For half a decade, I have depended on the great open source Gallery2 project to host my photo galleries. Unfortunately, I am finding myself with less and less time to devote to maintaining the installation, and many useful social media features have yet to make it into its code base. So, I finally decided to port my entire gallery into flickr.

Much to my surprise, there are lots of scripts in the gallery database to import photos from flickr, but no functional scripts to export photos out of gallery2 into flickr. Several past attempts have been made, but I can get none of them to work properly. So I did what any good coder would do, I modified the existing scripts until it worked. I am providing the scripts I hacked at the end of this post. There are several caveats with the scripts that I’m including here:

1. It’s recommended that you run this script (export-gallery.php) using command line php, or else the script might pre-maturely end due to Apache rest times. I also have max_execution_time = 0 set in my php.ini.
2. It’s recommended that you dramatically increase resource limitations on your mysql server when attempting to run this script. I made no attempt at optimizing mysql calls at all. The script basically makes a new call whenever it wants new data. I have wait_timeout=600 set in my my.cnf.
3. I offer NO support whatsoever for these scripts. They were created to ease my own personal transitions, and reading them should be fairly easy.
4. The script utilizes PHPFlickr and is based on mindlesscode.net’s version of export-gallery. Several major upgrades to the original script have been made, including the ability to export sub-albums.
5. I recommend only using getToken.php in phpFlickr, as I personally could not get PHPFlickr’s API authentication to work in any reliable fashion.
6. You should see a line like this in export-gallery.php i.".DATABASE_COLUMN_PREFIX."ownerId=10 AND . This allows you to export galleries on a per-user basis. You can look up the userid information in the gallery2 tables.

So with that said, click here to download the script. You can run it by typing php export-gallery.php on the command line after editing a few variables at the top of export-gallery.php and setting up the API key / token combination from flickr. I used this very useful link from PHPFlickr to get my token after setting up the API key.

For the past few years, I’ve stubbornly held out against HDTV and railed against Vista. Well, let’s just say I’m now a convert on both counts.

I bought two HDTV panels a month ago and I’m absolutely addicted to it now. Nature shows are absolutely stunning on HDTV (check Discovery HD Theatre). It’s actually pains me now to watch SD broadcast!

As for Vista, I finally took some time today to try it out on my Thinkpad (Lenovo) X41 Tablet. It was the most painless Windows Upgrade I’ve ever experienced. It’s even approaching OSX level simple! I simply ran the installation off an image, installed Office 2007, Adobe Design Premium CS3 and I was ready to go.

Just a few quick observations:

• Vista actually seems faster on the tablet than XP
• Handwriting recognition is significantly improved
• Instant Rails still works!
• I am really psyched to try ReadyBoast. It’s a feature of Vista that uses fast USB drives as extra ram. I have a fast SD card coming tomorrow, and will report about it when I try it.

Two decisions regarding technology were handed down by US courts today and I am once again disappointed by the result. Incidentally, the two cases just happen to be my two pet peeves, personal privacy and patents.

In the case of Vonage vs Verizon, a judge has issued an injunction against Vonage barring them from acquiring new customers on the grounds that Vonage has violated 3 very very broad software patents of Verizon’s. Not delving into the issue of whether software patents should be issued at all (and most of the world in fact do not issue software patents), Verizon’s own patents seem to cover nothing more than “obvious extensions” to current technology. See Clint Ricker’s brilliant analysis of the patents involved at his blog. Why can’t the US patent office do their job properly?!

In a much murkier case, a university student who was hacking sites like ebay.com was convicted based on evidence that the systems administrator of the network collected while hacking the student’s computer! Wire has published an article summarizing this case pretty well: Court Okays Counter-Hack of eBay Hacker’s Computer. This precedent can have potentially horrifying repercussions downstream. What stops Microsoft from deleting all of your files because they *think* you have a pirated version of Windows? or are we now going to let the RIAA hack computers that they *think* might contain pirated songs? Bruce Schneier, the CTO of Counterpane has written a great editorial about the subject: Vigilantism Is a Poor Response to Cyberattack.

