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  • First Facebook worm[-ish behaviour]?

    A friend of mine supposedly sent me a Facebook-based invite for an FB app called Advanced Wall. It came as a notification in FB and prompted me to retrieve a message from my contact by adding the app to my profile.

    ‘k, I bite, since I’m in Facebook-API-craze mode for work and fun anyway and get the following, as allegedly written by my friend:

    Check this out!

    It’s an Advanced Wall!

    You can change colors, sizes, fonts, add smilies, pictures, videos and a lot more…

    :)

    Odd.. Especially from the supposed author…

    First, I was just curious to know if they are using tinyMCE for the advanced editor, like WordPress and co. Evidently, I dig a bit deeper, and fire up Firebug, which as a complete aside is the most amazing piece of software. I use it everyday, and am still baffled by how efficient and powerful it all is.

    So, the Javascript doesn’t look familiar and the editor’s iframe goes to http://ai.idlestudios.com/write.php, a domain which strangely enough doesn’t respond under http://www.idlestudios.com/ or http://idlestudios.com/, and just redirects http://ai.idlestudios.com/ to the app’s description inside FB (as of 2007-07-22, ~1 AM).

    Odder…

    Head off the the terminal: whois idlestudios.com tells me the domain is registered to a more than likely fine fellow from the Russian Federation, which in and of itself doesn’t really imply anything.

    But that’s when I start noticing the ads in multiple locations around the Advanced Wall’s WYSIWYG editor. Text ads, subtly placed in the telling Facebook colour scheme. Blockbuster, icon sets, the usual.

    So on to my friend’s profile I go, and what do you know? What do I see on his wall, with no other message than:

    Check this out!

    It’s an Advanced Wall!

    You can change colors, sizes, fonts, add smilies, pictures, videos and a lot more…

    :)

    Really? And it’s coming from someone else in my contact’s own friend list…

    Next: Facebook » Profile » Applications » Edit » Remove

    🙂

    This all said, I haven’t gotten a reply from my friend yet on if he actually sent the invite in the first place (it’s late, and the invite was sent at 11:59pm), so maybe I’m just seeing things and outta get to bed. I’ll post an update here when I know more. Call me traumatized by another friend’s experience. ;P See update below.

    Personally, I’m not sure I’m willing to go for this one anyway. Best case scenario, it’s gonna be MySpace all over again…

    And if by any chance you receive an invite for Advanced Wall from me, you’ll at least know how it did not get there: Not-by-my-click.

    Update (20:45): Well, it seems that my friend is as surprised as I was. Although he did see an option to invite his friends, he is fairly sure he canceled. Yet, the app seems to have propagated itself to his contact list. He also had the same reaction as I with the dubious first message template, and brought to light an error message he received from the app stating “there are still glitches we’re working on with the facebook team“. So worm[-ish]? Questionable interaction design? Buggy app? Plain old bad taste? I’m not a security expert by any stretch, so I’ll hold off on the labeling, but as a software developer, I say: none for me, thanks.

  • We Should Not Bite the Hand that Diggs

    I’ve been noticing that Digg has been getting a substantial amount of cr*p about things they’ve done on and with the site recently. Nothing new or exceptional, as every popular Web outfit gets the community treatment once in a while, but now that the dust settled a bit, I just wanted to express the following thoughts.

    I had the pleasure to meet with some of the Digg crew in San Francisco last month, coincidentally hours before they released their new commenting system. What I saw was a group of people who, on top of being passionate about their respective vocations, actually believe in the product they bring us. This is a relatively rare and precious thing, and I think that as a community, we should nurture it as much as we can.

    I’m definitely not saying we should just fall into blind fanboy-ism and idolize their every actions, but I do think that there’s a [not so] fine line between constructive criticism, which is usually welcomed by any self-respecting professional, and plain old bashing, which can be the most depressing aspect of public releases. And it’s not like they’re not listening (1, 2).

    Yes, I do think that a balance between surprise releases and usability testing could gain to be developed. And yes, I do understand that sudden changes to something you enjoy can be offsetting for users. But I also know that they’re cultivating a tight-group/almost-family-like atmosphere amongst their ranks, and that the last thing I want is for the people behind the code to be nudged anywhere close to just being yet another bunch of salary makers, in yet another faceless corporation.

    So I say, keep on guys, and thanks for your efforts. I’ll happily keep on digging and watching the site evolve.

    And no, I’m not going to submit my own post to Digg. 😉

  • A Swarm of Angels: Remixing Cinema

    I found out about this open source movie project last winter, and am happy to see that they are so far reaching their set targets.

