Nick Oliva

Bing’s URL Shortener Is Longer Than Bing’s Own Domain

This is funny… to a point. It’s not likely that they would want to deal with using their main domain for shortening url’s. But it raises a point that I’ve been on my soapbox about for some time. I’m waiting for people to come to their senses on this, but it’s like religion, so it’s going to take a long time.

Many years ago account and inventory codes were segmented to convey information about the item. This was done for a long time until the people supported this really stupid approach died or were killed off. Since then, identifiers do NOT convey intelligence.

URL’s or URI’s were meant to be typed in…well, no, they weren’t. People were supposed to hotlink directly to the resource they wanted. It’s only the top-level domain that needs to be typed in. In a perfect world, resources work like Google Maps links – you can get them when you need them, but nobody would ever try to make sense of them.

Enter slugs… who had the bright idea to include the words in the URL as part of the search engine algorithm? Am I supposed to be really interested in a page because they did a great job of putting the terms I’m looking for in the address of it?

Enter URL shorterners… why didn’t Twitter just not count URL lengths in the 140 characters? The benefits of URL shorteners are that they take less space (only because the space is being counted because of programmer lazyness or omission), they are cryptic so the destination is unknown, they force you to rely on whatever third-party site was used to shorten the URL, and they make redirection take longer while that site records your activity so they can sell your information to marketers. The benefits, as you can see, are actually the drawbacks. These were invented to let legacy email software that breaks lines work in spite of the fact that the users of it ought to get off and onto something else.

All a product of the top-level domain fiasco. For all the credit given to the founders of the Internet, the idea to multiply domains with .com, .edu, .net, .org, etc. was profoundly stupid. One day, people will come to grips and “.com” will be made the default. So that when you type, “whereIstand”, into your browser’s address bar, you’ll be taken to “whereIstand.com” if it exists, and be offered to search for it if it doesn’t. This way, squatters that create new top-level domains such as “.fu” will not be able to charge legitimate sites to reserve their addresses.

All this comes back to the TechCrunch article making fun of Bing. What is funny is that URL shorteners are considered legitimate. They aren’t! In a world where terabytes of storage are accessible for free…? Think about it.

There’s an interesting article in the Economist this week about French efforts to ban the wearing of supposedly religious garments. [I'm not able to link to it because their Web site is on the fritz... I read it in the print edition.]

First, my initial reaction was, “Are they nuts?” It seemed to me a draconian and anti-Islam effort. Then I read the article and changed my mind. It turns out that there are no religious reasons for covering women in Islam – it is done for oppression of women. It also turns out that the very small number of women in France that are wearing these garments do not come from families where their mothers wore the garments.

On top of this, there are real security and social reasons to forbid the covering of faces in public; in a loophole-closing effort, there is an exception being made for carnivals, etc.

Barack Obama is quoted in the article as having admonished the French not to criminalize the practicing of religion as “people see fit”… but this is ridiculous. It is only because of the limits placed by society that people have stopped committing horrible atrocities in the name of ’saving’ the heathens.

No, society must impose limits, and the French are taking a very reasonable approach. I think you have to look into the use of the coverings to really understand what is at stake. In fact, where I used to think of France as an overly Catholic country, this Economist article has given me a new appreciation of the secular nature of the French government.

I’m a photography enthusiast these days. One of the things I discovered a long time ago is that quantity helps quality. I take a lot of pictures and end up with a few good ones. However, I’m also a pack rat. So I don’t discard any pictures that I take unless they are truly bad.

Over the years it has become more and more tedious to organize my pictures. When I began using a Mac, I had hopes for iPhoto – because I really loved the interface and some of the functionality – like the face recognition and the slideshows with the pan and zoom effects. [I'm amazed that they refer to this as "Ken Burns Effect"... I mean, give the guy credit, but branding it like this?]

When I realized iPhoto wasn’t great for organizing thousands of pictures, I discovered Aperture. After doing my research on this I was still excited about Aperture. Since you can use it for free before you buy, I did. Then, I bought. It has taken me some time – and I’m nowhere near being done – but, I expect to have a very long run with Aperture. I’m settling in with it and looking to become an expert in all aspects of it. It is exactly what I want. Exactly, that is, except that it doesn’t have some of iPhoto’s features that I love. At least it’s not packaged up so it’s as easy to do as it is in iPhoto.

The problem is that I don’t want to keep files in both Aperture and iPhoto. But, I think I’ve finally found the way to deal with these things. I’m keeping my master files in Aperture, and importing them into iPhoto with the advanced property to copy files turned off. If I manage it properly, this ought to give me everything that I want. One of the things I’ve settled on is to create smart albums by month in Aperture that filter to pictures rated with one star. This gives me only “good” pictures in Aperture. It’s not very selective, though, so I’m going to create smart albums by year with two or three stars so that I can show really great pictures in Front Row.

In the future, I may want to automate copying ratings, etc. from Aperture into iPhoto… but I don’t want to do this myself because I figure at some point Apple will provide the metadata capture as part of the iPhoto import from Aperture.

Of course, in a perfect world, Aperture would just include everything iPhoto includes so you can use it if you want to. Better yet, it would let you just “access” your Aperture library. But with all of the iLife integration bits, I can imagine that’s not so easily done, or Apple would have done it already. Alternatively, I imagine they don’t want it done – whether for aesthetic or commercial reasons.

Europe Drops Microsoft Antitrust Case Over Browsers – NYTimes.com.

