I've updated my BPM tap toy, which started behaving strangely since some GTK update. I've identified two issues, and it is working again now.

The BPM tap toy is a tiny Python script to obtain a BPM estimation by tapping on your mouse or keyboard. In contrast to many other such applications it does give you an error estimation and will visualize your precision in tapping. This way, you can judge how precise the value is.

I have some ideas to further increase precision while adding another useful visualization to judge the result quality.

The last weeks, I've occasionally been contributing to Wikipedia. I must say, Wikipedia is a really odd world of its own. Another thing I found quite surprising is the difference between the English and the German Wikipedia.

Some things I noticed:

• Some information in Wikipedia is grossly inaccurate. Interestingly, this even applies to computer science topics as simple as database indexes.
• A lot of the time, you meet users that 'defend' 'their' pages to any changes, as if they were the sole expert on this subject
• There appear to be plenty of zealots^W users with their life focused on deleting things from Wikipedia they do not consider "notable". This goes as far as the German Wikipedia having an initative called "Improve, don't delete" or the "Article Rescue Squad" in English Wikipedia
• English Wikipedia suffers a lot from link spam, despite "nofollow". In 'hot' (commercially, not on Wikipedia) topics such as "knowledge management" (yes, the "knowledge management" article on Wikipedia is crap, despite Wikis often being called "knowledge management"), half of the edits are link spam and reversals. There also is a lot of bookspam and citation spam, resulting in badly written articles where half of the article is unsorted and only partially relevant literature. In German Wikipedia, this seems to be a lot less of an issue.
• In general, German Wikipedia seems to be a lot more patrolled against changes (in particular links), but often is both less complete and less accurate.

So on overall: keep away from Wikipedia contributors, they're all maniacs. And often, don't bother to read a Wikipedia article if you can get an appropriate textbook. The Wikipedia article will just try to sell you a dozen textbooks anyway; you'll also have to read them to check the validity.

It is a pity, that despite its size and "eyeballs", Wikipedia so far seems to have not attracted much attention by actual "domain experts", but it seems that it is largely filled by bureocrats, zealots and promoters. (That don't have any real work to do?)

There are many things wrong here, that have been pointed out by many others, too. I'm not going to rescue the Wikipedia world, either. And yes, I am aware that you can discuss in Wikipedia, too.

• Good articles get more contributions. Nobody cares for the black sheep. It probably gives just much more gratitude to turn a good article into an excellent one, than turning a bad one into an okay one.
• Wikipedia at the same time tries to be exhaustive and maintain a certain "notability". This ends in people creating articles (because they're missing) and others then deleting them (because they consider them "not notable"). This is very discouraging to users that might even be experts on that subject they have been adding. (See also "the rich get richer" in this blog rant)
• New articles get extra attention, and often are attacked quickly for either quality or notability (despite WP:IMPERFECT), while articles that have been bad for years are barely re-checked. The categories listing Articles that need expansion and Articles that need cleanup are getting out of control, at 58000+ articles for the latter. Articles "lacking sources" is at 340.000+ articles. That is 1 out of 10.
• In fact, Wikipedia even has 138 "cleanup categories". Did I mention it is run by bureocrats, not by domain experts?

I fear that Wikipedia will go the DMOZ road. There was a time that DMOZ was doing quite well. Nowadays, large parts of DMOZ are dead. For two main reasons: it's hard to get in, and the backlog is way too large. If you get into DMOZ for a larger category, you'll be faced with thousands of pending link submissions, where for a large part you don't feel qualified to judge on appropriateness or rewrite their description in a neural manner. I have the impression that the same is happening for Wikipedia: on one hand, users that join are often kicked badly for many of their first contributions and will just leave again. At the same time, many of the old articles are in desparate need for attention, but nobody of the established users is willing to spend the days of cleanup/rewriting needed to get the article into a useful shape again. And a new user will never dare to discard most of the existing article; they usually just add or modify single paragraphs to see what happens. So Wikipedia might be hitting some kind of barrier.

