House of Jorob

Delicious has life after Yahoo!

AVOS has acquired Delicious from Yahoo!, removing for the time being the threat of losing hundreds of thousands of bookmarks, for users of the social bookmarking site.

Details in a FAQ here.

For reposting, that  link is http://www.delicious.com/help/transition

 

How to Fix Your Broken Delicious Extension in FireFox 4

I like Firefox 4.

Seems to run cleaner, faster, than previous versions.

But the new release completely busted my Delicious bookmark extension.

No more sidebar.

No more tag button.

Here's how to get it all working again.

You need a new Firefox Add-On, one called Add-On Compatibility-Reporter

Install it.

Restart Firefox 4 TWICE.

Then go to your Bookmarks button that has suddenly reappeared and turn on your sidebar!

Here's the tricky part:

If you now go back into your Add-Ons in Firefox, you will see that the Add-On Compatibility Checker is DISABLED.

DON'T enable it.

As soon as you do, you will DISABLE your Firefox Delicious Extension.

You can fix this, if you've gone ahead and done it already, by restarting Firefox twice again.

A list of companies affected by the Epsilon information theft (updated 4.15.11)

Following up last week's massive theft of millions of email addresses and names from Epsilon, I thought I'd cobble together a list of the companies known-to-date to have been impacted by the breach….because this theft is truly dangerous, in a creeping, insidious way.

Remember, the thieves did NOT get credit card information. A good hacker, however, only needs a matching real name and email address. Then s/he can build a perfectly legitimate-looking email from one of these companies, and send it to you with a bad link on it.

After all, if Best Buy sent you an email that said all you needed to do was “click here” for 400 bonus points to be added to your Best Buy Rewards program total, wouldn’t you do that?

And that’s why this theft is so scary. Because if *I* were a hacker, I wouldn’t use this information right now.

I’d do it three months from now, after you’ve forgotten all about the theft.

Be cautious with any email you receive from any of these companies, for a good, long time to come. Any links below will take you to carefully worded public statements from companies that have made them available.

(**Added to the list after original distribution. I sent this around the office on Wednesday, April 6.)

1-800-FLOWERS
AbeBooks
Air Miles (Canada)
Ameriprise Financial
**Ann Taylor credit card (by WFNNB)
Barclay's Bank of Delaware (BJ's and L.L. Bean)
Beachbody
Bebe Stores
Best Buy
Benefit Cosmetics
Brookstone
Capital One
Chase
Citigroup
City Market
College Board
**Crucial
**Dell
Dillons
Disney Destinations
Eddie Bauer
Eileen Fisher
Ethan Allen
Eurosport (Soccer.com)
Food 4 Less
Fred Meyer
Fry's Electronics
Hilton Honors program
Home Depot Credit Card (by Citibank)
Home Shopping Network
**Jay C
**J. Crew credit card (by WFNNB)
JPMorgan Chase
**King Soopers
Kroger
**Lacoste
Marks and Spencer
Marriott
McKinsey Quarterly
MoneyGram
New York & Co.
QFC
Ralph's
Red Roof Inns
Ritz-Carlton
Robert Half International
Scottrade
Smith Brands
Target
**Tastefully Simple
TD Ameritrade
**The Limited credit card (by WFNNB)
**TIAA-CREF
TiVo
US Bank
**Verizon
Walgreen's
World Financial Network National Bank (issues private-label credit cards, WFNNB, above)

 

Forever Tweet

Old Tweets never die.

They just get archived.

And are now searchable.

Forever and ever.

Details are here. This is Twitter's take.

Over here is the official Google announcement.

Mad Avenue Blues: American Pie

I love a good parody.
Even one that's over nine minutes long.
There are 19 stanzas making up L McDuff's spoof-song, and every one's dead on.
Vocalist Kevin Osbourne's work is up to the task, he doesn't get in the way of the lyric.

McDuff says he wrote his lyrics and produced the vid in just one day.

Wow.

