David Gessel

A week of tweets: 2010-04-25

Sunday, April 25, 2010 
  • Wow…. use for an iPad! http://www.wimp.com/catipad/ #
  • Mercedes E350! Thanks Hertz! Actually has an ipod interface too! #
  • Awesome! beware the cloud: if you don’t own the hardware, you don’t own the data. All big targets will be p0wned #
  • brilliant research technique! http://www.xkcd.com/715/ #
  • At dorkbot, analee newlitz speaking against immortality. #

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Posted at 02:11:00 GMT-0700

Category: Twitter

Facebook Open Graph Fun

Thursday, April 22, 2010 

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More detailed instructions about how to access facebook’s new Open Graph (below). Open Graph is an interesting OAuth based mechanism by which facebook is opening their database to “select” third parties and allowing those parties to read FB cookies and automatically connect to FB and read “engagement enhancing” information about the user such as their social graph, their profile, their news feed, the groups they belong to, their pictures (including all that they’ve been tagged in): just about everything FB knows about them. The details are at this URL.

It is not 100% clear to me yet whether giving the third party access to the facebook cookies, but if the techcrunch article is correct, then third parties can read FB cookies, which are all under the domain .facebook.com and all “send for: Any type of connection” including the “lxe” cookie which is the user’s sign-in email address.

To experiment with Open Graph, first log in to facebook… Read more…

Posted at 14:45:33 GMT-0700

Category: NegativeReviewsTechnologyVanity sites

Facebook Open Graph

Thursday, April 22, 2010 

AWESOME! Facebook open graph lets you grab data from facebook with an oauth connection. They hand back some amazing data for your exploitation pleasure. You get automatic login with a default privacy set to allow. I’m sure they will carefully vet every site they give permit, just like they say they will, and so you can be sure they’ve visited the companies, performed background checks and submitted everyone at the applying company to a lie detector test.

;-)

Until then try the sample code so you can see what sorts of things you get back, like this query:

Then vary the object ID. (..com/objectid?acc…) Poking around to 4 I get:

{ “id”: “4”, “name”: “Mark Zuckerberg”, “first_name”: “Mark”, “last_name”: “Zuckerberg”, “link”: “http://www.facebook.com/zuck”, “birthday”: “05/14/1984”, “work”: [ { “employer”: { “id”: 20531316728, “name”: “Facebook” }, “start_date”: “2004-02” } ], “education”: [ { “school”: { “id”: 105930651606, “name”: “Harvard University” }, “concentration”: [ { “id”: 111394625549982, “name”: “Computer Science” } ] }, { “school”: { “id”: 108366532520435, “name”: “Phillips Exeter Academy” }, “year”: { “id”: 115476681798224, “name”: “2002” } } ], “timezone”: -7, “updated_time”: “2010-02-14T09:05:15+0000” }

Substitute any username for the query object and get that user’s profile (friend or not).  Increment through all possible object IDs and collect the entire FB data set.

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Also fun, if someone touches your fb open graph enabled page without having set their privacy options away from the default no share you can snag their picture list and store it, with the bonus feature that all the tagged and posted photos are enumerated with “obfuscated” permalinks which you can evermore access without being logged in.

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Posted at 00:02:08 GMT-0700

Category: FunnyTechnology

14 is a really lucky number

Tuesday, April 20, 2010 

Catching up on back xkcd, I saw this absolutely brilliant gem of data presentation (though line charts inaccurately suggest the interpolated data is meaningful) and had to try it out myself.

I searched for “I’ve had sex with <x> people” and varied x from 1 (person) to 50 (people). After about 15 it gets kind of boring, but for some reason 14 is the 3rd most frequent answer after 5. 4 is the most common, 5 the second, then 14. 8 also stands out as anomalously frequent, more than twice the frequency of 7 or 9, but we already knew 8 is a lucky number; clearly 14 is the right answer for number of sexual partners.

Ive_had_sex_with_x.png

Now this inspires another search for “<x>  is a lucky number,” and there’s almost an inverse correlation. 8 is a lucky number, but 14 is much less lucky than 13. Perhaps with this illuminating data analysis, people will realize that 14 really is the luckiest number and drop the fascination with 13.