Still, I have to admit that I frequently use Wikipedia to look up things. Usually because it just comes up first in Google. I then often follow links to better resources, such as MathWorld. And I wish, Google would have taken me there right away ...

And don't assume I'd know how to run things better. I'd sure propose to spend more time at fixing existing articles instead of attacking new contributions that much (you'll lose contributors this way). But I also see the need for fighting spam (although you should also remove old spam ...). But I don't know if there is a solution that will actually attract domain experts to re-write all the badly written and inaccurate articles that don't have their personal zealot to patrol them.

P.S. Sorry, no comments on my blog. This isn't Facebook. Instead of commenting on my blog, how about working on Wikipedias backlog instead?

P.S. Another example is the German Wikipedia story surrounding Fefe's blog. Many here at the open source communities will know fefe for his work on Dietlibc, libowfat and similar highly respected open source projects. His blog has been famous for being high-quality in security, privacy topics, politics and media critics. Some of his fans (likely) started a Wikipedia page on his blog. There have been at least two huge discussions about deleting the Wikipedia page. "sock puppets" and all such things have been brought up, while Fefe himself was amused. The discussions around deleting the blogs page on Wikipedia made it all the way to the print newspapers. As I said, I'm not actually bringing up new critique on Wikipedia. It's an ongoing problem for years now.

[Insert random Deletionism rant against Wikipedia]

Mark Zuckerberg apparently recently promised

we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use.

Dear Facebook. I believe your users want more privacy, not just prettier controls. They don't want you to give away their data by default, track them across web sites (that embed the "Like" buttons) and auto-connect them to various things.

In particular, they want opt-in, not opt-out. And they also don't want to be auto-opted in by you either. Make the defaults all opt-out!

They don't want you to index and publish their data by default like if you were a paparazzi and they were a pop star. Sure, they'd like to be a pop star, but without the paparazzi stuff, you know.

There is an essential difference between actually caring about privacy, and just making it look nice (which unfortunately is what Facebook currently does, pretend it's all fine, because you could turn it off, if you go to all the sites you don't want and turn it off on each single one ...).

In a surprise move Apple today announced a new product closely related to the behyped iPad. This move went completely unexpected with technology analysts, who were expecting a new iPhone dubbed "iPhone 4G" to be released next.

The new product is called iPad mini, and features most of the iPad functionality in a lot smaller form factor, with extended battery life and without the overheating issues. It will focus on gamers, instead of the deprecated community of newspaper readers. The smaller form factor allows the users to bring the device along at any time.

Get all the specifications of the new iPad mini here [www.apple.com]. There is also a special edition with voice-over-3G functionality [www.apple.com].

Yes, I'm referring to the iPod touch and the iPhone. Just goofing around.

Folgende Texte sind - ohne Scheiss - von Facebook. Es handelt sich dabei nicht um Nutzerbeiträge, sondern um von Facebook erstellte Seiten (die Inhalte sind von Wikipedia importiert).

Gibt man in das Suchfeld "Kriegsverbrechen" ein, so erscheint dort die "Studienrichtung" [sic] "Kriegsverbrechen" mit folgendem Text:

Wir möchten aus dieser Gemeinschaftsseite die beste Wissenssammlung zu diesem Thema zu machen. Wenn du von Kriegsverbrechen begeistert bist, registriere dich und wir teilen dir mit, wenn wir deine Hilfe benötigen. Du kannst uns zudem helfen, indem du die Offizielle Facebook-Seite vorschlägst.

Quelle: "Kriegsverbrechen" auf Facebook.

Unter anderem auch zu finden: Waffen-SS, SS-Totenkopfdivision, Zweiter Weltkrieg (32 Fans) und Konzentrationslager. Auch hier findet sich natürlich wieder:

Wir möchten aus dieser Gemeinschaftsseite die beste Wissenssammlung zu diesem Thema zu machen. Wenn du von Konzentrationslager begeistert bist, registriere dich und wir teilen dir mit, wenn wir deine Hilfe benötigen. Du kannst uns zudem helfen, indem du die Offizielle Facebook-Seite vorschlägst.

