A lot of people thought that adding a freedom.txt to your domain was a cool idea. So I made a small landing page, where people can read about it. You can also send me suggestions by emailing at freedom.txt [at] wastedcode [dot] com
« Archives in January, 2012
Support an Open Internet, create your own freedom.txt
Today I came across http://fr.anc.is/freedom.txt and that resulted in http://isingh.info/freedom.txt
This is not to protest against any bill, but in general show support for a free and uncensored internet. We may have defeated SOPA, but there will be many more such bills. It’s high time we show that we will not let the freedom of the internet be taken for a ride. Furthermore I will add links to any freedom.txt I come across. I hope that the next time when somewhere searches for freedom, they damn sure see all these results!
Do add your own freedom.txt to your domains. If possible send me a link, and I will add it to my freedom.txt.
Update: I have set up a small landing page for this. http://wastedcode.com/freedom/. Let me know if you have any suggestions or want to add some content!
Have a profile pic, lets black it out this week?
If you have a public profile pic, this, might be a good time to change it.
Fly in the night!
Let’s take those words, and fly in the night
Feel the love in your heart, coming alive tonight
Come dance and make it alright,
’cause I know those people are by your side.
Close your eyes, and fly in the night
Tomorrow will bring much more love, than you can see tonight.
This is for my very dear friend Arvind Suresh as we all wish him a very happy birthday.
I am not much of a creative type, but I thought why not give it a shot. As always, it was technology to the rescue. With the help of some insomnia and Python, I whipped up a small script to measure common words used by Frank Sinatra in his songs. Arvind is a big fan of Sinatra, so it was only justified to do this analysis. Based on his top 25 songs (or what most people on the internet said were his top 25 songs), I did a simple frequency analysis.
Once the analysis was done, I tried to remove the common words like ‘I’, ’the’, ‘am’ etc. Surprisingly I did similar analysis for Fugazi and found out that Sinatra uses way too much ‘I’ in his songs. More on that sometime later though. Anyhow thanks to more insomnia, I finally wrote this shoddy poem, using the most used Sinatra words. I will post a detailed analysis later, but till that time lets wish Arvind a very happy birthday and a great year ahead!
Stop or I will add you on Facebook!
Michael Arrington recently posted this neat article on his blog. While I don’t disagree with him, do you really think it is possible to delete 400 out of your 600 “friends”? I think the problem comes from the fact that Facebook is a collection of people we know, but we want it to be a network of friends. It’s a very cool way of socially organizing all your contacts, but this comes at the cost of watering your true “social network”.
Facebook is the equivalent of meeting someone and giving them your business card, except now the business card contains the access code to your house. So there are basically the following options:
- Stop handing out business cards to most people.
- Hand out cards to almost everyone, and complain about how too many people are up in your business.
- Complain that the business card maker needs to have some easy way to choose who gets what.
This is basically what is happening right now. Now lets take case 1. You meet someone at a conference. You chat for 5 minutes. Do you tell them that they are not close enough to get your business card? Probably not, right? A very good example is Path. You are sitting with a colleague and chatting about technology. Now they add you on Path as you show them this cool new app. Do you tell them, this is restricted to your friends/family? There is no real way of declining this socially. What we need is circles much like we have in real life (and no I am not saying that Google+ circles are the right way or anything like that). In real life you call a bunch of friends to chill. Not every time you invite everyone. But that doesn’t mean they don’t belong in your network.
A contrast to that is twitter, which is completely public (and I actually consider my website/blog + Twitter as my business card). You can either have a completely closed network, or a completely public one. You can not have a semi private network like Facebook, and then tell people they are do not belong in it. Rather much like real life, give me control on what goes where. In real life I use my cell phone to call everyone, but I don’t need to tell everyone the exact same thing, when I call them.
I hope our social networks will get smarter, and realize that not everyone is equal to us. At the same time, I don’t wanna use 50 different networks for different types of people/activities.