What drugs is Facebook taking?

Am I the only one thinking the new interface of facebook sucks to such a degree that I’m thinking about deactivating and moving to Google Plus all together?

First is a mess. The only way I know to change to the older interface is to change the language (fine Facebook, I’m gona learn Afrikaanse so I can use your stupid service). Second, I use the “Most Recent” stream, like every f’ing person on the planet. Having a chronological view of the stream makes sense from every stand point, and I like reading the posts I deem important, not what the “The Facebook” considers “Top Stories”. If the engineers on facebook need an algorithm to determine what is important in your life and what not, than they have a problem. Recomendation isn’t a solution to every single problem on the planet. Then there is this god daam list on the right side that is hard to read because the area is small and they cut the text in half. But there is more! Apparently facebook engineers just got into 2005 and start updating every single bit of the page using ajax. Trendy! Now everything updates, everything moves, and I can’t have this open because it will distract me from my work.

 

I’m pissed. I might not like change, but this is step back. I don’t know if facebook is aware, but they are at war with google, and this was the most stupid move they could had made. I don’t think having spotify on the page is that big of a deal considering that most of the world can’t use it. And google is gearing up. Hangouts are becaming powerful with the new API. If facebook doesn’t get their act together, they will be the new MySpace.

 

 

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Yahoo, Flickr can go to hell!

I’ve recently open a blog about shoes with 8 (woman) friends of mine, called shoesisterhood.com. Mainly about woman shoes.

Well, our editors went to some parties and in order to select which pictures to post on the blog they created an free flickr account to post those pictures. Well, first the account was placed as “Unsafe” content. Most of the content is in this post.

Last week was Lisbon’s Vogue Fashion Night Out the girls decided to do a contest about who was wearing the best shoes and upload those into flickr as well. Today I’ve noticed that the content was still flagged as unsafe. Most pictures are a bit sexy, but not risqué, are mostly woman on high heels. So I appealed to flickr so explaining that most of the pictures are about shoes and are not sexual in any way.

Well, half an hour ago I’ve received an email explaining me that Voyeur content was not allowed on flickr:

Hello, Voyeur content is a violation of the Flickr Community Guidelines and Yahoo! Terms of Service. You can also read the following help forum discussion about voyeur content on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/95223/ Specifically this comment from staff: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/95223/#reply625343 -Flickr staff

Voyeur??? What the …!!?? So I’ve read the post in question and it that the following is their definition of Voyeur is says:

… practice of secretly photographing women (and men, and children) and posting them to Flickr for the purposes of sexual gratification…

So it seems that their problem is with pictures being taken without the explicit consent for sexual purposes? Ok, I reply to this email explaining once again that the people in the photographs were asked for permission before a picture being taken. The account is related to a blog about shoes, and no one in those pictures are being victims of sexual exploitation. I can’t understand the connection.

After sending the email I’ve decided to check the account to see if everything is ok. To my amazement, the account was deleted. Not only that, after logging in, I wasn’t given a choice to download the pictures. That means, my friends, that maybe some pictures were lost because of this. I don’t know what kind of show flickr is running but after the founders left the company I don’t know who ever is left there has the users interests in mind. The site is stagnant for years! And This was an free account but I do have an paid account. After Carol Bartz being fired, the board being considered the worst in the US, and hearing about people loosing entire collections, I’m done with flickr. I’m gonna wait until my subscription is over and I’m gonna move my stuff to other services. I don’t know if picasa is any good, or if I have to write a photo management service from the ground up, but one thing is for sure, in one year I’m not going to be using flickr. Something is roten at yahoo and I have a feeling that flickr might die with them.

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Google Tasks for Grown Ups

Do you like and use Google Tasks in GMail? How about a full screen interface for tasks that you can leave open during your work?

Check it here.

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Google + needs different font sizes:

I’m loving Google+, but they seriously need to use different font sizes. With only one font size in the Stream everything seems cranked up to 11, making it hard to read:

After tweeking the CSS in Chrome I’ve decreased the font size of the messages, with different sizes for the user comment and page message. I think it looks better.

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Fenix Domain Browser v3

When I started working on Project Fenix one of the things that impressed me was the size of domain model. Back then it contained about 9000 entities and was 17000 lines in size. It was (and still is) a monstrous file. But the worst part was the fact that the team was used to inspect the domain by reading text file. I remember a team member scrolling up and down the file finding entities and relations and me being a freshman in that team starting to feel a bit worried.

After a few weeks I started working in a confusing part of the domain, and I needed to see the domain represented graphically. Like always, I started writing code that solved my problem that time, then I generalized the solution and added some more code and the add some more, and some more and by the end of the weekend I’ve built what became Fenix Domain Browser.

The first version was written in a combination of perl and php (Perl for the DML parser and PHP for presentation) and generated graphs using Graphviz. After a few months I added some new features (UML graphs, mapping table resolution and printing).

Untitled.png

However there were problems. Because the code that parsed the domain was written in a hasty weekend, it was so ugly and unreadable that I’ve placed a header in the file warning to abandon hope all ye who enter here:

Untitled 2.png

Most changes introduced in DML weren’t being ported back to this parser and were a lot of bugs in it. A complete rewritten was needed but with my ill fated thesis and other projects that was delayed until now.

This new version is a complete rewritten in Java and GWT, it uses the DML parser to parse the files, so new changes introduced into DML are automatically supported. It also has support for any Fenix Framework Domain and a new interface:

data.png

Fenix Domain Browser is available at https://fenix-ashes.ist.utl.pt/fdb/ and the source code is at https://github.com/nurv/Fenix-Domain-Browser.

If you need a small domain to test it, use this file.

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Remainings of ourselfs

I’ve started reading Jon Ronson’s new book, The Psychopath Test, and a odd but astounding fact came to my mind.

Each time we meet someone we are changed, both in psychological but also in a biological sense. Most emotional memories can’t be forgotten because they make structural changes on your brain. Also and through theory of mind, we have fragmented copies of minds from people we’ve met. Each time we think what another person is thinking, we are creating a copy of that mind within our brain. Since meeting someone causes biological changes and we contain fragments of each others brain with us, we are in a sense the distributed backup drive for every each other. As long we continue to think about the people who died, theoretically, the thing that makes us us will still be alive and running in the collective conscience. We are continually maintaining “the souls” of everyone who died and we’ve met. We are the Heaven. Neat, hum?

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