Hallo Facebook, GEHT'S NOCH?!?!?

UPDATE: the bug is already fixed after a few hours, and only affected a minority of users (of a now deprecated, experimental option in the 'unstable' distribution, and only users that rebooted with the affected version).

The sysvinit version that hit unstable today has a grave bug if you have been running "startpar" or maybe "shell" style parallel booting. Read this bug report, if you have been using these (they were not enabled by default, so unless you've been giving parallel boot a try before, you should be ok.)

How to check if you are affected:

grep CONCURRENCY /etc/default/rcS

The workaround is as simple: just put either "none" or "makefile" in there, these are the only two values that are still distinct.

How to recover a broken system:

1. Boot recovery mode aka "single-user". At some point you should be asked for the root password. Login.
2. Run mount -o remount,rw / to enable write mode on your disk.
3. $EDITOR /etc/default/rcS and change the value of "CUNCURRENCY"
4. reboot

I can only confirm that changing "startpar" to "none" helped me. I havn't tried "makefile" yet, and "none" seemed more likely to fix things.

Since AdBlock in Chrome does not block, just hide (the same probably applies to Safari and other WebKit-based-browsers), here's a simple method to actually block Facebook Like tracking:

Use a proxy.pac file, also known as Proxy auto-config. Then redirect Facebook Like to a blackhole or filtering proxy. I use privoxy, and this replaces Facebook Like embeds with an error message, which enables me to see which site uses Facebook like and that my filter is working.

Here's the relevant excerpt of my proxy.pac file:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
  var fblike = /https?:\/\/([^/]*)\.facebook\.com\/(plugins|widgets)\/like.*/;
  if (fblike.test(url)) {
    return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:8118";
  }
  return "DIRECT";
}

Note that you can add arbitrary domains and regexps to this filter, if you want to block additional sites, such as Google Analytics, that you do not want to be able to track your surfing behaviour.

Facebook recently launched the "Like" function, which basically can be embedded into arbitrary web sites. Naively, it does two things:

1. Provide a "Like" button for sharing the web site
2. Show you how many other users like the web site

But now reconsider: even when you don't use the "Like" function, facebook is in fact notified of which web sites you visit!.

Encouraging you to "share" content with friends is the hanger for this function. This is what makes web masters install it on their sites: they expect to get some extra traffic from your friends, so they just add it.

But whether you like it or not, it basically allows Facebook to track your complete web viewing habits. And it's the target web site that opts in, not the user! Combined with all the personal information Facebook already has on you, this is a major privacy concern. Combining this information might even be illegal in some countries (but probably not in the US where Facebook lives, privacy unfortunately has a low role here).

The best workaround currently is to blacklist Facebooks "Like" function using some kind of AdBlock, for example using this element filter:

IFRAME[src^="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php"]

But in general, we should try to make this kind of data aggregation illegal without explicit consent and force Facebook to make this an opt-in feature. Political work needed here ...

P.S.: Make sure to check if your AdBlock actually blocks and not just hides. As far as I can tell, WebKit Adblock, including Chromes, only hide ads. Firefoxs AdblockPlus seems to be more powerful.

P.P.S.: yes I've read the claim that Facebook doesn't track. No wait, all they basically said was that they are not going to announce at F8 they will be selling web surfing behaviour based ads to their customers. They actually did NOT state (or guarantee) they will NOT use data mining on this data. Just that you probably will not be able to buy eyeballs based on rules such as "has visited/liked disney.com" ...

P.P.P.S.: I've been told that facebook.com/widgets/like.php also needs to be blocked, since some sites use this URI scheme. And of course, Privoxy and similar privacy-increasing proxies are a useful addition, too.