Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Spammers effected dating sites

So I'm on a couple of dating sites, no shame in this. There usually a good way to meet new people from totally different werks of life. Anyway I've noticed out of the two sites I'm on, one is full of spammers and the other there are almost none. What's strange is the one which is free (okcupid) is spam free and the other one (speeddater) which actually costs is spam heaven. Now to be honest I didn't really choose speeddater, it was attached to the speeddating events. But what kills me is how stupid the spam gets. Like I said a while ago about ebay, I'm outting all dirty spammers by posting their emails and email contents online for others to read and for google to index for others who might be tricked into their scams. I regularlly get 1-3 emails a day, I generally send back a stock reply saying.

Sorry I have to do this but please reply if your a real person and not a dirty spammer

Here's some of the replies and stupid emails I recieve.

From Sandraratrue (i mean come on!)

I dnt understand wat u mean

Email from Hellen_jennile (very odd name)

Hi thanks for the mail and am very soory to get back to you very late it

was due to my job.. i will like to know more about you and you can

meet me on yahoo messanger hellen.jennile2006@yahoo.com…Hope

to chat you soon.and i will like to tell you that am not that kind of

people am a real and god fearing lady.

Hellen..

This one kills me everytime, this time from Tracy2008200

Hello Sweetie,

How are you doing ? I was on this site trying to look at profiles

before i found your profile interesting . You sound so nice and i

will be happy to get along with you ) I think we have alot in

common if you are interested kindly give me a chance to get to

know you. I am a single dad of a Son *john*4years old .I live in

Alabama. I just think i will give it a try maybe i could find a

friend then see what happen. Can i be your friend?..I am easy to

get along with also a simple man. I own a house and i live alone

with Son and my pets . I lost my wife in unto Accident 3years ago.

Its a long story . I am willing to get along with you. Can you

give a chance so that we can get to know more about each other .

If you are interested please send me an IM or send..If you are

interested please send me an send me an message to my e.mail

address tracy.debby@yahoo.com

Hope to hear back from you.

Tracy

From Irino4ka (who interestingly cancelled _his_ profile today)

Hello not the familiar friend!!!

I the lonely girl from Russia, wish to find lonely beloved, is

not simple for games, and for serious attitudes.

There are interested persons, write to me I shall answer

without a delay. Beforehand I thank for your time given for me.

P.S. I write from the Internet – cafe, therefore I have inquiry

to you.

Please write to me on: konushnya@yahoo.com

Another Russian lady, this time olhakiska

Hello!

My name is Olga. I am interested in acquaintance with you. I am

interesting woman with good character, sense of humor, opens in

dialogue. I love to bring happiness to people, and the best thing I

need in this life is the happy smile of my Beloved man. I want to love

and to be loved. Tell more about a place where do you live. I will

look forward to hearing from you.

You can write me: ma3bl.lyalyagirl777@gmail.com

Have a good day.

Last one for today, Sallyisloving

Hi

I'm Sally, i seem to be new to this online thing.if you go thru my profile it would tell you

more about me..You seem to be very interesting..I'm seeking a relationship..Are

you?..Here is my email… sallyisloving@yahoo.com ,email me bcos i feel on email is

better than on here bcos its a more easier and better way to communicate… or you can

im me or add me on msn messenger …I would be waiting to hear from you as soon as

possible..

Yours Sincerely

Sally

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My Ubuntu desktop

Ubuntu screenshots by you.

Someone asked in the comments for a screenshot of my ubuntu desktop. So here you go, one with quite a few applications open on just one of the workscreens. I usually keep about 5 workscreens and when everything is clear it looks like this. The background picture comes from Flickr which I slightly modified with permission from the creator.

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Werewolf at BarCampLeeds2

Frankly this picture sums up the first game of werewolf, which surprise surprise we didn't finish. Although to be fair we did get in some cracking games the next day in the lobby. A very good one where me and Gemma killed off the village in no time, and the other where it came down to 3 people and I could have saved the game for another round by healing myself. But instead I choose to heal who I trusted and I ended up healing the werewolf while I got killed off.

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The move from windows is complete

I switched to Ubuntu ages ago on my Dell XPS 1210 laptop. But I did go down the route of dual booting at first. Soon after I stopped using Windows for everything except virtualdj which simply would not work emulated or virtualised under Ubuntu. Then a while back I found my 120gig hard drive getting quite full (unknown to me that I was backing up to the same hard drive at the time) so I deleted the c:/windows and c:/program files directories. I had changed my /home/ian directory to map directly on top of c:/document and settings/ian forrester/my documents/, so if I did boot into windows every document and media file would be accessible to me under Windows XP/Vista. So for about year I've been walking around and using the laptop with a small ext3 partition and a huge ntfs partition.

Everythings been great, but I sometimes noticed my laptop getting slow and sometimes hanging. I looked into it and it came down to two things. One Flash is still badly written for gnu/Linux and kills the browser if loading a large video or attempting to use the webcam. But this seems to only effect the browser environment, so sometimes I need to force kill firefox. Number two is Fuse/3g, which allows Unix operating systems to read and write ntfs formatted file systems. This was great at the start but I noticed Fuse will be eating all my CPU resources. So I put out a pled for somes software like Partition Magic which can convert a drive not just format. Some advice came back, but generally people said copy the whole drive somewhere then format it and put it back.