Released in early June, the tunes been viewed 121,000 times.(performed by vocalist Kevin Osbourne)

So bye, bye those big upfront buys.
Pitched my client who was pliant
But the pitch didn't fly.....

Word Clouds and the House

Been posting for a while now, and thought it'd be fun to play around a little with Wordle, the cloud generator.

The larger the font, the more frequent the word.

This is what House-of-Jorob looks like in a cloud:

I have no idea why Titanic is so big.

Or Rachel.

Looking at it, I think Wordle didn't hit the archives, just the last couple weeks worth of posts.

WTF. 

Looks nice, though.

It's easy to Wordle any page.

Just hit this link and enter a URL.

The Java application does the rest.

World Clock, Spiritual Awakening, and Where's the Joy?

This is the World Clock.

A neat idea.

On the surface.

But the damn thing is soooooooo subtley negative. Right there, under the coolness of it all.

Negative.

Which is really ironic.

Considering Peter Russell is a spiritual kind of guy. And a bit of a pioneer. He's had a website going since 1996.

That's the stone age, as far as the Internet is concerned.

Back then, you coded by hand.

In Notepad.

And uploaded on a 56K modem on your house telephone line.

The hell with everyone else in the house wanting to use the phone at the time.

But to return to the point.....

I don't think the negativity is intentional.

But the choice of what's being tracked is what's doing it.

Births. Deaths. Population growth.

Deforestation.

Communicable/noncommunicable diseases.

Species Extinct.

Abortions.

Hot-button items, all of them.

Each stat is rising, of course, because the figures on the clock are approximations based on past stats and estimates, and then aggregated since the thing started counting, whenever that was.

And when you're done being impressed with the stats, the negativity kicks in.

The world sucks. People suck. We're killing ourselves.

<sigh>

Where are the counters for:

• successful organ transplants
• dollars donated by individuals for disaster relief
• babies and older children adopted
• spayed and neutered puppies and kittens
• teenagers getting their driver's licenses
• weddings
• barrels of single-malt whiskey
• pounds of aluminum, glass, and paper recycled

I mean, if you're going to seek spiritual enlightenment--using these clocks--why not leave a little joy around for others to find?

Wizards in Winter Light Show

This is Carson Williams's 2004 light show.

The original. 

Visitors to the neighborhood heard the sound track by tuning their car radios to the FM channel he was broadcasting his music over--he posted a sign out front with the frequency.

The tune is Wizards in Winter.

The holiday house display spawned a whole bunch of imitators, and got glommed by a beer company.

Williams has gone on to bigger things--read about them here.

Wizards in Winter belongs to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Who might actually have a new album out before too long.

<sigh>.

Perfectionists.

What can you do?

The Great Firewall of China

I wish I could claim credit for that phrase.
But I can't.
"The Great Firewall of China" is a phrase coined to disparage the Chinese government's Golden Shield project.
Golden Shield is China's $800 million dollar Internet lockdown; probably the most sophisticated Internet filtering system of its kind.
Two or three sides are fighting over Internet regulation here in the United States, but in China, the battle is already lost.
(Type Falun Gong into a web browser in a Chinese Internet cafe and watch how fast the police show up after the sirens go off.)
Companies like Cisco happily sold all kinds of filtering gear to the Chinese--what, you thought they manufactured all this stuff themselves?
Hardly.
I'm all for making a buck--God knows, I need them, so I understand the rationale behind the sales.
And Cisco's shareholders would have crucified their board if they didn't make the deal.

Dollar bills don't have a conscience.

But I do.

Which might surprise some people.

Bill Xia heads up a company called Dynamic Internet Technology. He launched it six years ago, and its purpose was to assault the Great Firewall.

Bill brings uncensored Internet to Chinese end users--the citizens. About a million of them make use of his company's software, designed to get around the Great Firewall.

I'm sure any journalist reading this will want to take advantage of the toolkit before they go overseas.

Go right here to get it: The Global Internet Freedom Consortium. There's a zip file that's got 5 tools for busting through the Firewall, right in the middle of the page.