Robert Scoble is a fun act to follow. He looks at things and tries them out. He pushes and pulls and isn’t afraid to look silly for trying. He recently tried a script to export his friends from facebook into a Plaxo contacts list. Facebook promptly suspended his account!

Welcome to the club Robert. I was banned as well. My reason? I didn’t use my real name. When I joined (and I must say I really don’t get facebook at all. It seems a waste of time to me) it told me I had to use my real name, so what did I do? I used “My Real Name” as my user name. They didn’t like that apparently and thus banned me.

Here is the funny part — I guess it’s funny — they didn’t bother to tell me I was banned. I found out when I went there and tried to log in. I lost all three of my friends I had gained! Terrible.

Facebook is entirely free to set the terms of service it wants. It CAN require that you use your actual name (in retrospect when it said you had to use “your real name” I guess they were speaking other than literally. They CAN prohibit you from scraping data with an automated script like Robert was doing. That does not bother me, hey they own the system.

I have two issues however with facebook:
1. I would think it prudent of them to give some advance warning. They apparently did in Robert Scoble’s case, but they did not in mine. I was simply banned and gone. Even in his case, he was presumed guilty until proven innocent I guess you might say. They banned first and didn’t investigate before doing so.
2. They need a reasonable and fast way for you to reinstate if you are interested after committing a sin. In my case, my email address is apparently still banned and several emails saying okay, release my email so that I can register under my actual name have simply gone unanswered and tries to use the address over a period of time show it still banned (I have not tried it lately).

Obviously many people apparently do get facebook. Sure I like finding people I have lost touch with via facebook (something I do now on a new account registered under an unrelated email address — geez like who doesn’t have 103 email addresses anyway), but the method of conversation, this whole write on a wall things, it all seems disjointed to me.

My other and greater concern is with this whole concept of spending great time and resources putting information, contents, thoughts, contact lists, etc. on a third party site in their complete and unfettered control. Doing so causes me pause. There is a trend this way in business and personal things, but what to do for disaster recovery? I guess Robert will find out. In my case, I just said hi to my three friends the next time I saw them. If I cannot back it up, I don’t waste much time on it.

Are you one of the lucky one’s getting a new computer for the holidays? Are you treating yourself? If so you need to decide what is needed to get the new machine up and rolling.

1. Do not just move files across wholesale! Some techs suggest in fact that you do. They suggest that you use the Apple service or Windows Easy Transfer to just move all of your files from an old computer to a new computer. This is not the best solution. It just means that you lost a great “disk cleaning” opportunity.

2. You need to decide if you are keeping your old computer. In most cases it makes sense to keep it in the basement on a dry shelf with a cord to it and fire it up when you need a file. If you are going to sell it, you will get very little for it and worse yet, may be handing over confidential information, even if you attempt to wipe the drive.

3. If you cannot keep the old computer handy, then consider getting an external drive and make a complete back-up and test it before getting rid of the old computer.

4. It is easy to move files back and forth with a simple network cable ($20 bucks or less if you don’t already have one), or these days with a usb thumb drive which have become very cheap!

5. No matter what you do, go buy archive quality cd’s or dvd’s and burn copies of your photos, critical documents and videos. A hard drive failure could be catastrophic otherwise. Also consider putting photos on snapfish or the equivalent.

Microsoft risks alienating web developers with their unwillingness or inability to conform to standards and their secrecy surrounding Internet Explorer 8. I must admit to some amazement that they got to version 8 without web developers realizing that this is SOP for Microsoft and something they have done from the beginning. It seems that the only time you can really expect any openness, is when they are coming from behind and need some traction. When defending monopoly market share, they don’t seem to be able to do more than talk about interoperability, standards and the like. (ODF anyone?). Luckily for us, due to the ongoing success of Apple Safari & Mozilla Firefox, not to mention the growing range of Linux PC’s and laptops sold by giants like Asus and Walmart, Microsoft’s monopoly of the web browser is rather quickly being whittled away. That is great news as the Internet was designed to be useful to everyone, not to be held hostage by a commercial entity seemingly concerned with nothing but their own profits. (There is nothing wrong with being concerned about profits, as long as the actions stemming from such concern doesn’t prevent everyone else from striving to the same position.)