So today I did using a spare 100gig hard drive and the Ubuntu live CD. It all went to plan but a couple of points to remember! Chmod all the files to match nobody:nobody so later on you can access the files and change the mod to yourself. As default Fuse makes files on a ntfs disk root:root. This is fine till you move them to a ext3 disk and those permissions take affect for real. Also check the boot flag is assigned to the correct drive.

So now with NTFS gone, its goodbye Windows for good now.

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I just want simple Data Accessibility

People always think about the big things when thinking about Data Portability. You know the stuff about moving your friends list or your whole account complete with its data. But what about the stuff which is just not accessible? (or at least seen to be accessible).

One such example hit me when Katie Lips (what a lovely name for a lovely woman) demoed Treasuremytext. Now I've come across this site a couple of times actually though Katie but never really been that impressed. I've always had windows mobile phones, so copying text messages off is as simple as syncing with outlook, turning into notes or copying and pasting. But at BarCampLeeds2, I started thinking about all those people who use those phones which don't allow such things. For example is it possible to save a thread of conversation off a iphone? It maybe even possible but how easy is it? Well services like treasuremytext are part of the data accessiblity landscape, making your data portable.

This should really be the default state of most of the applications/services we use right? Taking something untangable into something tangable which you can maybe takeaway.

Right this moment I'm having trouble with Tesco online shopping. Me and Sarah use to use the same account and so the recommendations and previously bought shopping baskets are for a couple not a single guy. Ideally there would be some APML output and input, so I could remove items and adjust the preferences (geez think of shopping list as concepts instead of items of food) then feed it back into Tesco or one of the rivials who should be looking for my online business. Hey even, I could feed the APML into a broker/comparison site which would work out what my monthly average would be if I use another supermarket. And this is so all do able, even Tesco supply a download of there prices and other information weekly (they may even support a API by now).

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Its great putting name to faces, meet the xbmc team

I really wanted to go to Amsterdam for the Xbmc meetup but it was the same time as Mashed I think, so it never happened. Anyway, its great to see the XBMC team, even if the interview isn't the best. Its a shame we never got to see Frodo and ProjectMayhem who for me were some of the people critical to the sucess of XBMC.

By the way, if you do a search for xbmc in Boxee under bliptv (videos / internet videos / blip.tv / search videos). You can find this video and watch it directly in boxee instead of your browser. You will also see a couple of other videos by myself relating to xbmc.

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HighSpeedDownloadPacketAccess in the real world


So I've started using my windows mobile phone as a USB 3g modem (maybe not as elegent as the USB 3g modems but its more useable. For some reason since I've upgraded the phone to Windows mobile 6.1, the bluetooth connection has failed to work and I've not found the time to really find out what's wrong. Anyway I did a couple of speed tests using the phone connected via USB while sitting on the 13th floor of the Travelodge (trust me, your licence fee is not going on expensive hotels) in Holborn. The phone was showing a strong HSDPA signal and I wanted to know exactly what that meant in real speed, because it felt like I was using wireless or something.

The best download speed I could achieve was 1995 kbps (249.4Kb/sec) and upload speed 361 kbps (45.1Kb/sec). Frankly this is pretty amazing speeds, although a long way off the therotical 1440Kb/sec on the download the upload is very close to the maximum 384Kb/sec. Even on average I'm not getting less that 200Kb/sec download or 38Kb/sec upload. Not bad for a 6 pounds a month extra charge for evening and weekend 3g access.

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Ubuntu is already more attractive that osx

Another noteworthy podcast, this time from Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, describing the somewhat non-code challenges in front of gnu/Linux. I heard this about a two weeks before hearing about Mark Shuttleworth's comments from OSCON recently.

Mark wants to make desktop linux more beautiful not only user friendly. Well in my mind looking at the desktops of my mac friends compared to my own laptop setup, I got to say mine is more beautiful and more interesting. But obviously I would say that…

What I find really interesting about Mac owners is the lack of customisation they generally add to the desktop and interface. Maybe a change of background picture, quicksilver and thats about it. While on the linux side I've seen radical changes, for example Glyn has stuck with the standard Ubuntu theme while Sheila has her ubuntu setup so weird it looks like Xubuntu. I've also seen black themes actually being used by people at conferences (always wondered if they save on battery life that way?). While all my mac friends have the same windows styles, same netrual pallette, same icons, etc. Some would say this is because Apple have a almost flawless interface design team, but I'm not so sure.

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Keeping your social data in sync with Atomkeep

Atomkeep simply keeps your profile synchronised across multiple social networks and services. I'm obviously in favour of this simply from the point of Data Portability. I found it via readwriteweb in my aggregator and I got to say I'm pretty impressed so far. I do wonder how easy it is to import and export from atomkeep without going to another service? I'm not going to say this is ground breaking because thats reserved for Ping.FM which I still use everyday, but its not far behind. Atomkeep tends to want your username and password from the get go. Even when the service supports other means of connecting and controling the account like APIs, OpenID, etc. It ignores them and throws up a login/password prompt for you to fill in. Whats also interesting is what's underneath it.

I confirm that this is my private authorization credentials and I acknowledge my approval for Atomkeep to facilitate data input and update for me in this system. I completely understand and accept Terms of Service and Privacy Policy of Atomkeep and every other system engaged in the transaction.

Wow thats quite a leap of trust, saying that Ping.FM knows about 9 of my accounts too. I'm still looking forward to the day when you can have these types of services on your desktop or on your own server. Plaxo pay attention, you should have done this ages ago, you had the data already and you already have the link to linkedin.

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