Jure Cuhalev » Tech

Slovenian government is trying to censor the Internet

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:22:09 +0000

Most forms of gambling is illegal in Slovenia with a few highly regulated exceptions that are given concession from the government. Most notable are Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Lottery) and Športna Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Sport Lottery) in addition to real-world casinos and gambling places.

With growing popularity of online gambling these organizations as well as government are facing a problem with how to deal with insanely popular betting sites like Bwin, Expekt.com, bet-at-home.com. Government already tried to order ISP’s to block access to these webpages in 2006, but it turned out that they didn’t have legal ground for it so it failed.

That is why they decided to fix the law that would, among other things, require ISP’s to prevent access to web pages that would offer gambling related services. Failing to comply would result in fines from 7.500 EUR to 52.500 EUR and 1.500 to 10.000 for the person in charge. Parliament already approved the law on 18th of December 2008, but it got vetoed at the next stage in the process so they will have to vote on it again.

There are many troubling aspects of these recent developments:

From legal aspect it introduces censorship at the price of freedom of speech because part of the government decided that they need it. Who will be next to demand blocking of unwanted content?

From technical aspect it’s really hard if not impossible to block web pages. The only real approach would be using Deep Packet Inspection technique, that requires ISP to analyze each internet package violating privacy of the communication in the process.

It’s now up to the citizens and experts in the field to carefully analyze answers and proposed government changes to the law to make sure that it does not pass in its current form.

If you can read Slovenian, there are three excellent articles on this topic that you have to read:

Naš veliki kitajski požarni zid (bigger political picture)

Zakon o igrah na sre?o uvaja cenzuro spletnih strani (legal)

Cenzura prometa na stranska vrata? (technical analysis)

Original version of this article appeared on Netokracija

OS X tray icon overload

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:03:39 +0000

We used to make fun of Windows users and impossible number of tray icon in bottom right corner. Observing my OS X tray today I noticed that it’s almost 700 pixels wide and that it doesn’t look like the trend of expanding will stop.

Does this mean that next version of OS X will slowly start introducing “hide unused tray icons” like with Windows or there is nothing that we can do as we need all of them?

How is your tray? Wider or shorter? Am I missing anything?

No related posts.

Migrating Prevoz.org to GeoDjango/postGIS

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:47:52 +0000

Today we finally switched Prevoz.org to new backend that allows us to start offering an option to add international carpools. It looks pretty boring at the end of the day:

In the process we all learned a lot about GIS systems, different GEO API solutions, Geonames and that it’s not a trivial problem.

For now I just want to give thanks to everyone that helped in this transition and I’ll try to blog more details about the transitions and lessons learned in upcoming weeks.

Prevoz.org in Google Earth

Social media presence is not what your product needs

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:01:48 +0000

Today everyone blogs and we expect everyone to have their own blog, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile etc. Being present on as many services as we can. We can then measure measure engagement levels with one of the many different approaches (number of followers, sales, replies or even Klout rank).

What often don’t see is companies taking a deliberate decision not to be present on every social media fad, but instead decide to focus on a few communication channels and spend the rest of their resources on their actual product.

The one company that does this beautifully is twidroid. They make a deliberate stance that they don’t do tech support over Twitter and that you should use email. Their message is simple and it helps drive customer to the right medium.

We can take this a step further and take a look at different ways some of social media tools can be used:

Facebook Page
Is our audience on Facebook at all? Is this a replacement of Newsletter or do we expect to do tech support and discussions here? Do we just count number of fans so we have more than competition?

Twitter account
Do we plan to become a leader and Tweet about our industry or do we just push announcement every once in a while. Is this account to do tech support over? Do we want followers or engagement? How personal is the voice of the account?

Blog
Do we position ourselves as progressive thinking company that regularly writes in-depth editorials or do we push product announcements and speaking gigs. What would be most useful for our business goals (hyping up vs. consumer focused)?

LinkedIn and everything else
While we all love new social networks the only real question is – do we actually reach anyone on that platform?

Do you know why your social media presence is structured like it is? Or is it legacy setup already?

A confession of newage virtual schizophrenic

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:09:05 +0000

Hi, I’m Jure and one of the things I do is to help people talk and work with their communities so they can improve their products or services. Often they want to outsource at least part of the talking to me, so I’m given a new online identity. The name is still the same, but you get a new email (with IMAP and everything) and often business cards with this identity. If you’re lucky it’s also a Google Account (via Google Apps) that you need to share calendars, gtalk etc.

As you help different organizations, you keep accumulating these identities that you can’t shut off because you never know who will decide to email you on that address or which account you’ve got registered. On top of that, you almost never completely stop helping them unless the project gets shut down.

