taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Twitter API Rate Limiting : ‘Clients are allowed 70 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request. This is enough to make just over one request per minute, per hour, which should meet the needs of most applications.’ Fingers crossed this can be lifted for twit.ie
  (tags: aggregation rate-limiting api http twitter twit.ie)

• Pipes: BBC AOD filter : select a BBC radio show, get an RSS feed of “Audio on Demand” RealAMRadio files as they are posted. (”radio4″ works as the station ID for that station)
  (tags: bbc radio4 radio realaudio via:hublog)

• Work at Home . . . for a Criminal? : good round-up of how those “work at home” scam spams work
  (tags: work spam scams fraud teleworking telecommuting)

Tags: aggregation, api, bbc, fraud, http, radio, radio4, rate-limiting, realaudio, scams, spam, telecommuting, teleworking, twit.ie, twitter, via:hublog, work

• Emergent Chaos: Certifiably Silly : Adam Shostack tells the truth re Firefox 3’s stupid self-signed cert bug. ‘imposing yet another security tax, based on a static analysis of attackers and some certificate authority pixie dust, isn’t going to help things for very long.’
  (tags: firefox firefox-3 security certificates ssl tls ca pki adam-shostack ui usability)

• Image Cerberus: a SpamAssassin plug-in against image spam : a new plugin, subject of a paper at this year’s CEAS conference it looks like
  (tags: plugins spamassassin anti-spam image-spam images ceas conferences)

• Twitter drops SMS-notification support for EU users : interesting, I haven’t received the mail, and it claims to still be sending updates to my Irish mobile (update: I’m not actually *getting* any updates, though)
  (tags: twitter phones mobile sms ireland eu uk)

Tags: adam-shostack, anti-spam, ca, ceas, certificates, conferences, eu, firefox, firefox-3, image-spam, images, ireland, mobile, phones, pki, plugins, security, sms, spamassassin, ssl, tls, twitter, ui, uk, usability

• Cycle Helmets and Other Religious Symbols : there appears to be a lack of published research suggesting that bike helmets help avoid serious injury and death — in fact, research seems to suggest the _opposite_.
  (tags: cycling helmets safety research bikes equipment)

• Clever method of near duplicate detection : ‘SIGIR 2008 paper, “SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections”‘. may be useful, although we’ve pretty much stopped deduping in SpamAssassin nowadays
  (tags: corpora dupes duplicates spotsigs collections sigir papers via:jzawodny)

• HadoopStreaming : ‘Using the streaming system you can develop working hadoop jobs with extremely limited knowldge of Java. [..] Hadoop basically becomes a system for making pipes from shell-scripting work (with some fudging) on a cluster.’
  (tags: hadoop perl streams unix distcomp clusters mapreduce)

• political zealot using GMail’s “this is spam” button to deliberately cause spamfilter problems for Obama’s campaign : ‘Tablemate at benihana confided how he subscribes to Obama’s mailing list and marks it all as spam to train Gmail. Urge to kill rising.’ - Kevin Fox on Twitter
  (tags: twitter kevin-fox foaf-story benihana obama anti-spam filtering this-is-spam us-politics moveon)

• “Jake Leg” : ‘large numbers of [adulterated Prohibition-era alcohol, Jamaican Ginger Extract] users began to lose use of their hands and feet. Some victims could walk, but they had no control over the muscles which would normally have enabled them to point their toes upward. Therefore, they would raise their feet high with the toes flopping downward, which would touch the pavement first followed by their heels. The toe first, heel second pattern made a distinctive “tap-click, tap-click” sound as they walked. This very peculiar gait became known as the jake walk and those afflicted were said to have jake leg’
  (tags: jake-leg walking history prohibition alcohol odd bizarre adulteration poison 1930s)

Tags: 1930s, adulteration, alcohol, anti-spam, benihana, bikes, bizarre, clusters, collections, corpora, cycling, distcomp, dupes, duplicates, equipment, filtering, foaf-story, hadoop, helmets, history, jake-leg, kevin-fox, mapreduce, moveon, obama, odd, papers, perl, poison, prohibition, research, safety, sigir, spotsigs, streams, this-is-spam, twitter, unix, us-politics, via:jzawodny, walking

Twitter has this nasty habit — if you come across a tweet in your feed reader containing a URL, and you want to follow that link, you can’t, because Twitter doesn’t auto-link URLs in its RSS feeds. Instead, you have to click on the feed item, itself, wait for that to open in the browser, then click on the link in the new browser tab. That link will, in turn, open in another new tab.

Here’s a quick-hack Greasemonkey user script to inhibit this second new-tab:

twitter_no_popups.user.js

Tags: greasemonkey, hacks, software, twitter, userscript, web

As I previously threatened, I’ve gone ahead and created a “Microplanet” for Irish twitterers, similar to Portland’s Pulse of PDX — an aggregator of the “stream of consciousness” that comes out of our local Twitter community: IrishPulse.

Here’s what you can do:

Add yourself: if you’re an Irish Twitter user, follow the user ‘irishpulse’. This will add you to the sources list.

Publicise it: feel free to pass on the URL to other Irish Twitter users, and blog about it.

Read it: bookmark and take a look now and again!

In terms of implementation, it’s just a (slightly patched) copy of Venus and a perl script using Net::Twitter to generate an OPML file of the Twitter followers. Here’s the source. I’d love to see more “Pulse” sites using this…

Tags: hacks, ireland, irishpulse, sites, twitter

Intriguing! Via Glynn Moody comes an interesting new site, Pulse of Open Source:

To highlight open source activity on Twitter, I have launched a new web application today called The Pulse of Open Source. This is the stream of collective consciousness from the open source community on Twitter. You can follow this stream by simply bookmarking the site and visiting regularly or by adding the RSS feed to your feed reader. You can also create a Twitter account and add the individuals you’d like to follow to your own Twitter friends list if you’d prefer. There is also a mobile version of the site for on-the-go viewing.

I’m not entirely convinced it makes sense — the “open source community” is a pretty wide and amorphous concept, covering “enterprisey” types like Iona, to conference organisers, to web standards guys to GNOME developers. That’s a wide range.

However, that site links to the original, and a version which resonates better: PulseOfPDX.com, ‘the stream of Portland’s collective consciousness‘. Basically, this is a local syndication site, with microblogging from a community of local Twitterers. Similar to the “Planet” concept, which aggregates posts from multiple weblogs into a new ‘river of news’ combined feed, as seen on Planet Antispam, Planet Perl, Planet.journals.ie, but for off-the-cuff Twitter microblog comments. It’s a microplanet, to coin a phrase.

I think I might set up one of these for Ireland… what a great idea!

Update: Ted Leung posted about this today as well, I see, linking to this call for an “out-of-the-box” Twitter aggregator:

In theory, this whole pulse idea could be packaged up to be as easily deployable as “planet” sites. Here, “pulse” is the operational brand-name of aggregating Twitter accounts, where as “planet” is the tried and true operational brand-name of aggregating blogs.

I think I still prefer “microplanet” ;)

Update 2: check out IrishPulse!

Tags: blogs, communities, planet, syndication, twitter