Oh, yes, "Time spent trying to get the layout to work in CSS before giving up and using tables."

The last couple of weeks I've been suffering from "Mouse Shoulder". My right shoulder, arm, hand and fingers have been aching and tingling. I don't touch type so I tend not to get the classic wrist RSI, but I've had this one before. I used to think it was caused by commuting on a bike (throttle and brake) into London and then spending too much time at the keyboard. But as I'm working from home these days, it must just be working at the PC. Anyway it does seem to be getting better of it's own accord.

More worrying and decidedly scary is my eyesight. About 2 months ago I got a sty in the top eyelid of my right eye. It went down and stopped being red so I forgot about it. But then I started seeing double in my right eye and couldn't focus properly. I had another eye test at Specsavers and a small amount of astigmatism and a little short sightedness had turned into a lot of astigmatism. They didn't know why, but got me a new prescription. I thought I'd better get a second opinion, and another optician immediately said the sty had left a lump in the eyelid which then presses on the lens at night and causes the astigmatism.

So then it's off to the surgery who confirms the lump needs to be excised. In his words, the NHS have to get me a consultant's appointment in a maximum of 16 weeks which is also the minimum. Any treatment is probably another 16 weeks after that. So now it's off to Bupa on the credit card and an appointment in 10 days.

It should be a simple out patient op with a local anaesthetic and a needle to remove the "grunge". Oh, Joy.

Needless to say all this is not doing my concentration any good.

As a side project I run a site devoted to aggregating the RSS feeds from UK Political Blogs. One of these blogs is from Craig Murray, the ex-Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan. Two days ago he published a robust article about Alisher Usmanov. My team of robots collected this from his RSS feed and added it to his page on UKPoliBlog.

In a somewhat surprising turn of events, I was phoned this afternoon by somebody who may belong to Schillings[1] the lawyers, asking that I remove a potential libel from my blog Voidstar. As I have no personal interest in football, Arsenal football club or rich Russians, I wasn't sure what she was on about. After some beating round the bush we eventually worked out where it was and I've duly removed the offending article. She happened to mention that it had been found via Google, and when I explained what was going on, said that they were having quite a bit of trouble tracking down all the places it's ended up. On a technical note, I can't remove the article completely or the team of robots will just fetch it again. So I've left a stub there.

So let that be a warning to you all. Random re-publishing of volatile political blogger's RSS feeds can lead to interesting phone conversations!

[1]Schillings is the UK’s leading law firm dedicated to protecting the reputations of high-profile individuals, corporates and brands. According to their website.

[edited to add]. I'm supposed to have had an email and fax backing up the phone call but nothing has turned up yet.

Take two completely ubiquitous retail outlets. Starbucks and the Chinese Takeway. You can find both of them just about anywhere in the world.

Starbucks is completely uniform. It's managed on a Roman military command and control structure from head office. The local management are arrogant and make no attempt to assimilate themselves into the local culture. They're supplies are managed by the regional head office who buys in bulk. Senior regional management are on a 2 year secondment so they put their kids in the local ex-pat school and hang out with ex-pats.

Contrast this with:

Every Chinese takeaway is different (while following the same formula). They're run by private entrepreneurs. While there is a wholesale support structure, that's also run by private entrepreneurs. The owners have no choice but to become part of the local culture because they depend on local suppliers. This makes them accomodating rather than arrogant. They live in the culture, their kids go to the local schools.

So we have the military machine vs the ant-hill. Centralised vs De-Centralised. Cultural imperialism vs Cultural assimilation. Startrek vs the Borg.

Now translate this into America vs China as they move into Africa to secure raw material supplies. I'm hearing stories that the Chinese are easier to deal with because even when they are part of large organisations back home, they behave like entrepreneurs in country. And entrepreneurs have to meet their business partners half way rather than trying to impose a foreign system and set of values on them.

To a certain extent I think both India and China have this quality. It's quite quite different from our Roman background here in the west. They operate as a chaotic, complex, mesh of 2 billion autonomous units, not as a pyramid control structure.

The Next Overused Buzz Phrase | AlwaysOn : "Social Graph" might become the new "Web 2.0." Phrase droppers of the world unite.