OK, I made up the headline… but when you read this settlement, what other conclusion would you come to? Microsoft is accused of including it’s tool to access the Internet with its operating system. They used to argue it was a part of the operating system and couldn’t be unbundled. The only thing that could possibly be said to be different between the Microsoft situation and the Google one is that Google is not the dominant browser.

But it can’t be that there are separate rules for the winners than for the rest of the players. Microsoft ought to have demanded fair treatment and generalization. Europe is not saying, “operating systems must offer choices of browsers”. They are saying, “Microsoft is too successful… and it must be stopped before it kills somebody!”

Has Google actually said whether they plan to let their operating system run other browsers? Or is the trick of hiding the operating system behind the browser a way to get around regulation by saying there is nothing to unbundle even if they wanted to do it?

Blippy launches the Twitter of personal finance | Rafe’s Radar – CNET News.

People tend to get caught up with things and forget to ask simple questions like, “Is this really dangerous?”

I was sent a link to this article and asked what I thought of this service that is in alpha and PR modes. What it brought to my mind was whether anybody has actually given much thought to this idea that you would want everyone to know where you are at all times. I know people talk about it, but do regular people that are blinded by technology talk about it?

I think it’s important to take a step back and ask whether we bear some responsibility or not when we create mechanisms for anyone (or almost anyone) to stalk us. It’s surveillance… get it? Do you want your teenage daughter’s whereabouts to to be known to hundreds of people at all times? Some of those are trustworthy friends, of course, but in today’s blunt definition that could mean a lot of different things.

We have reason to expect financial companies to keep our transactions secret. We ought to have no recourse when we suffer damages of any kind after doing something so stupid as saying we want all of our financial transactions published.

Supreme Court Takes Texting Case – NYTimes.com.

I have to agree completely with the trial judge in this case. I think it may go the other way on the Supreme Court because of the thinking that resulted in the travesty of Kelo v. City of New London. It just seems to me that similar principles are at play.

In this case, the employer provided a messaging device for the use of the employee as it pertains to his job. Obviously, such a device is useful for personal reasons and many people use theirs in this way rather than carry two of them. The same thing happens in corporate email – as I was just talking about with a colleague yesterday.

An employer has a right to monitor the use of these tools. Letting a supervisor gut the rights the employer has been careful to preserve is a joke. If the supervisor otherwise mishandled other corporate resources, it would not create an obligation on the company either. The employee ought to have known, as is obvious, that the supervisor saying he wasn’t going to observe a policy wouldn’t be binding. That’s my interpretation from what I read, though the fact that the employee could pay for partial use could be a point to consider – in that the supervisor’s policy may have been in writing and even approved by superiors.

The big take-away from this is that people just need to be aware that corporate resources do not fall into the realm of your privacy. Regardless of whether you expect them to be private because you say they are, the reality is that people can read them. Don’t put in email, or corporate mobile devices, anything you don’t want your employer to know about. It’s just reckless behavior!

I haven’t been updating my whereIstand blog. We’re reintegrating the app with the blogs and one of the things I want to do is hook up all of my opinions that are published here again.

I have my doubts about writing blog entries on a mobile device, however. I’m just not very clean on this keyboard. It may be that it’s because I don’t use the landscape mode and two hands much – I’m trying it now and actually sort of likin it!

Here is something from a recent Economist that people on both sides of the death penalty debate ought to be able to come together and agree on when they give it just a little thought:

THE sad case of Cameron Todd Willingham began two days before Christmas in 1991. He was alone with his three daughters—one toddler and two baby twins—when their house in Corsicana, a small town south of Dallas, began to burn. Mr Willingham later said the house was so thick with smoke he could not find any of the girls before escaping. But at his trial, investigators testified that based on the burn patterns in the house, the fire had been arson. Mr Willingham was quickly convicted and sentenced to death. Years of court challenges came to nothing and in 2004 Mr Willingham was executed. “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man—convicted of a crime I did not commit,” he said from the gurney.

There is an obvious controversy about the death penalty here, but let’s not cry over Cameron Todd Willingham… here’s the comment I posted on the Economist Web site:

Not knowing more about this than what is in this article, I think it’s a poor example to use to debate the death penalty. I’m a father… if my son and I are in a burning house, I find him and bring him out with me or I die trying. You can be carried out unconscious, but you cannot walk out of that house. He deserved to die.

I can’t see how any self-respecting person would want to live knowing that he walked out and left his kids to die. There is no possible way to excuse this and no way to live with having done something like this.

F.C.C. Chairman Proposes ‘Open Internet’ Rules – NYTimes.com.

Cox Communications, another cable company, has been testing a system that slows traffic that it deems less time-sensitive, like file downloads and software updates, to keep Web pages, streaming video and online games working faster.

In case you’re missing the implication here… while you’re telecommuting, or while your company’s employee is telecommuting, his file downloads are taking much longer than they need to be. The reason, of course, is that nothing should keep 13 year old’s from killing their online friends as quickly as technologically possible.

File downloads are not time-sensitive? And just how closely is Cox reviewing traffic packets that it can distinguish binaries as being “software updates”? I suppose they’re just checking the Windows and Apple update sites.

Twitter Gets Revenue Model?

Wasn’t it just a few months ago that @Ev was bragging about not having any advertising-knowledgeable people at Twitter because it wasn’t something they were considering?

Does this mean that advertising is back in vogue for Web sites that can truly support it?

And for Twitter… where exactly will they run and not run ads? It’ll be interesting to learn from people complaining that a profane or disgusting tweet supported an ad for some wholesome product or service.