Anything or more and less

Some weeks ago I started a python module for Friendika (yes that was before the name change and I have not changed the name of the python module lazy as I am for historical reasons) friendika.py. One of the things I wanted to do with it and finally found the time to implement it was a Desktop Notification Applet for friendica.

Today I pushed the source of notifyfrndc to bitbucket, where you can either clone the Mercurial repository of grab the latest code as tar-ball.

It uses py-notify to display the number of new items to your wall or the network tab, the number of new private messages and the number of new introductions. It also displays a list of all the stuff behind those numbers and when it happened.

It is a bare script at the moment, without any fancy installation guidelines but you should be fine with a

$ python /path/to/notifyfrndc.py

Also you need to create a file in your $HOME directory called .notifyfrndc.cfg with your favorite editor (vim) or emacs your choice). The file should look something like that:

[account]
api = https://your.friendica.tld/api
user = yourusername
password = yourpassword
[settings]
timeout = 5
lookevery = 60

The stuff in the account section should be self-explanatory. The settings options are used as follows: The lookevery parameter gives the seconds after which the script should check for new stuff on your account. The timeout parameter is the number of seconds the notification shall be displayed. This is the base time, one additional second will be added for every item in the list, so that you can read it all.

Although the script may check your account every 60 seconds (or whatever you choose) it will not display the results every time. It will only do so if there is new stuff and it had not shown you the numbers before.

Ok, that’s all—have fun with it

Social networking is only fun if you have somebody to social network with, that’s the case in all form of reality the digital as well as the non digital. If you are using ~friendica there are several ways to find interesting people. None of them involves scrolling through the user directory although this can be fun too!

The 1st step in your search process should be your default profile. Scroll a bit down to the Public Keywords and enter some reflecting your interests and yourself. Those keywords will be published along with your profile picture in the public user directory (hover the star in the corner of some user pictures). You can also add additional keywords into the field below. Those private keywords will not show up on the user directory. You should enter the keywords in English and your native tongue, except you don’t want to have international contacts but the network is relatively small and English keywords could provide better results.

Once you have filled in your interests go to the Contacts tab¹ where you find a listing of your current contacts. Depending on your theme this page will look differently, but at the side there will be a menu.

At the top of this menu you find the add new contact box which can be used to add any contact from a service that ~friendica supports², followed by a list of the groups you have created to sort your contacts³. Below these two things you find the tools to find new contacts.

1st a search box. If you are interested in something, say “opensource” you can enter it there and ~friendica will search for profiles with matching public and private keywords.

If you now search for Linux there will be some more results, you have to play a bit with the search. Not everybody thinks about the same keywords you think about.

Below the search box there are three links. The third Invite Friends is self-explanatory but what are the other two for?

If you click on the first link Similar Interests ~friendica will match your keywords against the public keywords of other user in the global user directory. When you use this link without entering any keywords, friendica will tell you to do so.

Once you have found some friends you can use the 2nd link Friend Suggestions which will offer you a selection of the friends of your friends. These suggestions are drawn from all the networks your friends are connected to. At the moment I see suggestions from friendica, Diaspora*, identi.ca and Twitter.

And finally, if you have a homepage or blog and use friendica, you should consider linking your profile so that visitors stumbling over your web content can link to your friendica account for further networking.

Have fun

I had a funny little problem with my StatusNet instance which was that I was unable to change the theme of the page. What ever theme I selected in the config file, I always got the default neo theme in the browser. I should have read the logs more carefully, as is was written there…

During my upgrade from version 0.9.7 to 1.0 one piece from the old config remained there that was not overwritten by the setting in config.php. Obviously the theme setting¹—and StatusNet kept looking for the cleaner theme I used with 0.9.7 which wasn’t there anymore so as fall-back it used neo.

I was reading @sazius article Setting up my personal StatusNet instance finding, among others things, the filter setting for the logs.

Now, being able to change the theme I played through the available ones (those coming with SN and the neo-kafai theme by Ryan Weal) it was nothing there for my taste. My taste is something against the gray outside, that is supposed to be called winter.

The result is something that I call neo-sand with the yellow of my smily-logo in the background and something sandy as background for the rest. Except the default font, everything else stayed the same as in the neo-kafai theme.

