The Blog




We will be doing some engineering work this evening (Friday 22nd September) and expect some downtime. We plan this to start at about 6:30pm UK Time and last for about half an hour.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

We're going to be running the Skypecast of the Ecademy event again tonight.

Details here. Starting at 7:30pm UK time.

Go to that page after 7:30 and follow the instructions to listen in. You'll need your Skype password to join.
[from: JB Ecademy]

Apologies to those of you who have received large numbers of emails from Ecademy containing an "EAP Report".

This report went live at the weekend and should have sent one report each week. A glitch in the code meant that the servers resent a copy every half hour or so. This has now been stopped.

Unfortunately this coincided with a problem with the mail server which meant there was a large backlog of email waiting to go out which included these multiple copies. Consequently we didn't catch the problem quickly enough. Sorting out the mail server and clearing the backlog then released the waiting copies.

The mail server is now delivering mail correctly. There may still be some mail from the backlog going out where remote mail servers were temporarily unavailable.

We're working on finding out why multiple copies of the report were sent to avoid this happening again in the future.

Apologies again for the inconvenience. [from: JB Ecademy]

We had an outage on Friday evening. This was caused by a loss of power to the database server. It took some time to bring the server back up and it's clock was then set back to 2002. All of that has now been sorted. No data has been lost but there may be some records with invalid timestamps which we will attempt to rectify.

While the clock was out a number of background tasks will have sent out emails incorrectly.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

We had a hardware problem early this morning and again this afternoon around 4 to 5pm that meant that the Ecademy site was running very slowly. We're temporarily sorted this out and are currently investigating the cause to prevent it happening again.

Although this coincided with the new functions and changes going live, it was not actually related.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Key websites
- Twitterfeed Entries in an RSS feed copied to a Twitter account
- Twitter4Skype Twitter account updates copied to a Skype chat
- OpenID This page has a list of OpenID providers where you can get an OpenID
- RSS for your Ecademy status http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=status&op=feed&uid=YourEcademyIDNumber
- RSS for your Ecademy contact's status http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=status&op=feed&all=1&uid=YourEcademyIDNumber

Preparation. Get yourself an OpenID.

1. Copy your Ecademy status updates to your Twitter account
- Go to Twitterfeed.
- Log in with an OpenID
- Create a feed entry using your Ecademy status RSS
- Send it to your main Twitter account.
Every update on Ecademy also updates your Twitter

2. Copy your Ecademy Contact's status to a Twitter friend
- Create a dummy Twitter account (eg JBFeeds)
- Add this dummy account as a friend on your main Twitter account
- Go to Twitterfeed.
- Log in with an OpenID
- Create a feed entry using your Ecademy Contact's status RSS
- Send it to your dummy Twitter account. Prefix each tweet with: EC

Now you can see all your Twitter and Ecademy Friend's updates in one place.

3. Display your Ecademy Status on your Facebook profile
- Go to your Facebook profile.
- Add the Facebook Feeds RSS application http://apps.facebook.com/rssbook/
- Add the RSS for your Ecademy status as a feed

Your Ecademy status is now on your Facebook profile.

4. Add feeds from Facebook, Jaiku, Plazes, Ecademy to a Twitter Friend
- Follow on from 2. Seek out the RSS for all the other Status feeds for other services like Facebook, Jaiku, Plazes and add entries in Twitterfeed for them routed to your dummy Twitter user created in 2.
- Add a two letter prefix for each one like FB, EC, JK, PL

Now all your friend's on all your services can update their status and you'll see them all in one place.

5. Route all your Twitter updates to a Skype chat.
- Go here for a tutorial about Twitter to Skype.
1. Add twitter4skype as a contact.
2. Type the following as a single chat message to twitter4skype:

/account (alt+return)
yourtwitteraccountname (alt+return)
yourtwitteraccountpassword (alt+return)
3. The system should return: twitter4skype Registration complete!

All the status updates you've gathered together in 4. appear in this Skype chat. Set Notifications to off for this chat so it doesn't popup every 5 minutes. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's a challenge.

You're in Thailand.

You have your UK passport.

You have a UK bank account with internet banking and money in the account . You don't have your cheque book with you.

You can get to an Internet cafe.