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Posted at 14:36:38 GMT-0700

Category: Odd

A week of tweets: 2010-04-18

Sunday, April 18, 2010 
  • Tosh.0 is so very wrong I feel debased by every snorking laugh. But I can almost rationalize it as job-relevant research. #
  • New ual comforters are pretty deluxe. Off to iad today, night at carolyn’s apt then DCA-YYZ at 0600, carolyn’s creative sol to late flgihts #
  • Basically took a taxi from IAD to DCA with 2 horizontal hours and a shower on the way. #
  • Excellent weather in canada, warmer and dryer than SF. Back there for a night, then LA. #
  • First a bad hydraulic pump, now bad air conditioning. I just want my 12 hours at home this week! Need clean socks… #
  • OMG. A woman complain hot air was blowing on her. Turned our plane around and now will deboard for tests. Seatmate and I: “man up, lady.” #
  • Ugh. United 153 STILL on decision due to ac problem. Missed DCA flt by minutes, they couldn’t get ord-iad-dca-ord-lax… Dang #
  • New rental: infinity M35, thanks Hertz! But no usb port for audio? What is this, 2005? #
  • Twitter home page fail http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XcqO8oXJMk odd that it was stuck on one tweet. It seems fixed now. #
  • LAX is dead due to icland’s volcano. It’s Tops tonight. #
  • Crazy lady wanted boarding pass. She is on list, will get on flt, has to wait turn as list processed. This unacceptable. UAL win: PAX fail. #
  • Excellent hamburger in a 1935 diner, watching a vintage street car go by, a good end to a busy week. #

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Posted at 02:11:00 GMT-0700

Category: Twitter

Multi-Lingual Graffiti

Thursday, April 15, 2010 

The “Vulva” theme has faded, this is a thought-provoking replacement.

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Posted at 12:12:19 GMT-0700

Category: Funnyphoto

Wierd widescreen

Wednesday, April 14, 2010 

My UAL flight had 4:3 side screens and a 16:9 center screen. The program material was 4:3 and dynamically distorted to fit the 16:9 screen.

Now I’m used to 16:9 screens showing horribly distorted video in hotel rooms; it seems every hotel has invested in wide screen TVs but, hey, broadcast is 4:3. So they’re fixed at “stretch” and only occasionally do you find a TV that you can reset to pillar box so it doesn’t look horrible. And I thought that was bad.

But this is amazing – the screen has a variable distortion field – stretch is zero in the center, but becomes more pronounced on the edges. That means that the necessary compensation is worse than 2:1 on the outside edges, just horribly distorted, while the center is undistorted. I suppose the theory was an analog of fovial vision… gone awry, but the result is just weird, disturbing when someone walks across the screen and seems to get twice as fat from center to edge. Who thought that was a good idea?

People: do not distort the image. Just because you paid for the pixels does not mean you must use them.

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Posted at 22:28:29 GMT-0700

Category: OddphotoPlanes

Air Canada Takes a Step Back In Time

Wednesday, April 14, 2010 

Back to the mid 1990s before airlines realized that giving free wifi in their clubs would encourage people to become members and that they’d make more money on the membership fees than on screwing people for access charges. Besides, most of us have WWAN cards now.

$9.95 for 10 minutes of access before my flight. Sorry, no. Even if the WWAN roaming is more expensive, it is a matter of principal.

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Posted at 13:14:45 GMT-0700

Category: TechnologyTravel

My nuts are cold

Monday, April 12, 2010 

UAL Triple 7, three class plane, cross country flight (SFO-IAD): about as far as you can fly CONUS to CONUS, and I can’t get my nuts warmed?

I’d trade the puffy comforter for warm nuts any day.

cold nuts.jpg
Posted at 16:19:35 GMT-0700

Category: FunnyphotoPlanes

A week of tweets: 2010-04-11

Sunday, April 11, 2010 
  • United FA union on strike at SFO: apparently 7 years without a contract. #
  • Thanks Hertz, for the fx35. Like the Gen2 NeverLost. Phone bonds easily, but “my car” is an odd I’d for a r #
  • The cybersecurity act does suck. srsly But not the commentator… #
  • Best easter egg hunt ever! http://www.flickr.com/photos/26639011@N06/4503641430/in/photostream/ #
  • Looking forward to Its Tops in about two hours. @Semb? #
  • Yum. California PIG, jack, med rare, o-rings. Anchor steam. #
  • Oh no! Kotobuki on Piedmont Moved! Been going 15 yrs. #

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Posted at 02:11:00 GMT-0700

Category: Twitter