So now you have tons of email addresses, that each connect to different identity that you use to talk to bloggers. The only problem is that there is a limited number of meaningful connections that you can have. So you email people from all these identities with different questions, forwards, reply-alls and so on.

This does at the end of the day mean, that I’ll have to talk to myself via different identities, CC other email or info@ accounts (that I control anyway) so that we can make sense of our world. That everyone knows who belongs to who, depending on the email domain.

I have yet to write multiple (personal) Twitter accounts or Foursquare logs, even though I’m sure that this day isn’t far away.

So if you see my replying to myself from a different domain, it’s all normal, it’s just that I don’t want to break online balance of identities.

On Foursquare and the likes

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:21:21 +0000

Foursquare is like Twitter, many things to many different people. What I would like to start using it is to passively track location of my friends and use that information to decide on my future plans.

Knowing for example that someone else is also at University and that it’s lunchtime and that I’m nearby, would allow me to ping them with food related question.

This is something that is not practical without Foursquare as people don’t tweet their location.

The second important part is that I now suddenly leave breadcrumbs of my past behavior. I’m not exactly sure the depth of usefulness but for now I’d like to be able to draw a heat-map of my favorite places and maybe see how it compares to my friends one.

But there is one major obstacle – we need critical mass of friends on it. Foursquare doesn’t recognize Ljubljana as a city (it thinks it’s Vienna), so we can’t do proper evangelism for it. On the other hand Gowalla recognizes Ljubljana but doesn’t have Android client.

So the war for location tracking is just starting and the one that can deliver the best experience first and is willing to work with local mobile geeks will have an upper hand.

Fog and Morphfest

Assumptions of your ecosystem

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:05:09 +0000

I’ve recently started helping out with limesurvey project, more specifically, their rewrite to CakePHP. One of the latest tickets I help with was to add optional table prefix, so you could have separate installations using the same database.

This is something you would never see in Django world, where everyone can afford as many databases as they have apps and you don’t have such artificial limits.

After discussing the topic of adding support for this, with all the problems it comes with, the reality is pretty grim – while we might have access to a number of servers, most of the [limesurvey] users are on cheap or simply outdated PHP hosting plans and still need this hack.

This is important because if we want to build great open-source application, we have to consider our end users and with it, their ecosystem of apps that they use. If you’re building a PHP software, you just can’t afford to not have table prefixes.

Usability reflections: How Google failed to keep their BlackBerry experience simple

Captcha is such an ugly word

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:16:46 +0000

Hat tip to Wikia who gave it a few moments of thought and renamed captcha to blurry word. It still doesn’t tell you why it’s there, but now you can at least find it. Before that, it was just a nonsense term (for someone not in IT/web field).

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Python SMTP sink server

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:49:29 +0000

Debugging email sending in your Web application is always tricky as you need a working SMTP and you also need to watch out that you don’t accidently spam real users (if you’re working on a local copy of real database).

There is a neat one liner that acts as a “sink smtpd” server, meaning that it implements SMTP protocol, so you app can communicate with it, while printing everything it receives on screen:

sudo /usr/lib/python2.6/smtpd.py -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25

(via Django Snippets)

#webcamplj – community is alive and how you can help!

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:01:38 +0000

One of the big questions we’re always wondering is – is there a community in this small country? Aren’t things better in bigger cities?

There are two answers to that:

1. Sure. It’s better out there and we don’t stand a chance here.
2. or we can say – It depends. We just need to give our community a chance to come out.

The fact that #webcamplj could be done so quickly, while attracting such a lot of high quality speakers and participants gives me hope. While Slovenian (web) IT community might have its quirks, it’s alive and more than willing to come out and share the knowledge. It’s not just the BarCamp like events, it’s also weekly web.zen.si events in Kiberpipa, as well as Webmaster piknik, etc.

With this in mind, I just wanted to say that #webcamplj was really a community effort with more than 10 people working in backstage to keep the event running smoothly and some continue working even after event to make sure that we will be able to archive all the collected knowledge.

But there’s a bigger point to this blog post – you can help too. Consider running your event within a specialized field of your interest, so others can learn with you and we can advance the state of your field. You don’t even have to be an expert, just someone who is interested, as research has shown that people learn the most from peers their same level.

Having said that, there are a few things we can offer

1. We have a wide infrastructure that can support a variety of events. From 30 people meetings up to 150+ person events. Relationships with potential venus and experience at what works where and under what conditions.
2. We can help you with promotion as we’re involved with a number of online and offline media projects or help with Facebook groups or Twitter lists.
3. We can also help you with sponsoring and optimizing costs of your event (if any), due to previous relationships.

Who is we? We are a loose community of people who invest our time and money to keep these open places, events and online communities running. Talk to anyone that seems responsible at any of the community events and start the ball rolling inside your field of interest.