Monthly Archives: July 2007

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

You Haven’t Got Much in your Facebook Profile

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Over the past few months it seems like everybody has been getting accounts on Facebook, indeed BBC News recently reported that membership has grown by more than 500%.

As with MySpace, I’d generally resisted signing up for an account, however the issue with Facebook is that only members can see information, so when groups I am involved in decide to use Facebook the only way people can access information is to sign up to Facebook – a classic example of the walled garden idea that AOL tried and failed with years ago. Unfortunately, the only way to access that stuff is to step into the walled garden, and hand your information to Facebook.

I’ve only put the absolute minimum of information in, and Beth hasn’t signed up at all. Needless to say, that’s produced some grumbling from some quarters, but I don’t really see the point in duplicating in Facebook a whole load of information that is elsewhere. Then I found out some more that made me really rather glad that I hadn’t provided anything else, and that Beth wasn’t on at all…

Jen was having a similar issue as me, with people she knew joining the networks and moving their online presence within the walled gardens. Then she discovered something altogether more worrying about Facebook policy.

First take a look at the Facebook terms and conditions:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Basically, anything I might upload is automatically licensed to Facebook to do anything with for any purpose, and they can sub-license it to anybody else too. The next sentence states that you can remove your content and that revokes the license, but that they then say that your user content will remain in their archives.

But that’s not the really worrying bit – if you consider all the information you can add to Facebook it can produce a fairly detailed picture of you to allow advertisers to target adverts to your personal interests. The Facebook privacy policy says as such:

Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you. You can know more about the world around you and, where there are advertisements, they’re more likely to be interesting to you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don’t tell the movie company who you are.

However the next paragraph is somewhat more worrying:

We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile.

Effectively they are saying that over and above what you give them, they will collect other information about you from outside Facebook including elsewhere on the internet, in newspapers and anywhere else.

Back in December 2005, two MIT students produced a paper looking at Facebook privacy – certainly worth a read in terms of the privacy issues, but also in relation to the amounts of personally identifiable information that some people reveal on the site. Just consider for a moment what a goldmine of a one-stop-shop for personal information Facebook could be…

Jen then posted a video which she had been sent. As she says, it is maybe a bit alarmist in places, but it does highlight the basic issues well…

On the basis of that video, Jen decided to remove her account – but it seems that Facebook is like the Hotel California in that you can “check out any time you like, but you can never leave.â€? The closest you can get is to deactivate the account, but if you log back in, it will come back to life again. Thankfully I’ve not given them much.

So hopefully that explains why I haven’t got much in my Facebook profile, and why there won’t be. It also goes to highlight once again how careful you have to be with the information you give out about yourself on the internet.

Doctor Who, Movies & TV

The Last of the Timelords

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350px-doctor_archangel.jpg

So after all the speculation, we now know what happens. The Master has been defeated and is dead (or maybe not), Martha is back with her family, Jack is back with Torchwood, and the Doctor is back travelling the universe.

As the episode opened, time had moved on by a year from the cliff-hanger at the end of A Sound of Drums. The Master and the Toclofane have absolute control of the world, enslaving the human race to build a fleet of war rockets to take over the universe. The Doctor, having been aged by the Master has been kept almost as a pet, humiliated. Meanwhile Martha has been travelling the world on a mission to save the world.

One of the big questions outstanding from last week was who or what were the Toclofane. The answer was perhaps the most straightforward, especially when you remember that the Doctor said last week that the Master could only travel between the twenty-first century and the end of the universe. The Toclofane were all that was left of the human race – not surprisingly Utopia wasn’t an escape, and the Master had travelled to the far future and offered to ‘save’ them by bringing them back in time. This also explained the paradox machine created by the Master which was needed to hold everything together as the Toclofane changed their own past. Ultimately it was the paradox machine that held the key to resolving what had happened – with the machine holding the paradox removed, everything reverted to normal.

As with last season and with many series, the major plot was resolved relatively early on in the episode, giving a chance to ‘reposition the pieces’ ready for Christmas.