There's a lot of noise around Brad Fitzpatrick's Thoughts on the Social Graph and the mailing list associated with it. not surprisingly, I've been a prolific poster, so I'm going to have to copy some of the mind grenades I've tossed in to here.

One quick thought. There's a set of people obsessed about the privacy implications of linking social graphs between social networks. I think they're misguided because the cat is already out of the bag, the horse has already bolted, etc etc. If you post on the net you have no privacy. Get over it. Your potential employers, various governments and people who might vote for you are already using all that data to draw big pictures about you. Assuming of course that anyone cares.

See also Tabber.org. They're creating FOAF on the fly from aggregated Social graphs. Which is giving another kick to the total amount of FOAF out there. I wonder again what is the total number of RDF FOAF files and RDF triples out there waiting for someone to do something useful with them.

Linking social graphs is prime Semantic Web territory so the usual suspects have dived into the mailing list. And yet again I'm kicking and screaming and being a grumpy old man because I find it so hard to follow their jargon, and because they're comments and solutions are still at the academic, system level. I've been thoroughly rude in the past about RDF that it's "Write Only Data" Sadly I think it still is as I've yet to see an end user application built on it. Every single proof of concept I've seen has been intensely geeky and aimed at "showing the power of RDF". What it doesn't do is actually solve some real world problem. The state of the art in RDF has moved on a bit since the Semantic Web conference in Galway 3 years ago. But the criticisms of it being academic wanking still apply.

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Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph Is Brad Fitzpatrick's manifesto for a way of aggregating friends and followers across Social Networks.

Good stuff. Read it.

See Also OpenID: Great idea, bewildering consumer experience

Facebook's data feeds :

# friends' status updates;
# your own status updates;
# friends' notes;
# your own notes;
# friends' posted items; and
# your own posted items.

Expose them on some public web site for Google to index. You know it makes sense. ;)

They're a little hard to find and depend on your privacy settings.

Don't fall for the Potemkin scam :

The DRM business model is the urinary tract infection of media experiences: all of the uses that used to come in an easy gush now come in a mingy, painful dribble

What a glorious image and turn of phrase.

Anyone want to dig around in http://static.ak.facebook.com/js/statuspro.js?12:52414 looking for submitStatus() and /updatestatus.php

There is a route to updating Status remotely. Using cUrl and PHP
1) Login to Facebook, grab the cookies and store them
2) Switch to the mobile Facebook interface
3) Grab post_form_id from the form on the mobile home page using regex (be careful with regex pattern greediness)
4) Post the Form with curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,'post_form_id='.$form_id[1].'&status='.urlencode($status).'&update=Update');

The problem is that logging in from there logs you out in your browser which is really naff.

Come on Facebook. Make this easier for us.

» The workaround that pipes Facebook status entries into a Twitter feed | Berlind's Testbed | ZDNet.com : In response to last week's post where I said it'd be real nice if updates to my Facebook status cascaded to my Twitter feed and vice versa, ZDNet reader Dan York (blog) pointed me to Julian Bond's workaround which involves using Twitterfeed.com.

Nice to get some recognition. But what's missing here is the link back to Robert Sanzalone. It was his original post about Twitter4Skype that led me to Twitterfeed and the two techniques of feeding RSS of your updates to your main Twitter account and RSS of your friends updates to a dummy Twitter account that you befriend. After that it was just a case of finding the Facebook RSS for just your own updates.

Meanwhile my good friend, Mr Winer, has been busy writing code to route Flickr to Twitter. But I don't get it. Flickr has RSS, so why not just use Twitterfeed? Why does this need yet another application to do the job? Then there's the question of why do it at all. Whenever somebody starts using an automated service to Twitter that generates entries like "I'm Listening to" or "I'm browsing" It just gets really really annoying for their followers. It seems that the way we use Twitter has a sweet spot of a maximum of 5-10 updates per day. Any more than that looks like spam.

Craig Murray - We Killed One Million People - Yes, You and I Did : Of course we don't know the exact number of Iraqi dead. Nobody does - dead civilians are not considered important enough to count by the occupying forces. I don't care if the estimate of a million is 50% out, either way. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died a terrible death, and we caused it. Not one of us has yet done enough to stop it. The guilt lies heaviest on Bush, Blair and Cheney.

