Dominik’s Blog

I’ve launched Dominik’s Tumblelog, powered by Tumblr.

What is a tumblelog you ask? In short, it’s an oldstyle weblog, before blogging became a semi-pretentious publishing platform (not that there’s anything wrong with that). A tumblelog records one’s tumbles throughout the web and life in general, a “stream” in my parlance, and a literal interpretation of a log of interesting places and sights one’s stumbled across on the web. And therein lies the root of a tumblelog, stumble. It isn’t meant to be perfectly organized or impeccably formatted, but rather a quick, short link, along with accompanying text or a photo.

Tumblr makes it painless to do this, and even lets you integrate other feeds (such as your shared items on Google Reader). I’ve done this over at my tumblelog, and look forward to continuing to use it.

What will happen with my blog? Things will continue as they are, with most longer content posts being posted here. You can think of the blog as where the articles live and the tumblelog as where interesting snippets live.

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I’ve closed my Facebook account. Or, rather, since one can’t close a Facebook account per se, I’ve deleted friends and removed all that I could from my profile. Finally, I set my account to ‘inactive’ in Facebook, which is as close as one can come to deleting it.

I opened my account back in March 2004, when Facebook was a small, quiet, private site open only to few colleges around the country. I never amassed more than 400 friends (I think my final tally was somewhere in the low 300s), but it was a nice way to vaguely keep in touch. I found myself checking in on the site perhaps once or twice a month, if that.

Back in September 2006, I defended Facebook’s mini-feed, with the tagline of “If you aren’t comfortable now, you shouldn’t have been comfortable before.” My logic there was that the mini-feed didn’t expose any information that wasn’t available before, it just made it far more accessible. I did find it bad marketing on Facebook’s part to launch it without even so much as an opt-out option available, but I figured they’d learn from that mistake in the future. Finally, I found it a touch ironic that all the “Stop the New Facebook” groups grew virally in large part thanks to the very mini-feed they were railing against. In the end, Facebook made it possible to opt-out and control what was posted in the mini-feed, restoring the option to maintain the security-through-obscurity regime that many of its users had accustomed themselves to.

Facebook didn’t learn from its mistakes. Beacon, which differs from the mini-feed in the important aspect that it reveals previously non-public information to the public (and select Facebook advertisers). Where the mini-feed merely made what was already knowable easier to know, Beacon published previously unknowable information for all to see. Once again, without even so much as an opt-out provision at the start, though this has since been added.

Beacon, combined with Facebook’s slow slide towards something resembling selling out, convinced me that the small, quiet, cool way to keep in touch with friends online that I knew from March 2004 was gone forever. I “closed” my account, as best I could, having to put up with the final indignity of having to delete each of my 300+ friends one by one.

Fundamentally, Facebook is trying to reconcile its revenue model with what makes people use its site. The weakness of its traditional banner ad model is that people ignore the banners and instead look to see what their friends are up to. Beacon tried to one-up this by putting ads into what their friends were up to. Rent a movie from Blockbuster? Facebook will let your friends know what you rented and when, so they can rent it from Blockbuster too, which conceivably gives Facebook a cut. An ingenious idea, except, as Seth Godin puts it: “People don’t truly care about privacy . . . What people care about is being surprised.” Had Facebook allowed people to opt-in to Beacon from the start, those people who wanted to then could do so, and they would not be surprised to find their rentals being broadcast to their friends. In fact, they’d be happy that the service they opted into was working. Instead, we have a nasty shock to all Facebook users who suddenly find that their previously private actions on Facebook advertisers’ sites are suddenly — without clear warning or any action on their part — being broadcast to all their friends. Worse: without a way to turn it off. This caused the uproar and backlash.

Farewell Facebook.

Find yourself needing to keep track of information from various websites?

Google Notebook to the rescue. With its new Firefox plug-in, you can select text from a web page, click it, click Clip and then put it into an appropriate notebook. It’ll automatically record the URL you found it from and clip the selected text into a new entry, preserving the information in one organized place.

Use it for research or just to keep track of interesting things you’ve read on the web.

I personally am experimenting with using it as a rough and tumble to do list, an annotated bookmark list and a research helper. For example: instead of just bookmarking a page in Firefox, I highlight what I find interesting and then Clip it into Google Notebook; then later, when I’m browsing my bookmarks notebook for a particular topic, I can quickly see why I bookmarked that page, and, if needed, can back to the page in a single click. And finally, as an added bonus, Google Notebook is accessible from any machine with a web browser and internet access.

An insightful read:
Seven steps to remarkable customer service

I’d argue there are applications well beyond the software industry, or even anywhere you might imagine getting a tech support line.

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music, specifically in reference to DRM (Digital Rights Management, or Digital Restrictions Management, depending on your perspective) music files. It’s a good read, as is the Economists’ analysis of the essay.

A colleague at law school was kind enough to send me this link, and I find it interesting enough reading that I recommend it as a good read:
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Streams, my new personalized feed reader, is now live. It replaces the old blogroll and friends links. I use it to keep up to date on all the blogs I like to read and streams enables me to do so by splitting the old blogroll into more relevant subcategories.

Apple recently came out with iTunes 7.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, don’t go rushing to do so. This version is a bit buggy, to say the least.