Having captured the Master, there is a nod to Scream of the Shalka which included an android Master – voiced by Derek Jacobi – who lived in the TARDIS in that the Doctor decides that despite what the Master has done, he can’t allow him to be executed, and as the only other time lord, the Master is his responsibility, and he is going to imprison him in the TARDIS. However this plan is curtailed by Lucy Saxon, the Master’s wife, who shoots her husband. Whilst the Doctor begs his enemy to regenerate, the Master appears to deliberately stop himself from regerating, and dies in the arms of the Doctor. The interesting comparison to this is a scene mere moments before, when the Doctor has grabbed the Master as he attempts to escape using Jack’s vortex manipulator. Having failed to escape, and finding themselves near the fleet of rockets, the Master then threatens to blow the ships up killing both himself and the Doctor. However, the Doctor calls his bluff, saying that the Master would never do it because it involved his death. The Master hands over the control to destroy the rockets, and returns with the Doctor. Then moments later he is goading people to shoot him, almost as if he wants to die – and when someone actually shoots him, he doesn’t regenerate all a bit odd…

Alone, the Doctor takes the body of his former enemy and places it on a funeral pyre. However, then the odd behaviour and rocket scene make a bit more sense. In a scene reminiscent of many classic sci-fi serials you see a woman’s hand retrieve the Master’s ring from the pyre, and hear a familiar chuckle. Perhaps, as he has done before, the Master has cheated death, and by letting his time lord body die (remember the Doctor appeared to know the instant the Master became time lord again two weeks ago) managed to evade the Doctor to return again.

That is not the only revelation in the last few minutes. I’ve commented a couple of times on the paradoxes included in this series. Back in episode 1 there was a minor paradox when Martha meets a future Doctor, then in the Shakespeare Code, the Doctor has to leave in a hurry as he is chased by troops for something his future self has done. Blink also includes a paradox that is key to the whole story. However as the Doctor drops Jack off in Cardiff they discuss the fact that he is ageing but will never die, and then Jack comments that in his home era living on the Boeshane peninsula, he became a poster boy, and was known as the Face of Boe – perhaps explaining how the Face of Boe knew how many times he would meet the Doctor, and also the fact that the Doctor was not alone.

After that revelation, there was one final twist as Martha decides that she is not going to leave with the Doctor. Whilst he tries to act as if nothing has changed, having spent a year away from the Doctor, she knows that everything has changed. Having said that, she apparently isn’t out of the series, and may well also be appearing in Torchwood too. This neatly arranges everything for this years Christmas special, where the special guest companion is apparently going to be Kylie Minogue. Much as with last year, we also get a Titanic cliff-hanger – as it appears that the ship has smashed it’s way into the TARDIS.

All in all I found it a really enjoyable episode, and a definite improvement over last week. I was a lot happier with the characterisation of the Master too, with the zany moments of last week toned down. The relationship between the Master and the Doctor being at the heart of the episode, and some very moving scenes between the two. There were also some great references back to previous battles with both time lords mentioning the Axons. Amusingly after a whole series of moments where I expected the Master to not be dead, the moment where the hand picks up the ring and you hear a familiar laugh did produce a big smile. Also the reason for having Jack around became clear – although I don’t think I can cope with a million years of Torchwood waiting for him to age…

Computers/Technology, Programming, Transport

A Busy Saturday

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Yesterday was somewhat of a busy day – not only was it the fifth of the successful series of Developer Days at Microsoft, but we’d also got tickets for the equally successful Watercress Belle, the fine dining train that the Watercress Line preserved railway run on a number of Saturday evenings during the year.

The day didn’t have an overly great start. For some reason, I did something I never usually do, and despite driving a familiar route ended up heading onto the A329(M) going in the wrong direction! Not too much of a problem as I could just drive down to the next junction, go round the roundabout and back, but still a bit of a pain. Thankfully I’d left in good time, so still managed to get to Thames Valley Park without too much of a problem.

Looking through the list of sessions in advance, whereas at previous events when I’d had several sessions, usually at the same time that I really wanted to go to, this time around there were a number of spots where there was nothing I was massively enthusiastic about needing to go along to, as a result, my choices tended to have slightly different criteria. My first session choice was a good example. Whilst I was quite interested to learn about Mock Objects, Colin, the chap doing the presentation sat opposite us at the geek dinner following a previous Developer Day, and I thought I’d go along to support him too.

Although I understand that Colin had done his presentation previously, he’d been allocated one of the larger rooms, and with a full house he seemed understandably nervous. In the early stages of the presentation he did seem to flit about a bit in relation to his slides, and it took a while to answer the question I had, which was why I should consider using mock objects. Having said that, once we got to a few examples, it all started to make sense, and ultimately it was a useful and informative talk.

