I forgot many of the other lines, but it just struck me Gates knew Microsoft was being beaten by the likes of Google, Amazon (at one point, he described a device like the Kindle as being part of the future), etc… I cannot remember much of what else he said along these lines, but it was along these same lines.

It moved onto questions after that….

I was hoping to ask something about the OLPC, but I ended up not after he addressed enough to invalidate the question. I wish I had gotten up though. Most of the questions were either about the foundation, some random computer thing (some confused, some boring), and then it got to the obligatory open source question. The person asked something along the lines of “open source something something business something something future.” Essentially, Gates said that business and open source are incompatible, and there are only a few circumstances where it made sense, etc…. I don’t remember a lot of it as I just started getting pissed. One of my friends just got up and left. He made it out to be some weird, anti-social thing. He compared the GPL to a virus. The best comment, however, was something about how open source developers cut hair during the day and work on software at night. My CS friends and I all think that various barber jokes should circulate the CS department for a while to follow. I couldn’t help but think of Stallman after hearing it. It was really just infuriating that he just lied so blatantly like that to us. Borja, a CS grad student, wrote up a better summary than me. Such is Gates.

SG had some dumb thing that was consistent with my opinion of it.

It would be nice to believe that the rest of the audience came away thinking that he was as much of a toolbag as I did, but there is definitely a reason that the talk was hosted the business school and not the CS department. My roommate Alex, who got in with a press pass, said most of the reporters there ate it all up. They were happy to give all sorts of free press to Gates and MicroSense (thats a joke, laugh).

I suppose it just reinforced what I already knew. I just had never really encountered it so first hand.

Inspired by the fail blog, some friends of mine decided to make the success blog. On it, we post pictures of “successful people being successful.” Essentially, the point is to put up pictures of tools feeling good about themselves, high-fiving each other and such. In general, the site is meant to show off any instance of this skewed sense of success. I suppose it is the sort of humor that appeals to those who think the inspirational posters are as funny in some ways as the parody despair ones. I also registered thesuccesblog.org and thesuccessblog.info. If you have any submissions, send them to me or to thesuccessblog@gmail.com. We will eventually try and get it some publicity (hence wordpress.com), but we need to post more first.

Some friends of mine from the maclab and I are planning to go into a startup of great hilarity. We just got the domain names, so hopefully we will have something we can be more public about soon.

Since my roommates and I first moved into our apartment, we have left our wifi access point open. No security al all. None of the other people in our apartment building strike me as the type to break any sort of security. Besides, some of my roommates were having some trouble getting it setup with security on their computers, and I really didn’t want to have to configure their computers or deal with problems that came up. Really, I liked the idea of leaving an access point open.  I knew the security was weak to begin with, and it can be a lifesaver for others at times. Bruce Schneier wrote a piece on why he keeps his wireless network open that follows this same line of reasoning. Unfortunately, there is a very real problem with open wifi in apartments. Some people moved into the apartment a floor above ours, and it appears they never bothered to get an ISP; they just leached off ours. I would think that few people would mind someone using their connection while waiting to get their own. The connection started to really slow down. I suppose one way to solve the problem would have been to talk to them, but I decided to implement MAC address filtering instead. I suppose such things were to be expected, but I always hate when I end up being disappointed by human nature.