For me personally, music just wouldn’t play cleanly anymore: it would be filled with static, jittering and distortion that was a result of iTunes, since playing the exact same MP3s with another player would work fine.

I thus decided to revert to iTunes 6, because I like iTunes and have a lot of useful data in my library (my entire smart playlist set up, several months worth of song ratings, etc.) that I don’t want to have to duplicate in another player. I know Apple will release an iTunes 7 fix soon, but I don’t want to wait.

Step 1: Backup
Back up your iTunes 7 settings, so that you can keep them around in case you want to go back.

Go into your My Documents folder, then your My Music folder. Copy the iTunes folder inside there to somewhere else. That’ll save your settings.

Note: That’s the default location, if you’ve moved things around it’ll be somewhere else. If you need help finding it, search for files ending in .itl on your hard drive.

Step 2: Uninstall iTunes 7
Now, uninstall iTunes 7. Go to your Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, iTunes and hit Uninstall.

Reboot as it asks you to when it’s done.

Step 3: Download iTunes 6.0.5
Download iTunes 6 from Apple:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/itunes605forwindows.html

Step 4: Install iTunes 6.0.5
Install iTunes 6 by running the installer.

Step 5: Try to run iTunes 6
You should get this error message:
The file "iTunes Library.itl" cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes.

Step 6: Restore your old library
Go back into My Documents/My Music. Now go into the iTunes folder. Rename your iTunes Library.itl as iTunes Library.itl.old. Go into the Previous iTunes Libraries folder. Take the newest file (for me this was iTunes Library 2006-09-14.itl) and copy it back up to the iTunes folder. Rename it iTunes Library.itl. Run iTunes 6 and you should be all set, with your library restored.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than losing your library entirely. Plus, since you’ve backed up your iTunes 7 library, when Apple releases an iTunes 7.0.1 you should be able to reverse the procedure above and use your most current library before upgrading to iTunes 7.0.1.

I hope this is helpful to someone :)

Facebook has, apparently, erupted in furor over a set of changes launched yesterday which make it easier to keep track of changes in friends’ profiles.

I’ve received several invites to “Stop the New Facebook” and am at a loss as to what people are so up in arms about. All the new changes do is make it easier to see what has changed in friends’ profiles. They do not reveal any information that was previously inaccessible, they only make it more accessible.

Apparently many of my fellow facebookers were under the mistaken impression that what they posted on the Facebook or what groups they joined was somehow … private? I fail to see what has changed, save for the accessibility of the information, since now Facebook’s default interface keeps track of friends’ profile changes. Previously, a dedicated stalker could save Facebook pages to disk and then run diff on each one to see what had changed. The changes have always been there, they are just more accessible than before.

Why then this anger and sense of betrayal? Over what? A perceived violation of privacy? Did Facebook install spyware on a user’s computer, dig through the user’s e-mail and auto-post stuff to the user’s profile? No? All the new Facebook changes have done is make what was already there easier to see. Nothing has changed in terms of information availability, only the accessibility. If people aren’t comfortable having their information so easily available now, then they shouldn’t have been comfortable before — the fact that they didn’t have a problem with it before indicates they do not understand that once something is posted on the Internet, it is no longer private, even if it is posted in a registration-only student-only community such as Facebook.

There is no such thing as a “private area” on the Internet. Before you post something online, make sure you’re comfortable with everyone online seeing it and knowing about it. If you’re not comfortable, don’t post it. It’s really that simple.

You think your Facebook profile was secure before these changes? It wasn’t. There was nothing stopping a “friend” of yours from screenshotting your profile, or saving the page to his hard disk, or even going to some campus administrators, logging onto Facebook in front of them and showing them your profile. If there’s something you don’t want people to see, don’t put it online — ever. The entire point of social networking sites such as Facebook is social networking. Networking is about bringing disparate information sources together. The new facebook changes make this easier than before, but they reveal many people’s innate cognitive dissonance: they thought they were “safe” and these changes have shown that they were never safe in the first place.

I for one applaud the Facebook changes: it forces people to confront the reality that information on the Internet lives forever, and once it is shared with others, it is out of your control forever.

You can add a Google Gadget to your Google Personalized Homepage that will countdown the days until an event takes place.

To do this, click on “Add Content” in the upper left hand corner of your Google Personalized Homepage, then click the little “Add by URL” link to the immediate right of the “Search Homepage Content” button.

Then copy-paste in this url, changing the date and and event name as you’d like:
http://dominik.net/hidden/days-until-xml.php?year=2009&month=5&day=10&event=Graduation

That particular date is the date I graduate from law school (982 days until as of today).

If you’re at Ave Maria School of Law and just want to add that without having to go through all the trouble above (which is only really necessary if you want more flexibility in terms of the date and event), you can just click this button here:

To expound on the customizability, you could Add by URL this address:
http://dominik.net/hidden/days-until-xml.php?year=2006&month=10&day=20&event=I turn 23

That would count the days until I turn 23 years old. I hope folks find this little gadget useful and fun!college movie fest fuckfree movies fistingsex movies hotfree movie hentaimovies gangbangmovie pee clipsmovie lolita free samplesshemale movies hardcore Mapretirement credits security 34 socialconusumer acc creditamerican aceonline aceonline credits coaster enthusiastslaboratories abbott credit employeebroker afg 130 1300 loancredits completed 8686 completed creditsabi vc loan bird Map