Our civil liberties and our ability to innovate continue to get stymied by bad policies from the US government. Perhaps 1984 wasn’t nearly as fictional as people had thought.

I found this gem of a quote in Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini that characterizes the current web “revolution” remarkably well.

Our modern era, often termed The Information Age, has never been called The Knowledge Age. Information does not translate directly into knowledge. It must first be processed–accessed, absorbed, comprehended, integrated, and retained.

The 1990’s ushered in an explosion of websites, almost all of which focused on bringing as much information as possible onto the internet. The buzzword at the time was “database”, and .com startups raced to implement “database driven backends”. This generation of websites caused an explosion of information on the internet, most of which unfortunately, is useless for any individual user.

Then of course, came the advent of AJAX that ushed us into our current wave, the aptly named web 2.0. Suddenly websites became prettier and more responsive, and the buzzword of the day became “social networking” and user generated content. Yet, two generations of the web still has not produced any “knowledge”. But hope is on the way!

There are finally efforts to process all the information on the web in the form of initiatives such as Semantic Web and Collaborative Filtering.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could finally check out restaurant ratings from people who are just like you?  Afterall, you wouldn’t normally take restaurant recommendations from your next door neighbor who eats dog food, and he just rated McDonald’s 5 stars online!  The potential for a good collaborative filtering is virtually limitless, and in my opinion, will ultimately be responsible for web 3.0.  Netflix seems to be bracing for that possibility already, and is offering a $1MM prize for applicable advances in exactly that!

You can probably tell from my previous post that my own windows mobile device (DASH) is loaded up with 3rd party applications and I can’t imagine using my DASH without them. With the launch of the iPhone however, Apple has declared that there will be no 3rd party application support. Charlie O’Donnell argues that apple’s software is so superior that it needs no other applications. Though I will concede that this is indeed true at the moment, it is hard to believe that 3rd party programmers will never catch up. Case in point, firefox on OSX is in many ways a better browser than Safari. What is more disturbing to me however, is another Apple related story that also came out recently:

Apple’s Steve Jobs Is Company’s $20 Billion Asset

By Connie Guglielmo

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. may find its most valuable asset is something it can’t protect through patents or secrecy: Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs.

If Jobs were to leave, shares of the Cupertino, California- based company might drop 25 percent or more, analysts say. That would erase about $20 billion in Apple’s market value.

Though to many, this may seem like a great thing for Apple. Unfortunately, it is actually a disaster waiting to happen. The greatest responsibility that a CEO can be said to have is the development of potential leaders around him. Borrowing from Jim Collins‘ Good to Great terminology, what enduring companies need are level 5 CEOs.

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. it’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

It is fairly clear to me that Steve Jobs does not have level 5 leadership skills, but is instead an EXCELLENT level 4 leader. There is no clear succession plan at Apple, and Steve Jobs’ persona is too domineering for the proper development of his other executives. Let’s hope Steve Jobs can put his ego aside, and Apple doesn’t collapse the moment he leaves!

Since I don’t have a secretary, I use a whole host of computer applications to help me increase my productivity. I’ve decided to list them all here for others to peruse. If you have a favorite efficiency application that I don’t actually use, tell me about it!

• File Management
• Amarok (Linux) - A full featured music application with full support of podcasts and bi-directional music transfers on Ipods.
• Anapod Explorer (Windows)- A bi-directional music organizer for Ipods.
• Ex Falso (Linux) – A mp3 tagger.
• Hellanzb (Linux) - It downloads from newsgroups, checks the parity files, and then extracts the files for you. What else can you ask for?
• Organizer
• FlexWallet (Windows Mobile) – Allows me to leave most of my (credit || membership || rewards) cards at home.
• Gaim (Linux) – allows me to sign on to MSN / AIM / Jabber all at the same time.
• Lextionary (Windows Mobile) – full featured on-the-go dictionary.
• Maildrop (Linux) – automatically sorts and filters my email based on my personal scale of “importance”.
• MythTV (Linux) – acts as my digital video recorder (DVR) and my video organizer. The setup was a bit torturous, but it has made up for it in all the ads I no longer have to watch (without paying a monthly fee)!
• Outlook (Windows [Mobile]) – keeps my calendar and contacts on both my laptop and my phone.
  