But it lies on you and me too.

I've always been just a bit short sighted. Not serious but just enough to need glasses for driving and watching TV. Now I'm getting old enough to get a little presbyopia. So the range between distance and short sight gets narrower and narrower. Eventually you can't read close up, but can't see far away either. Welcome to bifocals. But I'm still a good few years away from that yet.

But what was really disturbing is that some time in the last 6 weeks, my right eye has decided to go wrong. I had the eye test and there's nothing basically wrong except that I've suddenly developed some astigmatism in one eye. So that's a new lens for each of my pair of glasses when they're only 5 months old. But what's worse is that working at the PC with my glasses on it's now too close to focus on. With glasses off, I'm basically reading with one eye. The solution is the second pair of glasses which I could really do without.

While all this is happening, of course you start to have all the deep fears. What if I can't read any more! What if it's a detached retina! What if I've scratched the lens (cigarette ash burn, perspex flake while working in the garage)! What if it's brain damage, hypertension, diabetes. Oh, right, that's "Man Hyperchondria". We don't go and find out what's actually wrong, we just obsess about what might be wrong.

Still. It's appeared suddenly. Maybe it will fix itself suddenly.

An application that let's use your FB Identity as an OpenID.

Here's a clue for Social Network Designers. Stop using "Friend" and switch to "Following" and "Followed By". Then you won't be tempted to overload Friend to control who can see what parts of a profile. And you won't have to annoy your members with endless "XXX says they are your friend, please confirm" messages.

If you use Following and Followed By, then the act of linking to a contact is entirely driven by the person who wants to follow you. So there's no need for a confirmation.

I'm beginning to think this was the single biggest innovation in Twitter.

Oooh, Errr. Upload your music collection (what all 100Gb?) to Anywhere.FM and then play it back mixed in with some Last.Fm style friends and neighbours. Uses Amazon's S3 storage. There's some deep copyright questions there.

The new Maps API ads layer: Released and ready for you to try - Google Maps API | Google Groups : Currently, the feature only shows ads for businesses in US. Apologies to our (many) international developers, who can, however, still implement the ads layer in advance of international ad inventory becoming available.

ARRRRR! Yet Another USA Only Maps Feature.

KTHXBAI !!

When you find yourself turning into a grumpy old man.

This is going to hurt my reputation as a closet anarchist, but I've been browsing a couple of UK Police Blogs. Police Inspector Blog and The Policeman's Blog.

When they're hanging round the local market town on Friday night, or stopping you for speeding and giving you the lecture, the Police seem like some strange version of humanity that was probably bullied as a kid and grew up to be power hungry bullies themselves. And I've never been able to work out why people become policemen. But then you realise what shit they have to go through every day and what shit happens on the edges of society and you realise we couldn't pay them enough if we tried.

The Ambulance blog Random Acts of Reality is a bit of an eye opener as well.

Dave Winer on Twitter : The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.[1]

That means a dead simple API that goes both ways. It's important to have lots of RSS out. It's equally important to have an API that let's you update the service from an external App. That's what separates Twitter from Facebook. It's why Twitterfeed can exist for Twitter but not for Facebook.

Where it gets tricky is when you've got the API, growing user base but not lots of users and not lots of developers working with you. Even if I exactly duplicate the Twitter API or Facebook API on Ecademy, I still won't be able to get the developer ecosystem going until we have 10 times the users. And although it would be trivial, all those Twitter Apps would have to be rebuilt because they all hard code the connection to a specific service. So this hard for me, but what about Linkedin? Let's say LinkedIn do their own Facebook style API. Will they be able to get traction? Will anyone actually code to it?

In the middle of the article, Dave drops another mind bomb. One of the things we talked about was micro-blogging. I asked the people if they would like it if the only way you could create a WordPress site was on wordpress.com. Think for a moment. Is a distributed Twitter possible? Where everyone runs their own system to show their latest status update and some aggregation system appears to draw all the content together and provide the following - followed by Social Network functionality?

[1]Dave. You need to see the last blog about routing Facebook to Twitter. It's got RSS. It's got APIs. It's got Open Identity standards. Should be right up your street.