Moving on, I then went for something rather different, and attended the Guy Smith-Ferrier session giving tips on using Visual Studio 2005. Guy has been involved with the community for a long while, and I believe has spoken at every previous developer day. However I don’t think I’ve ever actually attended one of his sessions. Largely as expected, several of his tips were ones I knew about, however there was a goodly number of tips and tricks that told me something new. Guy’s experience was pretty apparent though, and he coped both with people in the audience correcting him, and, as is sometimes the case at these events a persistent good natured heckle from someone he knew sat down the front.

Session three was one of the points where I really didn’t know which session I was going to attend beforehand. Eventually I plumped for Alan Dean (who again we sat opposite at a previous Geek Dinner) giving a very interesting talk about Object Thinking.

The basis of the talk is a book from Microsoft Press, also called Object Thinking, the premise of which is that as software developers we have not properly understood the concepts of object orientation. Essentially what has happened is that traditional software developers have taken the concepts of of object orientation and then moulded them to be a lot closer to traditional programming than perhaps was intended. Certainly the example code that Alan showed us seemed rather radical, eschewing a lot of the perceived benefits of a language like C# – effectively reducing objects to a collection of generic fields. Refreshingly Alan was very careful not to try to “sellâ€? the concept, rather it was pitched very much from the point of view that this was a technique he found interesting and useful, and it is something that may be of benefit to us too. It has definitely made me keen to at least read the book, even if I don’t ever use the ideas.

Next up was lunch, and after my experiences previously, I managed to grab my lunch quickly, and secure a reasonable spot for the lunchtime Grok Talks. First up though, wasn’t a Grok Talk as such, but three students who had won through to the final stages of the Imagine Cup with a proposal called “My First Programming Languageâ€?. The team are being mentored by a regular attendee at the Developer Days, so in preparation for their trip to the finals of the competition, he put the three of them in front of us to get our feedback both on the ideas, and on their presentation.

In terms of the presentation, the most annoying part of the presentation was that they kept swapping presenter – it was suggested that for clarity they should have a single lead presenter in the finals. In terms of the content, it was quite interesting I think for many of us, as it was attempting to address the fact that there is a shortage of properly trained software developers. One chap next to me seemed to think that was a good thing – more jobs and better pay for the rest of us, but it does highlight an interesting change. I like many of my contemporaries learnt to program as a child, with computers like the ZX Spectrum. However over time, including a programming language with a computer has fallen out of fashion, and alongside that, computer teaching at schools, which included some element of programming as I was going through has changed focus to become ICT, which is much more about training children to use software packages rather than to actually write software.

Their tool was aimed at relatively young children, in order to try and teach them the skills that are needed to program software. Having said that while the concept seemed good I’m wondering whether, as with situations where schools prefer children to use Microsoft Word rather than an ‘educational’ word processor, the same might apply to software development. Indeed you only need watch a young child who is able to work a mobile phone much better than an adult to realise that in most cases they can understand complex tools a lot better than adults.

After lunch I attended a session by Gary Short, another SSE escapee talking about using Agile methodology in both an enterprise, and software house environment. There were certainly moments in that presentation when he was talking about difficulties in an Enterprise environment when I could tell he was very much talking about problems I encountered in SSE – and he certainly gave some food for thought for implementing the ideas in a smaller scale environment.

Last up I attended Multi-threading Patterns, a presentation by Cristian Nicola. Cristian admitted from the start that he’d had to reduce a four hour presentation down to one hour. Since in order to get to the patterns – the bit I was interested in, he had to cover a lot of the basics of multi-threading, I found it a bit disappointing, as inevitably the patterns part of the presentation was the bit that got snipped significantly.

After the end of the Developer Day, whereas usually I’d be heading home, or maybe to the geek dinner this time we were off to Alresford near Winchester with some friends to enjoy a five course dinner on the Watercress Belle. The evening consists of two steam hauled round trips on the line whilst an army of volunteers serve a delicious meal cooked on the train, definitely recreating some of the feel of a luxury dining train of old. It’s not the only special train they had running last night – last night they also had the Real Ale Train which runs the other way on the line, starting at Alton to a similar timetable – an connecting with South West Trains for the journey home. The focus of these trains is somewhat different, being very much on the drink!

As on previous trips, the food on our train was excellent, and despite the rain we got a good view of the countryside on the first round trip, and then the really atmospheric final return trip stopping at dimly lit country stations before pulling into Alresford at the end of the trip. A great evening, and one we’re sure to repeat.