• Papyrus (Windows Mobile) – keeps my day to day organizer on my DASH.
• Planetplanet (Web) – aggregates all the non-private RSS streams of blogs I read and publishes it on one clean page.
• Sitebar (Web) – synchronized bookmarks wherever I go.
• Trillian (Windows) – The windows equivalent of Gaim.
• Server Management
• Amavis (Linux) – Gets rid of virus-infested / spam emails from the mail server. It is now stopping more than 1000 spams a day!
• Gallery (Web) – In my opinion, there is simply no better way to organize your photos.
• Horde (Web) – I mainly use the email portion of this “groupware”, and apparently so does a lot of universities.
• Phpmyadmin (Web) – you didn’t expect me to manage my databases all using command prompt did you?
• Phpldapadmin (Web) – Sometime last year, I thought it would be a great idea to switch my backend to ldap. Thank god for this app.
• Samba (Linux) – Allows windows and Linux computers to talk to each other in an admin-sane fashion.
• Webmin (Web) – Graphical interface for systems administration.
• Wordpress (Web) – Most of my websites now run entirely off of Wordpress (though a severely hacked version). If I still had to manage a loose collection of pages, I would seriously kill myself.

Referenced from Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

I personally spend significant amount of time on my Ipod and my E3C headphones. Naturally, it’s been quite disconcerting to see increasing anecdotal evidence of earbuds induced hearing loss. Fortunately, it seems that an industrious graduate student has come up with some concrete numbers we can use:

“Sound Output Levels of the iPod and Other MP3 Players: Is There Potential Risk to Hearing?”

Cory D.F. Portnuff
Au.D., Ph.D. Candidate
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences Dept
University of Colorado

Brian J. Fligor, Sc.D.
Director of Diagnostic Audiology, Children’s Hospital Boston
Instructor in Otology and Laryngology, Harvard Medical School

Most of you are probably quite familiar with e-mail spam by now, and might even have noticed that it has increased in intensity in the recent months. Rests assured, this phenomenon is by no means isolated to your mailbox. Network World recently published an article on this exact phenomenon titled: What’s with all this spam?.

What’s with all this spam?

Unwanted e-mail levels ’shot up like crazy’; image spam partly to blame, say experts.

By Cara Garretson, Network World, 11/08/06

Researchers and IT managers are confirming security vendors’ claims that spam levels have spiked in the past month – some say by as much as 80 % — and show no signs of decreasing.

…

The article cites the rise of image spam, spam that contains its text inside an image, as a leading cause for this recent spike in spam filter evasion. Unfortunately, the problem is not nearly as simple as this. Before I dive deeper into the issue, let me first briefly go over the art of mail filtering. Current mail filters function by leveraging 3 distinct methods (simplifed below for illustration purposes):

• Distributed Spam Checksum Networks like Vipul’s Razor.
• Each mail server in the network (including mail.grafitto) would submit a checksum (analogous to a computer file’s fingerprint) for the email that it has classified as spam. The network would then process all the checksums and figures out what it would like to identify as true spam (in case an individual mail server is wrong). This global database is then consulted by all mail servers in the network to block any new emails that match any existing checksum.
• Blacklists like SPEWS
  
• These blacklists are compiled by what essentially amounts to spam watchdog groups. These groups scour the emails floating around the web and look at what parts of the internet is currently engaged in spamming. Indeed, it then asks that mail servers voluntarily block emails emanating from these addresses (and sometimes entire zones). This method is akin to quarantining a section of the web until their admins fix their behavior.
• Bayesian Spam Filter like SpamAssassin:
• This class of spam filters leverages bayesian statistics to look at the frequency of words (and their patterns) in emails to classify them into either spam or ham. This class of filter is extremely powerful because it is able to continually “learn” by adjusting its bayesian weights for each piece of new spam.