The ATM has just swallowed your Bank card.

How do you get cash in your hand? [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm going to try to Skypecast the London Event tonight with Don Tapscott for people who cannot attend.

At around 7:30pm (UK time), go to this web address and follow the instructions. You will need your Skype ID and Password. [from: JB Ecademy]

This is a little tricky so pay attention!

Go and get yourself the following:-
- A Twitter Account
- A Facebook account
- An OpenID
- The URL for the RSS from your Ecademy status. This will be something like
http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=status&op=feed&uid=9999
Where 9999 is your Ecademy #ID number.

1) Sign in to Twitterfeed with your OpenID.

2) Create an entry in Twitterfeed for your Ecademy Status RSS. Route it to your Twitter account.

3) Add the Twitter application to your Facebook profile.

4) Click on the button at the top of the Twitter application setup where it says "Want Twitter to update your Facebook status? Click here!"

Now when you update your Ecademy status, it will flow though to Twitter and then on to Facebook automatically. [from: JB Ecademy]

Some of you may have noticed that the Skype icons on Ecademy have changed and a lot of them now show a gray question mark. We made a change to the way Skype presence was displayed and these icons are now served direct by Skype's servers. This means that display of whether you're online should be more or less instant rather than delayed by an hour or not at all.

If you want your presence and status to be displayed, then you need to enable it in Skype. Within the Skype program the switch can be found in Tools, Options, Privacy, Privacy settings, and then check the box "Allow my status to be shown on the web". If you can't see the checkbox, click on "Advanced". The default is off, so if your Skype icon shows the gray question mark. you need to change it. [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a virus email doing the rounds that appears to be a message from Ecademy support. It's a Virus or Trojan. At least one copy that we've seen appears to have come from an ADSL broadband line in Chile. The headers are forged and made to look as though it's from a fake Yahoo email address with a fake Yahoo message ID.

Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.

At first glance the message could be taken to be designed to be a malicious attack on Ecademy but I'm inclined to think that it's actually just an example of clever social engineering. It wouldn't surprise me if there are or will be very similar emails apparently about other social networks just as there are already about all the banks.

Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

Over the last couple of days and again this evening we've had some problems with our database server.

It looks as though a request for an RSS feed was being made very frequently and this particular request was launching a database query that was inefficient and slow. The combination was overloading the database and leading to the site being extremely slow or unavailable.

This particular problem has now been dealt with and should not arise again.

Please accept our apologies for the outage.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

A second virus email has appeared with text about Ecademy, Subject: "ECADEMY will close work in April 2008". It appears to be from info@ecademy.com . Again it has a Yahoo Message-ID although it hasn't been anywhere near Yahoo's servers. The email has an attachment Ecademy_Instructions5164.zip which contains document.exe which may be a Trojan or Virus.

One copy we've seen was sent from a Korean home broadband PC using Outlook Express. This makes it look as though it's being sent by a botnet of infected PCs round the world.

Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.

Ecademy never sends emails with attachments.


Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy



ps. Here's the text of the email

Hello!
Dear postmaster@ecademy.com members, clients and guests of our portal,
Over the last few years our portal has helped you to organize your business, find new partners and increase sales.
However, all good things end. Many of you know that we have experienced legal problems over the last year. Our competitors from other social
networks are trying to take over our client base.
Our website has been hacked and our database was stolen. After that we were taken to court because of identity theft.
Unfortunately, legal expenses and unfavorable court verdict with following closure of our bank accounts will lead to closure of our website. All
paying members will receive refund starting from March 14th.
Please check attached file for legal information in regards to your account.

Best regards,
The Ecademy Team

Ecademy - The Social Network for Business People

Company Registration:7382702 VAT:718 0377 36
[from: JB Ecademy]

We've now got Yahoo OpenID fully working to log into Ecademy.

1. Go to My Settings, Manage OpenIDs

2. Type in "yahoo.com" into the "Add a new OpenID" field and hit "Sign In"

3. After a moment and perhaps an intermediate screen, you'll be presented with a Yahoo screen asking if you want to log in to Ecademy.com. Click on the "Let Me In" button.

4. You're returned to Ecademy and your Yahoo OpenID is associated with your Ecademy account.

Now when you need to log in to Ecademy, the process is very similar.