In other Microsoft news, apparently their hardware is just as vulnerable as their software has proven to be over the years. Using a Microsoft wireless keyboard can get your machine and all passwords used on it handed over to people some distance from you. Worse your machine need not even be connected to any network to be vulnerable. Apparently all you need do is use a Microsoft wireless keyboard and you are vulnerable.

In hardware news, Western Digital has released a fashionable range of external (and NAS) hard drives called “My Book”. They look cool, but apparently Western Digital has assumed that you want to pay them to police your files on your network. The client software (WD Anywhere Access) for the drives will not let you share a wide range of multimedia files on your network. Apparently you are to pay them handsomely for the privilege of the software you purchased presuming you are a criminal.

Lastly, could this finally be the time for of Desktop Linux getting widespread adoption? First we had Tivo running Linux, now we have a range of Linux PC’s showing up in huge shopping chains, then Google makes a bid to have Linux become the standard in mobile communication Operating Systems. Linux seems to be popping up everywhere. The majority of the top 500 super computers are running Linux (including #1) and now it’s going for the low end as well. It doesn’t matter if you are a fan of Windows, Linux or Apple, this is good news, because it means that Microsoft and possibly Apple will have to lower prices and compete when Linux gains widespread acceptance from the newbie crowd. In addition, everyone is looking to a future where software runs over the Internet, and for the underlying Operating System to be less and less significant. For that to happen no one company can be allowed to steer the direction by using existing market share. The rise of Apple, the growth of Linux and the innovation of Google are going to see that the future of personal (and mobile) computing is not steered by any one company.

WordPress has long been a favorite software around here. It is open source, it has a great group of users and developers and it is better every time we use it. One of the best new advances has been the addition of WordPress Widgets.

In the original setup, they were added by means of a plug-in to WordPress (2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.4, 2.0.5, 2.0.6, 2.0.7, 2.0.8, 2.0.9, 2.0.10, 2.0.11, 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3). However, the utility of them is so great, that they are now standard fare in WordPress 2.2 and following releases (to date, 2.2, 2.2.1, 2.2.2, 2.2.3, 2.3 and 2.3.1).

Originally the widgets were placed into your directory structure as explained on Autommatic’s How to Use a Widget Page. However, that information and directory structure are no longer accurate. You will now find your WordPress Widgets in a file called widgets.php located here:
…\wordpress\wp-includes\widgets.php.

If you need to modify your widgets, make an addition or otherwise address the default widgets that are included, this is the place.

I have been trying to find a forum software I really like. I used phpbb for a few, but have not been all that happy. I tried Vanilla and like it overall, but it seems to have some issues, like for example with incompatible plug-ins and absent plug in’s it isn’t all that powerful. So I tried this comparison site http://www.forummatrix.org/. It is pretty good. It compares and contrasts between a number of the popular programs so that you can pick. I found mybb this way and it looks quite good so far.

Microsoft is the target of new Mac commercials and frankly they are not only funny, but true. Upgrade from Vista to XP goes the theme — I know I sure have. Vista offers little advantage and is so slow. Even XP has it’s share of problems however. Today Microsoft Update says get the latest and greatest .net framework upgrade. Why do I need it? They never bother to explain.

List of bugs that are fixed in the .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Do I use the .net framework? For what? Or are they again clogging up my machine with stuff I just don’t need and use?

I have not made a favicon for a bit, so I figured I’d whip one up today. I did a quick google search (still my favorite search engine after all these many years) and I found a nice little utility to whip a favicon up. It allows you to download it and the only bad thing about it is that it is all zipped up and you need to unzip it to use it. It worked perfectly for me.

What is a favicon? Well it is a little teenie image that appears to the left of your url in the address bar (three examples above) and then shows under your bookmarks or favorites in many cases.

So who has the best favicon you have ever seen? Drop a comment so we can check them out. They are very limited because really they are simply 32 pixels square and well … that doesn’t leave much room for detail now does it?