Neville’s posterous

There’s an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?

Heh, nice to know what a yottabyte means, never mind the Big Brother concerns :)

[...] Here are some very basic facts:

1. When you purchase software, you are purchasing the rights to run the software according to the terms of the End User License Agreement (EULA) that comes with that software.
2. When you install that software, you are agreeing to the terms included in the EULA you purchased.
   - For instance, in the Windows 7 EULA it states, “By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, return it to the retailer for a refund or credit.”
3. When you purchase an Upgrade license, the included EULA states that you must already own a qualifying full license to upgrade from in order to use the Upgrade license, hence the term “Upgrade.”
   - For instance, in the Windows 7 EULA it states, “To use upgrade software, you must first be licensed for the software that is eligible for the upgrade.”

To put it simply, here is a graphical representation of what this means:

General Example		Example with Product Names

In stark contrast to:

General Example		Example with Product Names

So when these posts and write-ups state that you can install clean from an Upgrade piece of software and they fail to mention that you need to own a qualifying software license to be legal to use the Upgrade software for the installation, they give the impression that because it is technically possible, it is legal to do. Unfortunately, by doing this, they irresponsibly put end users at risk of loading unlicensed software. Because of this, I am putting this post up to try and clarify the truth behind what an upgrade license is and provides so that hopefully people will not find themselves misled by some of these other posts and articles that may mislead them to believe something that is very wrong due to their lack of inclusion of this important piece of information.  If the posts or write-ups you saw did include this information, then kudos to that writer for providing the accurate information.

This is why DRM or whatever equivalent evolves will be around in the future - trust in people is really difficult sometimes.

The number one reason people give us for not upgrading to the latest version of WordPress is fear that their plugins won’t be compatible. As part of our continuing efforts to make WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades as painless as possible, Michael Adams developed and launched a beta of a new “Compatibility” feature in the plugin directory, powered by your votes. When viewing a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-downs. If there has been feedback about this WordPress / plugin version combination, we’ll show you what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible vs how many marked it as incompatible.

...

What a great idea. Much too hit-and-miss right now in knowing plugin versions and what would work in a new WP.

As you might have noticed, we use Thesis for this site. We also use Thesis for a lot of client work.  And while we dig Thesis, one of the things that becomes a pain in the ass when using it, (or any theme that provides admin control of layout and design) is having to manually add common layout and design settings that we use regularly.  With the release of Thesis 1.6, this has become even a bigger issue due to all the new font and color control features.

As things move forward, more and more skin designs will start incorporating admin panel settings rather than relying on the traditional style sheet approach. And that means skins will become less and less “plug & play” because you will have to spend time inputing dozens of settings to get your skin to look like the original demo. And skin designers will need to spend a bunch of time creating additional instructions that list all the items that need to be changed. (For a great example, check out all the work that went into Ben’s post on his latest skin).

That seems like a bunch of needless work to me, so I asked Dax to break out the import/export tools we use that deal with Thesis into a stand alone plugin. The concept is pretty simple. After you upload and activate it, you can download individual data files for Thesis Options, Design Options, and all OpenHook content. (located at Appearance > Thesis Import/Export)

So once you have completed a skin design, or custom layout for a client, you can just export the data files and then bundle them with the plugin. Once the skin is installed, the user simply uploads the bundled data files and all the original settings, hooks, etc. will be imported.

The only words of caution you will need with this plugin has to do with the restore functions. If you click on those links before you have saved a backup, all your settings will be lost!

Download Thesis Settings Export Plugin Here

Yes! This looks exactly like the answer to my question!
Via Chris Pearson.

Fiery race-car crashes, exploding oil refineries, policemen shot in the chest at point-blank range -- these are just some of DuPont's new social-media tools. Fearing that it's losing touch with young professionals who don't read traditional media, the chemical giant developed a social-media strategy anchored in viral video. Digging into its archive, it pulled out some of its most spectacular product test and demonstration footage. And this became the core of a series of three-minute programs hosted by video blogger Amanda Congdon and distributed widely across online video sites.

See all the videos at http://stories.dupont.com/

Presentation recorded at WordCamp Seattle 2009.

[...] All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we've done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you're following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we'll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we'll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

Trying it out...

I've downloaded the app from the UK App Store (£1.19) to take a look. Like the business add-on idea: guide for organizations and employees on what to do to deal with an outbreak.

Plan on a blog post or audio report on the app soon.

More than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day, and admit wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.

One in three of the 1,460 office workers surveyed also said they had seen sensitive company information posted on social networking sites, leading to fears about how workers use the internet.

Philip Wicks, consultant at Morse, the IT services and technology company who commissioned the survey, said the true cost to the economy could be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate. “When someone is asked for their own use they say around 40 minutes a week, but when asked about their colleagues they say they say up to an hour a day. We have used the lower of those figures rather than the high point," he said.

“It is the sort of thing people constantly use which means that its not quite the same as doing a crossword, where you spend half an hour on it and it is finished. When it comes to an office environment the use of these sites is clearly becoming a productivity black hole. Social networking can be a cause for good when it is used professionally but I think organisations need to wake up – that is not the way it is always being used.”

David Clubb, managing director of Office Angels, the recruitment firm, added: "As younger generations join the workplace, I believe UK businesses will, inevitably, have to embrace social networks, recognising the benefits of providing staff with well deserved downtime, but also their potential for business networking.”

[Three quarters of the office workers surveyed said their employer had not given them any specific guidelines on how to use Twitter, but 84 per cent believed it should be up to them what they post online.

It would be easy to simply dismiss surveys like this with the technical expression "what a load of bollocks." Some people will look at the details with some alarm, though, and will think it confirms their worst suspicions that employees everywhere are not to be trusted.

What a sorry state of affairs!

But two bright spots - David Clubb's reality quote that illustrates how you ought to look at tools like Twitter; and the reality picture in the last paragraph: 75% of those surveyed reporting that their employer has offered no guidance on how tools like Twitter fit into the workplace.

Makes this post on my blog seem so timely: A clear call to action for social media guidelines and training

Opportunity knocks, everyone!

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site's infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal. That's something of a victory for the Drupal (not to mention open-source) community.

A victory indeed for open source. Drupal must be thrilled with such an endorsement.