1. Go to the login screen at Ecademy. Scroll down to the "Login with OpenID"

2. Type in Yahoo.com and click Sign in.

3. You're redirected to Yahoo asking if it's ok. Click "Let Me In"

4. You're back on the Ecademy home page and logged in. [from: JB Ecademy]

The site maintenance over the last weekend went smoothly and I hope you're enjoying the much increased speed of the Ecademy website. We have two problems as a result.

Some people have been receiving email from the site that is dated December 2007. It seems we had a large queue of email that had been held. When that was copied across, the new email server finally delivered it. If you receive email notifications, particularly about subscription problems, that you weren't expecting then check the date. If the Sent date is very old, then simply discard it.

The main Contacts Search seems to have got out of step and some searches are not returning the data they should. This is currently being dealt with and should improve over the next day or so.

Julian Bond
CTO Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]




Well we've been back 36 hours and my brain is still completely fried.
- London autoroutes and N roads from before Rouen to Tours and a night with an old school friend
- Poitiers, Limoges, Tulle, Argentat, Aurilliac, Rodez, Villefranche. Rodez was like Stevenage so we pushed on to a Michelin Bib Gourmand in Villefranche. Tulle to Rodez over the Massif was stunning riding.
- Albi, Castres, Mazamet, Carcassone, Narbonne, Perpignan, Catalunya.
- Camp in Car Park B, watch the races, etc etc
- Perpignan, Montpelier, Nimes, Aix arrive at Classic Bikes Provence in time for 3 course dinner.
- A day riding an Enfield, Velocette Clubman, BSA A65 , CB750F round Provence and Luberon
- Aix, Nimes, and up into the Cevennes, Gorges du Ganges, Vigan, St Jean du Bruel, Meyruies, Florac and another Bib Gourmand.
- Gorges Du Tarn, Millau, under and over the Millau Bridge, Villefranche (again!), Cahors, Sarlat, St Eyzies.
- Perigueux, Brantome, D675 all the way to Tours, Le Mans and Silly Guillaume and the last Bib Gourmand.
- Push for home, Boulogne, Calais, Tunnel and London.

2600 miles.

Check out the Michelin Guide and what they call Bib Hotel and Bib Gourmand. Cheap rooms and good food at reasonable prices. They vary a bit but I've never had a bad one.

Everyone we talked to said the weather this year is crazy and it's *never* been like this. April onwards should be guaranteed sun but most days were a good start, cloudy at lunchtime, thunder in the afternoon and then drizzle at night. Up to and after Mazamet should have been amazing (50km of bends) but was instead scarily intense. Wet broken tarmac on a laden sportsbike concentrates the mind. The side winds around Perpignan were the worst I've ever ridden through, and we got down to 15 minutes of 30mph and 2" of standing water over the top of the Pyrenees and down into Barcelona.

The Cevennes region and the Gorges to the east of Millau is absolutely amazing. Highly recommended.

Pick some D road routes across the gaps on the map between the main roads and you can travel almost as fast on mostly well made roads and never see a car.

The French got roundabouts all wrong. The camber slopes outwards and the exits are really tight. But they really understand big fast constant radius corners. 180deg at 90 leaned right over is *so* much fun.

Catalunya is not one of the best circuits for watching. It felt like Silverstone. Lots of big screens and grandstands made it like sitting watching TV at home but with a better soundtrack. The commentators were SCORCHIO from the Fast show. We camped with others in a car park instead of 80 Euros in the real campsite. On friday night at 7pm a Police van and three circuit security turn up and say "no camping". There's lots of arm waving. 30 minutes later they leave. 30 minutes after that somebody comes round and says "this happens every year, they have to tell us off and we ignore them, then they go away, everyone's happy". You gotta love this kind of anarchy where everyone goes through the motions and then does what they were going to do anyway.

Next year, Mugello!








The Fork in the Road for Social Media - ReadWriteWeb : Group buying has some possibilities. It at least fits the peer ethos, and it could be popular in a recession. To date, though, this is only a theory as far as I know. If I had to pick one sustainable revenue model, this would be the one. But the spark of innovation that turns this from a promising idea to a $100m plus revenue line is still missing.

OMGZ! It's 2000 all over again!