Have fun with it

Download: neo-sand (tar.gz)

A happy new year to all the visitors reading this! Time to have a look into the Piwik Analytics data for the last year from this little server here.

In 2011 we had a slight growth in the visitors number on diekershoff.homeunix.net almost doubling the number. As one can clearly see in the Top 4 graph below the reason for this jump is clearly the ~friendica instance running here now since a year. Almost 40 percent of the page views registered by Piwik were visits to the open socialverse as I’ve called my installation. Another 40 percent (well a bit more, but the two share the fame) of the page views are generated by my StatusNet stream, which in itself more then tripled the visitor count compared to the last year which is no big surprise as I moved my activities from identi.ca to my own server a year ago.

The other big things on the server are this blog with some 15 percent of the page views and my bugtracker with 3 percent of the views.

You are using Firefox (or maybe Chrome/Safari) and some sort of Linux in general visiting the server from 7 to 24 o’clock CE(S)T which is no wonder as I usually switch off the server over night. Sometimes though, intentionally or not I forget to switch it off and you are still visiting, so I really should try to get some plug server or something else so the server can run around the clock.

Slightly more then 25 percent of you are using this alternate operation system called Windows and some of you use the tool to download a browser to actually browse the content here, which is ridiculous because you won’t find a browser here anyway.

The most viewed page from each of the big four on the server are my ~friendica profile, my blog posting about ownCloud, a dent by inforrupt no clue why you are reading it here and the page for my Twitter plugin for ~friendica.

Well, so much for 2011 – happy 2012 again. Time for a cup of tea now, have a nice stay and come back anytime you want

A double entry for the days 3 and 4 of the 28c3, simply because the entry for day 3 would be rather short. The reason is simple that I caught the obligatory cold somewhere at the bcc, probable during one of the cash shifts and it more or less knocked me out that day.

Initially I wanted to attend the 0. Spakariade, just to gather some information about this post privacy thingy I did not really found time to consider yet. I heard it was a good event with interesting discussions over the topic but no trolling.

Alas, thanks to the cold the only event I did attend with a bunch of other people infront of one of the screens around Saal 1 was the Fnord-Jahresrückblick by Fefe and Frank Rieger (Abstract, Recording). It was a great fun, best enjoyed with others.

But I got enough sleep, tea and some other stuff to regenerate at least partly for day 4… good that I have reserved some free time at the beginning of the new year – something is always after the congress

Brenno de Winter hold a really nice talk (again no slide show!) Changing techno-optimists by shaking up the bureaucrats (Abstract, Recording) about the things happened last year in the Netherlands. It’s worth watching, and I’m really sure that something like this can never happen in Germany! The talk was a constant OMG and WTF moment, one hour… that is a really bad story he told. Anyway it was fun… kind of.

Tear down started before the last round of talks and got amplified after the Security Nightmares, they talked a tiny little bit too long, and the Closing Event.

And then 28c3 was all over – too fast as usual. But it was a great fun, interesting topics and wonderful people. See you next year or at the C-Base for the after-show party later

Edit (Jan 04 2012) There are now recordings available from the talks at 0. Spakariade

Congress already halfway done – wow, but that also meant some nice talks, some chatting with all kinds of people, which was actually not that good judging from the sound of my voice today and the Feedback button on the events pages in the schedule.

After a slowish start at the Ball-Pool in the lounge of the bcc (big kids, a ball-pool, not a good way to get something done but ideal for some deep relaxing ) my day started with the talk Don’t scan, just ask by Fabian Mihailowitsch (Abstract, Recording). I was a bit late to the talk, but what I heard of their method was interesting.

That talk was followed by two workshops about the Freedom Box and the Social Swarm project. I have mixed feelings about both of these workshops as I expected something else then what finally came out of the workshops. Maybe the second workshop from the social swarm people would have been more what I’ve expected, but that slot was already filled up and the first part couldn’t encourage me enough to change my mind As you may expect I’m interested a lot in making federation (or how ever you want to call it) broader available to get the masses off the monopolistic/centralized services we have right now; guess it’s mostly missed expectation fulfilling causing my mixed feelings. Really…

After that workshop marathon the next talk was How governments have tried to block Tor by Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine (Abstract, Recording). I really recommend you to watch this talk (once permanently online) even if you have nothing to hide as it sheds some light into the discussion I believe more normal people should be aware of.

