Digital Transition

In this recent post, a Facebook employee discloses some of the internal workings of Facebook.
What frightens, but doesn’t surprise me is the fact that they track everything! From logins, profiles you click on, everything you post, like, comment, upload… and even delete. It all goes into 1 big database. This follows the “get-as-much-information-as-you-can” philosophy for social networks nowadays.

Ow and if you’re wondering why Facebook tends to crash a lot, I’m suspecting the 1 server not located in the US (but in London) has something to do with it.

When Facebook changed it’s privacy rules for its users in december 2009, it was a big fuss and in my opinion for good reason!
In this new article Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO) said that privacy is no longer the social norm.
Apparently the younger the social network user, the less concerned they are about who can read what about them online.
I may be too paranoid here (or not when the UK government monitors everyone’s internet traffic on social networks), but I don’t think people consider the implications of certain sharing of information.

An example from the article:

A survey sponsored by British insurance firm Legal & General found that users of social networking sites were giving away vital information about themselves and their whereabouts that was being used by professional burglars to establish a list of targets.

Of course it’s for everyone to decide for themselves.

With launching Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft finally admitted that IE 6 is outdated (which is 8 years old by now).
But now they are actually actively urging to upgrade to a newer version.

There are basically 3 groups that are still running IE6:

1. People who don’t have the technical knowledge to upgrade
2. Systems that don’t use IE 6 and/or aren’t connected to the internet
3. Corporate systems that have an enforced policy to use IE 6 (or heaven forbids older)

To get rid of IE 6 they can be approached in 3 ways respectively:

1. Force an upgrade to a higher version, plain and simple
2. Non-internet-connected systems can be left as they are, as long as it doesn’t cause other security problems. Connected systems that don’t use it, should be forced to upgrade.
3. Corporate systems are a little more difficult because of compatibility issues or licenses, but I think corporations have had time enough to switch to a newer version, so here support for IE can be stopped completely both from Microsoft and implementers.

Finally, In my opinion Windows XP is fastly approaching this point as wel. Windows 7 with disabling a few “fancy” features runs perfectly well on those Windows XP boxes.

Finally I found an answer to my Gmail notifier problem. For security reasons I set my gmail account to only use secure connections. Everything will go over https, this also means checking your mail with the Google notifier.
However this excellent little program, doesn’t support SSL.
After almost a month, I stumbled upon Gmail Notifier 2. I really recommend it.

Just came across an annoying problem when reading and displaying a Polish XML file.
The default character encoding functions don’t work because these characters consist of 2 bytes instead of 1.
So mb_string functions to the rescue. (The mb stands for multi-byte)
Here’s the solution:

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');
$tmp_info = mb_ereg_replace('Ó', 'Ó', $tmp_info);
$tmp_info = mb_ereg_replace('Ó', 'ó', $tmp_info);


Note that there are HTML entities for those characters as well (Ó and ó respectively), but those are for HTML only. Since I needed to export to XML, they didn’t work.

A nice list of both HTML and XML entities can be found at W3Schools.