Yay! I've got a shiny white Asus eeePC 900 Linux. It's so cute it should have a Hello Kitty sticker on the back. The eeeuser forum has been invaluable. Here's some things I've learned.

- The 900 with the 0502 bios upgrade does what the overclocking techniques did for the 700. It runs at 900Mhz on power and 650 on battery with speed stepping. So just ignore all those threads about overclocking.

- There's a repo at http://download.tuxfamily.org/xepcrepo p701 main
with a lot of packages specifically built for the eeepc. Add in the xandros repos and do pinning. pimpmyeee.sh does most of this for you but needs tweaking. Don't bother with the pure debian repos as there's very little that isn't already in those above and they'll just introduce dependency problems. pimpmyeee also makes it trivial to enable full desktop mode.

- Upgrade amarok to at least 1.4.8 (from xepcrepo) to avoid problems with the latest iPods and make lastfm streams work. It also seems to be more stable with large libs of tracks in samba shares that are not always there. check out dynamic collections and/or disable watch folders for changes to avoid Amarok just forgetting the whole collection.

- For some unknown reason, the eeepc xandros doesn't use the usual /etc/rc.d methods of auto-starting services based on runlevel. this is just weird! /etc/init.d entries exist but their not used. You have to create startup scripts in ~/.kde/Autostart with entries like
sudo /etc/init.d/autofs restart

[edited to add] There's an easier, better way. Near the end of the boot process it runs entries in /etc/fastservices where each entry is the name of a file in /etc/init.d So I added these two lines
ntp
autofs

- /etc/mtab keeps being recreated and grows like topsy with duplicate entries. Delete it and link it to /proc/mounts

- There are loads of forum threads about delaying network shares till after wireless connections come on line by putting netstart scripts into /etc/network/if-up.d/ They're all deluded! mountnfs in that directory is what the system uses anyway to remake samba and nfs shares. The problem is that wireless takes a little while to startup after networking comes online.

A better route is to use autofs.
1) build a mount command line for your samba share. Use cifs. add a noperm parameter so that a remote samba share that understands linux permissions doesn't override your local view of the permissions (like say a linksys Slug)
2) modify /etc/auto.master like this
/mnt/auto/ file:/etc/auto.mysamba --timeout=300 --ghost
3) create /etc/auto.mysamba
[mountname] -fstype=cifs,[mountoptions] [sharename]
where sharename is something like ://192.168.3.2/HDD_1_1_1
4) autostart autofs in your startup script in ~/.kde/Autostart
Now your share will be available as soon as you use it and will just return nothing when it's unavailable.

- Alt-click-drag let's you move the few dialogs that don't fit in the screen height.

- My internal microphone was crap and probably broken. I don't think I'm alone. I salvaged a mic capsule from an old portable home phone and soldered it in. Works a treat. You can get the screen surround off without opening the main case and voiding the warranty!

- Vodafone have a linux driver specially for the eeePC and 3G modems. It's got a couple of weird dependency problems that may or may not screw you up. Ignore them and it just works. Now I have to work out how to get it inside the case.

- It needs a bigger battery. Asus are screwing around with giving the UK a smaller capacity than the 700 or the 900 in other countries. There are aftermarket batteries that are more than double the capacity. but big.

more later.




The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect :

Why do all journalists have to frame issues as a war?

The first few widgets available on the Friends Connect OpenSocial hosted platform are from Google and in there is an OpenID Signin, and a Friends viewer. And also in there is a Facebook application. And it's this Facebook application that is calling Facebook's bluff.

Either Facebook's Connect API let's you use Facebook's auth and gives you access to your friends. Or not. And on the surface the answer is "Yes, as long as we like you". But even this isn't clear. FB appear to be saying that you can get and store ID numbers, but you can only display your contacts' data on the fly.

Which finally brings us down to a privacy debate that is central to the whole data portability drive as it relates to your list of friends. You have a claim on your own profile data. You have a claim on your list of friends. But you *don't* have a claim on your friend's profile data. And in that context Facebook looks like it's trying to do the right thing while also using it as a core part of their business model. Google is also trying to do the right thing from the public access point of view. Actually your friend's profile data is public information. And public information wants to be free.

1 to 20 of 3860