Among these 3 classes of spam filters, Bayesian Spam Filter is the only one that has preventive abilities. The other two classes of spam filters would not recognize a spam as such until a large number of mail servers have already been hit. In the never ending horse-race between the spammers and the filters, it seems that spammers have finally figured out how to circumvent all of our current protections.

• Garbage Emails
• You probably have seen lots of emails with non-sensical texts and wonder why the spammers are being so stupid. In fact, the spammers are not using them to advertise a product, but actually using them to confuse and mis-direct the weights in a Bayesian Filter.
• Semi-Real Emails
• A new class of spammers are now appending thier ads above real webpages and mailing lists emails. This is extremely messy for any heuristic algorithm and will definitely mess up any Bayesian filters.
• Image Emails
• Another way to get around a Bayesian filter is to simply have no words at all! Many spammers are putting down their words in an image file and sending only the image file. Furthermore, changing a pixel per image would throw off all the checksum comparisions.
• Zombie Computers
• In order to circumvent blacklists, many spammers are now hacking random servers on the web and using them to send out their spams.

Spammers have in fact even started using other mediums for their messages:

• Wiki-spam
• Putting spam messages on wiki pages (abusing their open edit nature) in the hopes that people and search engines will see the page. Links are often put there as well in order to increase the spammer’s site’s google page rank.
• Referrer Spam
• Repeatedly hitting a website that has a visit tracker like webalizer in order to inflate a spammer’s site’s google page rank.
• Webpage Spam
  
• Creating a bazillion copies of the webpage and putting it all over the web so that at least one of its content would appear on the top of google’s search results.

All of this leads me to believe that we are definitely losing this war on spam (and very possibly permanently so). We don’t even have to look that far back at the advent of Capital One (Junk Mail Master) to see how profitable junk mail can get (CEO at Capital One Cashed In Options for Nearly $250 Million). For every 1000 person direct-mailed, only 1 person needs to respond for the whole batch to break even. The break-even percentage of people that need to respond to an email is of course thousands of not millions orders of magnitudes smaller. Sigh, if only attorney generals would actually try to enforce the CAN SPAM Act…

Founded in 2001, Vonage is currently the biggest VoIP company in the world. More interestingly, on May 5th 2006, Vonage issued its’ IPO prospectus. For those that not familiar with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), it is a new technology that uses the internet as the backbone infrastructure for traditional telephone calls. It allows its’ users to make and receive phone calls as they do traditionally, while transparently replacing much of the role of the traditional phone company.
The technical idea itself is an ingenious one, and it seems like Vonage has been able to successfully make the leap from early adopters to the early majority (borrowing from Geoffrey Moore’s terminology in Crossing the Chasm). It’s revenue has risen from 19MM in 2003 to 270MM in 2005. Unfortunately, Vonage doesn’t seem to be watching its cash flow, and has been running higher and higher net losses since its inception.
Now that I’ve talked briefly about Vonage the company, I have to say that its’ propose IPO reeks of the dot com bubble. Once again, VCs are attempting to push a startup that is still cash flow negative out into the market in order to make a quick escape. Let me lists the reasons why I think this is a disaster in the making.

1. VCs have given Vonage more than 660MM of funding. Now clearly VCs have no intentions of losing 660 MM, which is why it’s absolutely scary to see this in the prospectus: “Our stock price may decline due to sales of shares by our other stockholders”…
2. Vonage is still cash flow NEGATIVE. In fact, it’s so negative that the prospectus itself warns: “Our significant losses to date may prevent us from obtaining additional funds on favorable terms or at all … We do not fit traditional credit lending criteria … the terms of our senior unsecured convertible notes contain significant restrictions on our ability to raise additional capital.”. Seriously, WTF
3. Jeffrey Citron, the out-going CEO (and current Chief Strategist), is an absolute ass. Hell, he got banned from the brokerage business completely by the SEC for his last startup (Datek Online).
4. Mike Snyder, the in-coming CEO, is a major contributor to the 2 billion dollar accounting fiasco at Tyco according to the Wall Street Journal. (Even with Snyder at the rein, Vonage’s balance sheet is STILL cash flow negative?!?!)
5. Vonage has been throwing its marketing dollars down the drain. Normally, companies with significant first mover advantage should be able to equate their brand name with the entire product category.
   • Underarmor – Athletic wear
   • Ipod – Mp3 Player
   • Xerox – Photo Copier
   • Post-its – sticky notes

   Since Vonage has utterly failed to brand itself as “The next generation Phone Company”, it has actually been running a marketing campaign for the entire VoIP industry. (I’m sure Sunrocket is thanking Vonage for all the free marketing).

