Wilted buttercup, grey skies, and geek

So Facebook announced their new Facebook Places functionality a couple of days ago, the service seems well implemented, and following the uptake of 4square, probably a timely service for fb – good luck to them.

What I am most disappointed about (**rant) is the way that Facebook, seem to think that an “OPT-OUT” policy is the right way to go about landing new functionality on their users. By default, Facebook allows your friends to log your geolocation at given point in time. And this is simply NOT ACCEPTABLE. As far as I am aware (and please do let me know if I am wrong), none of the other popular geo-logging services allow for other people to log your location at a given point in time. I see this as a massive invasion of your privacy, and as have others, as discussed in the following CNET article:

Shots already fired over Facebook Places privacy

An OPT-OUT policy to services which compromise your privacy and your personal information is simply NOT acceptable, and DRACONIAN. I mean, Facebook, DID NOT even attempt to inform me, that friends of mine can can geolog my location at any given point in time. I mean, what is stopping a friend of mine, who is hanging out in a brothel from geologging me, and defaming my character, by suggesting that I too was at the same place as him.

I noticed this yesterday, and then I got round to tweeting it, and had a lot of people thanking me for informing them of this change of service. So, I thought I would expand what is going on in a bit more detail. If you would like a more verbose write up on how to disable this new “feature”, visit the Garlik blog article:

Garlik Blog: Disabling Facebook Places.

As far as I am aware there has been no recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policy or their terms of service as illustrated on the awesome Terms of Service Tracking site. From my point of view, Facebook should inform their users about new functionality, especially new functionality which by definition shares your geolocation information both with people within Facebook, and with the Skyhook geolocation gazetteer.

I have been bitten by a number of things when I updated my PHP to PHP 5.3. These are the changes which I had to make to my php.ini file :


short_open_tag = 1


This option allows for the use of the short hand "<?" and "?>" used as abbreviations for "<?php" and "php?>". And yes, shorts hand are good, I am super lazy, insofar as I am not good at setting “use strict;” when writing perl code.

Secondly, I was stung due to the fact that PHP 5.3 has clamped down on the returning of values when expecting a reference to be returned by a function, this phenomena and the necessary fix is illustrated in my previous blog post.

So, I am officially super annoyed with both OpenID and with WordPress right now. There is a bug in the OpenID plugin developed by the Diso project (thanks guys), I have been using this plugin for a while now, but it seems very broken at the moment.

I have managed to get my OpenID server working, my OpenID URI being http://mmt.me.uk/blog/, but I have yet (after hours of trying), managed to get OpenID commenting fixed on my blog.

So my apologies if you try and comment on my blog using your OpenID, as it doesn’t work.

The most annoying thing about this whole issue is the fact that I get perhaps the least helpful error message ever. The following error message pops up when I attempt to use my colleagues OpenID to post a comment to one of my articles, this following error message gets sent to my STERR :

[Fri Aug 20 12:01:14 2010] [error] [client XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] Successfully fetched 'http://steve.harris.name/': GET response code 200, referer: http://mmt.me.uk/blog/2010/07/30/the-facebook-like-button/

“200, and Successfully fetched!” my ass!

In order to get the OpenID server working I had to apply a patch, which has been raised as a ticket on the diso project issue tracker. In short, there are two required changes, due to PHP 5.3 funkiness, required to make the OpenID server work.

These couple of changes to the OpenID libraries which came with my version of WordPress is due to the fact that PHP 5.3 has clamped down on the returning of values when expecting a reference to be returned by a function, this phenomena was illustrated in the following errors :


[Sun Apr 18 23:40:05 2010] [error] [client 140.203.155.13] PHP Warning: Parameter 1 to Auth_OpenID_Server::openid_associate() expected to be a reference, value given in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1702
[Sun Apr 18 23:40:05 2010] [error] [client 140.203.155.13] PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function needsSigning() on a non-object in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1495
[Sun Apr 18 23:40:06 2010] [error] [client 78.86.167.133] PHP Warning: Parameter 1 to Auth_OpenID_CheckIDRequest::fromMessage() expected to be a reference, value given in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1576, referer: http://apassant.net/blog/2010/04/18/sparql-pubsubhubbub-sparqlpush?destination=node%2F374
[Sun Apr 18 23:49:36 2010] [error] [client 193.203.240.209] PHP Warning: Parameter 1 to Auth_OpenID_Server::openid_associate() expected to be a reference, value given in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1702
[Sun Apr 18 23:49:36 2010] [error] [client 193.203.240.209] PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function needsSigning() on a non-object in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1495
[Sun Apr 18 23:49:52 2010] [error] [client 193.203.240.209] PHP Warning: Parameter 1 to Auth_OpenID_Server::openid_associate() expected to be a reference, value given in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1702
[Sun Apr 18 23:49:52 2010] [error] [client 193.203.240.209] PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function needsSigning() on a non-object in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1495
[Sun Apr 18 23:50:27 2010] [error] [client 216.97.225.85] PHP Warning: Parameter 1 to Auth_OpenID_Server::openid_associate() expected to be a reference, value given in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1702
[Sun Apr 18 23:50:27 2010] [error] [client 216.97.225.85] PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function needsSigning() on a non-object in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1495
[Sun Apr 18 23:50:28 2010] [error] [client 78.86.167.133] PHP Warning: Parameter 1 to Auth_OpenID_CheckIDRequest::fromMessage() expected to be a reference, value given in /media/data/www/mmtmeuk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php on line 1576, referer: http://www.pillwatch.com/proc_openid-login.php


There is a page which describes the patch one needs to run to overcome this:

http://patchlog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/openid-server-php.5.3.diff

I need to get on with other stuff now, will revisit this in the future …

Yay finally, come across an update to the GPGMail plugin for Mail.app 4.3 on Snow Leopard. This is the one bit of functionality which I have missed since upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and have been searching for updates periodically for a while now.

This is fanstatic news, as I can now digitally sign my emails, with my GPG identity, which can be found linked to from my FOAF file.