    A groundbreaking project to create a £1 million film and give it away to over 1 million people using the Internet and a global community of members.

    • P2P-friendly: free to download and share
    • No DRM: watch on anything
    • Creative-Commons licensed: remixable

    A fantastic initiative, in my humble opinion.

    See also: Elephants Dream, by the Orange Open Movie Project.

  • 2007 World Gravity Sports Championship

    On August 25th and 26th, Montreal will, for the 5th time, host the Top Challenge competition, featuring skateboarding, speedboarding, street luge, inline skating and inline boarding.


    I know I’m shooting myself in the foot as a dad, but I’m definitely bringing my boys to see this. They surely would lynch me if I went by myself…

  • Mooooooo

    I just have to let it all out: I love mootools!

    I’m not going to get in a pi**ing match with prototype, jquery, dojo and company, since they’re all truly neat little bundles of joy, but as a write-all-javascript-from-scratch kinda guy, I wasn’t inclined on having to rely on such involved libraries in the past. Especially when coupling them with huge server-side code base that I must keep in mind might actually outlive me. Call it an ever-lasting “vendor” lock-in allergy.

    Choosing the best contender to be included in the McGill web platform among the countless available options in the compact JS framework sphere was one of the most difficult tech decisions I’ve had to make in years. But so far, I sure am glad we opted for mootools. Bonus: I didn’t even have to force it on anyone either, and adoption by different levels of developer has proven smoother than in tests involving other potential choices.

    Great docs, tight syntax, (close to) worry free platform compatibility and a lively dev community are all among the many benefits we are so far enjoying.

    But beware! I’d advise anyone going the framework way to:

    • Do a lot of research before committing to anything, to really gauge what is best for you and your team(s).
    • Not be afraid to write a slew of tests to be implemented in the selected top choices to right away define what has more potential in your very context.
    • And most importantly, not get too comfortable and devolve into a one-lib-only coder.

    On this, I’m going back to milking it for all its worth.

  • Neo 1973 + OpenMoko: It's Out!

    The first open mobile solution is out and available for purchase (developer preview).

    Neo Base US$300
    The Neo Base kit contains everything the mobile application developer needs to enjoy the benefits of the first freed phone, the Neo 1973.

    Neo Advanced US$450
    The Neo Advanced Kit everything the mobile device hacker wants to get down and dirty with the first freed phone, the Neo 1973.

    /happy-dance

  • Amstrad CPC 464

    I was recently talking to someone about the first computer I owned: an Amstrad CPC 464 (@wikipedia). Attached is a nice flickr photo of the beast in all of its 64kb-RAM-and-tape-recorder glory.


    Good times; good times indeed. I was 12 (1987) and saved my money for around two years to get one. It was my first major purchase on my own. The first computer I used was a Thomson TO 7, and its lovable turtles, at school.

  • Happy Canada Day!


    Oh, how I wish I was back in Vancouver, where people actually celebrate our country, instead of disguising the day as the province’s official moving day…

  • Explicitivitytyty

    Something rather peculiar puzzled me today… I went on to purchase the latest Nine Inch Nails album, eager for a fresh batch of their trademark sound. If you haven’t heard about Year Zero yet, they had a killer marketing campaign associated with it that anyone interested in the viral trend should check out.

    When the download was complete, I promptly went the the Recently Added smart playlist in iTunes, and there were the two last album I purchased from the iTMS: Year Zero, by NiN and The Best Damn Thing, by Avril Lavigne. Before you scold me for the latter, I bought it last month on my wife and kids’ request… Everybody should know the artwork is all I wanted. 😉

    What I found peculiar about this view was the rating on the tunes. Every single Avril Lavigne track was labeled as explicit, while none of the NiN ones were flanked by the telling red icon.

    Had I purchased the radio-edit version?!? Argh… But no. After listening to the whole album, it just does not contain anything deemed offensive by the music rating authorities.

    Really, what has the world come to when the music marketed to my kids gets such a rating and an album many puritan bodies would surely like rated 18+ is squeaky clean?!?

    Personally, I think it’s a giant yet brilliantly subtle [explicit] to the rating bodies. Kudos Trent and co. You did it again.

  • Charles de Gaulle: Vive le Québec Libre

    On July 24th 1967, French president Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech in Montreal in which he declared 4 simple yet revolutionary words, echoing the Quebec separatist slogan: Vive le Québec Libre.

    After reading about the said speech for years, I finally found the video on the Web in its entirety today. Regardless of one’s (or even my) opinion on the subject, this is a historical moment by all measures.

    The CBC Archives also has a newsreel for this day, highlighting the controversy this created in the rest of Canada.