6. The telecom companies are currently trying to remove net neutrality. In fact, some have already started to prioritize their own packets over others, causing unacceptable VoIP performances for any provider other than their own.

When I look at all these reasons holistically, I see a company with bad management, bad finances, and bad marketing with vulture capitalists not far behind trying to recoup their investment. Does this look like a good investment opportunity to you?

Around a week ago, I made a blog entry about the difficulties I encountered during my workstation’s upgrade from FC4 to FC5. With that bitter memory still fresh in my mind, I had expected to spend this entire weekend on my MythTV box’s upgrade. To my great surprise, the process went very smoothly, and took no more than 6 hours. In fact, I even saw HUGE NFS performance improvements because of FC5.

Since the famous Fedora Mythology is currently not actively maintained, I’m going to post some tricks I took to setup my FC5 MythTV box here. I will caveat it by saying that I am not posting compete instructions, but rather notes that I think would be useful for someone going through this process.

1. Always partition your disks such that your kernel could be swapped in and out. For example, my mythTV box currently has the following partitions:
• /boot (ext3) on /dev/hda1
• / (ext3) on /dev/hda2
• /home (reiserfs) on /dev/hda3
• /videos (jfs) on /dev/hdb1 (recordings for mythTV)
2. Since Fedora is terrible at actual upgrades, I highly recommend doing a full blown install on your / partition even if you are “upgrading”. If your disks are setup like mine above, you would only have to backup your mysql database (mysqldump) and your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. All the other settings in /home/ would be recovered when you remount /home.
3. When you are finished installing from the CDs, run this script (atrpms.sh) so that you can add atrpms to your yum respository. Do a yum -y update immediately following and install the modules and programs that you need. (In my case, they were NVIDIA, IVTV, LIRC and mythtv-suite). The instructions are exactly the same as Fedora Mythology’s instructions for FC4. I am going to post my xorg.conf here just for reference.
4. Interestingly, FC5 MythTV now considers PVR-350’s Tuner0 as Tuner1. In order to avoid headaches later on (like off by one channel syndrome), it is worth the effort now to delete all the current information in mythtvsetup, and re-enter them.
5. I spent a long while with modprobe.conf and was still unable to get lirc to successfully load on startup. What I ended up doing was putting the following two lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and it seems to work fine.
• /sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c
• /sbin/service lircd start
6. Spend some time reading about Fedora’s implementation of udev. I saw quite a few people having trouble with lirc because they don’t quite understand udev. If you don’t have a /dev/lirc0, that means your LIRC wasn’t initialized properly. If you do have a /dev/lirc0, but not a /dev/lirc, you cannot simply create a symlink in /dev. /dev is dynamically maintained. What you actually need to do is create /etc/udev/rules.d/lirc.rules and have the following two lines in the file:
• KERNEL=”lirc[0-9]*”, NAME=”lirc%n”
• KERNEL=”lirc0″, SYMLINK=”lirc
7. Fedora Mythology’s lircrc file for the PVR-350 remote is actually pretty messy. I’ve cleaned it up slightly and you could see mine here.
8. To avoid the mouse cursor showing up on screen when you are using MythVideo, you can install unclutter (i686 RPM here). Unclutter will remove the idle mouse cursor from the screen.
9. See Mauriat Miranda’s excellent guide here for information on setting up win32 codecs for linux (WMA files, etc).

Well, I hope the information above is useful to those of you upgrading your mythTV Fedora boxes. If you are still having issues, you can never go wrong asking for help on FedoraForum.org.