The reason for not joining the second social swarm workshop was the talk by maha “Die Koalition setzt sich aber aktiv und ernsthaft dafür ein” (Abstract, Recording) which was, as it was in the previous years, a very nice linguistic analysis of the way politicians use the language, this time to place smoke bombs.

And the last talk, after a very relaxed cashdesk shift that we closed a bit early so that the night shift could take over, was 7 years, 400+ podcasts, and a whole lot of Frequent Flyer Miles by Bicyclemark (Abstract, Recording) who talked about the last seven years as citizen journalist and how is stories happen to happen sometimes.

It’s c3 time, this year 28c3 with the motto behind enemy lines and honestly this motto is a bit unfitting after the last we come in peace. Or do we want to suggest that we are the evil invaders from space telling the backward residents of planet Earth we come in peace, but conquer anyway? I for myself as little cash desk angel, I still come in peace.

Besides that the congress started smoothly as ever with all the well known bugs behind the scenes that have a certain tradition and which are needed for a working congress anyway But even the cash desk was opened in time at Day Zero at 20 hours CET nothing to whine about really! There are some glitches in the cash system, nothing that can’t get a hotfix.

Day 1 started with the opening lecture by Evgeny Morozov Marriage From Hell: On the Secret Love Affair Between Dictators and Western Technology Companies (Abstract, Recording) followed by the talk of Anne Roth Sachsen dreht frei (Abstract, Recording), two interesting political talks the first for the international scope and the second for the local scope.

Usually we talk about these things in a very abstract way when we are talking about evil states somewhere in the world but with Saxony we have a real example right in the middle of the republic.

Two talks followed by my first cash shift. As I said there are some glitches in the system which require a hotfix or a sudo but which can usually be solved within minutes and don’t spoil the fun. I was a bit surprised in which speed the cash shifts were filled in the Angel-System leaving me with the opportunity for some chilled-out evening shifts

In the late afternoon the next round of talks opened by Almighty DNA? by Lisa Thalheim and Uta Wagenmann (Abstract, Recording), Does Hacktivism Matter? by Kai Denker (Abstract, Recording) and after the lunch break Cory Doctorow with The coming war on general computation (Abstract, Recording).

Three talks, three different topics. The first about the rely-ability of DNA traces and the associated data retention and surveillance issues. The second about the historical impact of the BTX Hack (Wikipedia DE) and its traces in German law. The third a very interesting talk (no slideshow!) about why the War on Copyright was just the first battle of the upcoming war.

There is a GSM network running at the congress and I actually found a spare phone this year, so you can reach me at the 94321 during the congress from the internal network.

And now off to Day 2 at the bcc…

Edit (Jan 03 2012) In the mean time, actually already during the congress, somebody explained why that motto was chosen… well ok I can understand the why, though I still think the order of the mottoes during the last years is a bit unlucky now

identi.ca was down today, for me it was the morning till the afternoon. Such things happen and they are not nice, not for the users and not for @evan and his team. Nobody to blame except those who blame the team but don’t setup their own StatusNet nodes, which is not that complicated. In fact it is rather easy…

For federated StatusNet user, those of us Laconicats (c.r. identicats) running their own servers or microblogging on federated nodes, that means it gets awfully quiet in the timeline. This time it hit my nerve and I just wanted to have some numbers.

So here they are. My node, since its last crash after the MySQL breakdown in April—so half a year. Nothing said about how active these accounts are, pure number counting here.

These numbers are profiles seen by my StatusNet node. Seen as once or still followed, once answered or once posted to a group I’m member of/was. That is 3440 profiles from identi.ca, 58 profiles from microblogs from the status.net cloud and 140 profiles from other sources (mostly StatusNet but also some Friendika instances). So when the StatusNet cloud is offline, and identi.ca beeing the biggest part of the SN cloud IIRC, that means that 95% of all profiles my node ever saw are gone.

I would not mind some more federated contacts

And for those who are interested, here are the MySQL queries I used (I’m open for other queries)

I’m sure there are better queries, maybe even a count (I’m sure it is) but they did their job and I liked to see the names flying by in the terminal