Recently posted this on Doc's IT Garage.

There are many blogs out there that use AdSense to make a little beer money and it generally works very well. The Google system has an uncanny knack of posting mostly relevant ads for the blog or blog post. It's also fairly unobtrusive.

Since I think Ads in RSS is inevitable, we should be arguing about finding an approach that mirrors this rather than whether they should be there at all. The Ads should be unobtrusive, and well targeted. I don't think that creating dummy items answers this. Neither do I think that leaving it to the aggregator works. ISTM that the best approach is a simple, short text ad added to the end of the description.

I've asked Google if they have or are thinking of extending AdSense to provide a service like this to content publishers and I got the expected non-reply that didn't say anything beyond "please don't put AdSense into RSS". There are some technical issues as well. Bear in mind that AdSense currently relies heavily on javascript and CSS which is likely to be stripped by any well behaved Aggregator. There's also a timing issue. Google is bad at targeting the ad correctly before it has spidered the specific page. And yet we're usually creating the RSS immediately after creating the post.

I'm going to try and create a proof of concept to see how well this works by using the GET call to AdSense and then stripping out the important bits from the Ad (title, link and text) before inserting it into RSS.

jbond posted a photo:

Another view of the pullback brackets

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

You can see that the handlebar cover still works but leaves a gap. The tiewraps keep the cables from rubbing on the fairing hole. The cables are *just* long enough to not need any lengthening.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

Again, you can see that the cover does still fit but a bit more of the mounting hardware is exposed.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

First remove the two covers that let you get at the rear tail bulbs.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

£35 from Busters. They're German grips with a 3 position temperature control. The Suzuki throttle barrel has moulded in bits that need removing with a scalpel. I cut out all but the last circular bit at the controls end and left the longitudinal ridges. The grips have a moulded end so you have to lose the handlebar end weights. Getting the throttle side on was fairly easy. The other grip was a pain and too liberal quantities of WD40 to get it down over the handlebar end.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

The temperature controller is quite large and there's no obvious place to put it with the handlebar cover. So I tie wrapped it into the left dash box. "Start" is the full max temperature and gets pretty hot. High is ok once everything is warmed up. Low hardly warms the grips at all.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

With some estate agent sign and duct tape I've made some extensions to the bottom of the screen to keep the wind a bit more off my hands in the winter.

[from: Flikr Photos]

What is it? [from: del.icio.us]

Must read story [from: del.icio.us]

This is something I've wanted for decades now. Wireless stereo headphones that have a boom microphone attached. In these days of Bluetooth, VoIP, Skype, Mp3s, Winamp and so on I'm amazed I still can't find it.

I listen to a lot of music via the PC. I also use Skype. I've got Skype set so it auto-pauses the music on an incoming or outgoing call. What I want to do is to be able to get up and walk around rather than be tied to a cable. And to be able to get up and make a cup of tea without having to unplug myself.

If this was Bluetooth, it would be cool if the same approach could be used to link the headset, phone and portable music player (iPod).

As the headphones would need local power perhaps they could be noise cancelling as well. [from: JB Ecademy]

UK Copyright lawyer wanted to definitively answer two questions that are bugging me.

Regardless of the copyright notice inserted by the copyright holder, is it
1) legal to make a copy of the content for personal use?
2) legal to you to take a copy from somebody else for personal use.

The first is about doing things like ripping a CD to MP3 so you can play it on your iPod. My understanding is that ever since the first cassette tape recorders it became legal to do this. Somewhere prior to that you had to get a "license" of some sort to do it, but the law changed to allow it. It's also related to things like video recording commercial TV programs. It's important to point out that this is for personal use not for sharing with others.

The second is a little more awkward because I'm only talking about the person receiving the copy, not the person giving it. And this is specifically about downloading music from an untrusted source that may or may not have a license to distribute it.

I'm not interested in talking about the morals of all this. I'm trying to get sopme sort of definitive answer about whether it's legal and whether you're breaking the law by ignoring the copyright notice that may forbid it and hence whether the copyright notice is enforceable in these specific circumstances.

If you can throw any light on the same issues in other jurisdictions so much the better. [from: JB Ecademy]

IT Facts is a wonderful aggregated blog that consists of nothing but links to stories containing statistics. eg
- By 2008 the market for semiconductors in China will be the largest in the world at about $50 bln
- Gartner forecasts worldwide PC sales would hit 51.9 mln for Q4 2004
- Medium-size online stores lose 2.5% of revenues to online fraud

This must be an invaluable resource for all those analyst companies that produce nothing but statements that say "The X market will be Y big in Z years". [from: JB Ecademy]

An interesting thread is developing on the decentralization mailing list on the issues of Decentralising Single Signon and how it relates to SXIP. Here's my latest post.

>As for single sign on (Sxip), I only see this working for homogeneous
>security domains. The likelihood of a system being used for on line
>banking as well as weblog comment posting is almost zero.

Agreed. But while lots of work is being done in the B2B area the only
people I'm aware of working at the weblog end, and with something
demonstrable is SXIP. The thing is Passport has failed, Liberty is aimed
at B2B. Which means there's a chance for a properly architected bottom
up solution to become the standard. If it's built right there's no
telling how high up the ladder it could go.

This is a pretty boring area ;-) but at the weblog end, comments spam is
a problem we all have *right now*. And the spammers and scammers are
getting more inventive and prepared to do work. It's not at all unusual
now for a scammer to go through the whole signon process, wait a week
and then use the system's internal processes to start sending the
message.

We're seeing each major blog platform introduce it's own centralised
authentication to try and deal with this. So in order to leave a comment
I have to have a Blogger, Typekey, Userland, etc etc account depending
on where the blog is located. I'd much rather just say "My authenticated
home account is at Ecademy, use that" and with no changes to any of the
systems, you should be able to say "My authenticated home account is at
TuCows, use that".

A recent post on the decentralization list.

>I do agree that a system based on unsolicited requests for your
>attention will devolve into spam at some point.

There's a social paradox here that systems like Linkedin attempt to
solve.

There are a lot of people who:-
- Want to network and receive unsolicited approaches from people who can
provide mutual benefit.
- Don't want to receive spam and want to be able to block unsolicited
approaches from people who are a PITA.

What we need for this is systems that allow "arms length" initial
communication. Something that allows the progressive opening up of
layers of protection as the relationship deepens. The problem with email
addresses now seems to be that they are binary. Keep them secret or be
deluged by spam with nothing in between.

"True Names" comes to mind here as does all the work on anonymous
remailers.

Listen to the sweet sound of electro groove, jazz and funk broadcasting from Paris. [from: del.icio.us]

A YASN intimately linked to Skype.

They seem to have an online presence indicator for embedding in a web page. Among other things.

Blahgger: The Closing of a Chapter

So as the Winamp team at AOL winds down, it looks like the end of the road for Winamp. Maybe not tomorrow, but the day after. This is really sad.

Maybe AOL could spin it off like they did with Mozilla.

10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris

Another way of viewing the zeitgeist. Fun to play with, but I can't imagine myself coming back.

It's a shame the algorithm doesn't do more duplicate checking as well. [from: JB Ecademy]