facebook, or any other site, isn’t responsible for raising your child

Written by Moe on September 30, 2007 | 1 Comment

I was having a great day today. Back from a birthday weekend in Vegas and ready to spend countless hours in front of my laptop. I hop on google reader and begin to catch up on tech news. Apple bricked the Iphone for customers who are smarter then Apple would like, youTube launched adsense (so I guess they make money now) and facebook might face consumer fraud charges. Huh? Consumer fraud. For what?

The Internet social networking site Facebook Inc. that promotes its safety for young teens from sexual predators and promises prompt responses to concerns has been warned by the New York attorney general that it may face a consumer fraud charge for failing to do either, a Cuomo official confirmed Sunday…..

But it’s now a much larger and growing social networking site and the safeguards and apparently the response times for complaints aren’t what they were a year ago, Lerner said. Cuomo is calling on the site to revise its claims.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny–cuomo-facebook0930sep30,0,3857577.story

Wow. Revise their claims? Have these people been on My(Slut/Space) or any of other social networks? Facebook has great privacy policies that restrict people’s profiles to a point where you can’t even see a person’s picture. Which sucks sometimes cause you want to see if a chick is hot. She adds you as a friend and turns out to be a whale. However, that’s another topic all together. Maybe facebook should roll out a “pee in a cup to make friends” option or something.

Bad Parents
People need to stop expecting the internet to raise their children. Get your kid’s password and log on their account from time to time. Stop handing off the responsibility of raising your kid to other people. I bet these are the same people that send their kids to school and complain that they sweet little billy is ill mannered.

Come on Cuomo

I knew facebook was getting big but I didn’t know it got to the “If I can get my name in the same headline as facebook it will help my political career” status. Come on Cuomo…there are a lot better ways for the Attorney General of New York to get his name in the paper then riding the facebook wave. You tried to run for governor and had your ass handed to you, since then have made insane claims to get your name out there with some avail. You’re like a D-list celebrity that does stupid things to get into the tabloids. Just release a sex tape, it worked for other spoiled kids.

…Criticism was much more heated, however, in a series of lawsuits and investigations surrounding a Florida based S&L institution in which he was accused of illegal, hostile take-over maneuvers among other things. This problem tapered off after Attorney General Janet Reno declined to initiate a full investigation. A spectrum of excuses and accusations were offered to explain this situation.

In tandem with this last situation is the extremely sharp and heavily documented criticism coming from Catherine Fitts, former HUD Assistant Secretary and FHA Administrator under Jack Kemp and HUD independent contractor under Henry Cisneros and Andrew Cuomo. She, basically, accuses him of fraud and links his name to HUD vendors who also provided him with lucrative benefits of various types.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cuomo

Posted in Facebook, Politics

1 Comment

Notes on Git

Written by Ben on September 23, 2007 | 1 Comment

So, it’s been a while since Linus gave a Git talk at Google. Since then, I’ve been playing around with it. In truth, it’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it is so much smoother running than darcs.

Why? Because, it supports a distributed workflow such as:

1. Create N number of branches to work off of in your local repository.
2. Make N number of commits to those branches, only merging the polished patches into your own main line branch.
3. The expose your own main line branch to other developers via an exposed repository on some webserver somewhere.
4. Other developers will pull down your changes into their own repository, from which they work one the code (creating their own branches and commits).
5. Other developers expose their own main line branches in their own public repositories, from which you can pull down their changes.

So, here are my notes about getting setting up one’s own Git repositories. Note that you will generally have at least two repositories: Personal development one, and one exposed for your own published commits. In Git, the public directory is generally a “bare” repository sans a working directory. Whereas your private repository has a working directory… for your work.

Here are steps (rough notes) for creating the public and private repository for a project:

# Create your area to store the public repositories
mkdir -p ~/repo

# — CREATE THE PROJECT
mkdir -p ~/projects/myprojectname
cd ~/projects/myprojectname
git init-db
# Commit something first, like a README.txt
touch README.txt
git add README.txt
git commit -a

# — CREATE PROJECT’S PUBLIC REPOSITORY
# NOTE: Git bombs out if there are Zero commits in the project you are
# making public. Make sure there’s at least one commit in that repository.
# The reason I committed an empty README.txt. But also, one could have
# created a bare Git repository without the clone.
cd ~/repo/
# copy the repository in bare form– sans working directory.
git clone –bare ~/projects/myprojectname myprojectname.git
# make the repository available for reading.
touch myprojectname.git/git-daemon-export-ok
cd myprojectname.git
# update the server info for remote clients, tracking branches.
git –bare update-server-info
# post-update executes everytime there is a push to this public repository;
# it executes an update-server-info by default.
chmod a+x hooks/post-update

# — MAKE THE REPOSITORIES VISIBLE
# NOTE: Put it on a dumb (read only) webserver of your choice.
# I rsync it to my dreamhost account; this command is a cron job.
# The following makes the assumption that the public_html directory
# is the web root for the exposed ~username/ directory for the
# webhost.example.com webhost.
cd ~
rsync -av -e ssh ~/repo username@webhost.example.com:public_html/

# — UPDATE THE PUBLIC REPOSITORY
# NOTE: This updates your local copy of the project’s public repository;
# where the next run of the rsync cron job will update the public
# webserver.
cd ~/projects/myprojectname
git push ~/repo/myprojectname.git master:master

# — OTHERS DEVELOPERS CLONE PROJECT’S EXPOSED REPOSITORY
# NOTE: On another machine, another developer.
mkdir ~/projects
cd ~/projects
git clone http://webhost.example.com/~username/repo/myprojectname.git
# This developer now has his own copy at ~/projects/myprojectname;
# this developer will then work and create patches to send to you.
# If you have pushed updates to your public repository, this other
# developer may pull down your changes using:
git pull

Now, only if I could better figure out how I’d like to work on managing my own branches, and tracking remote branches.

Posted in Technology

1 Comment