In Your Face!
Many people in this country take public transportation to work. In my case I take a bus from my little corner of suburbia to the big city. The operator of the line I take has a few basic rules for riders. No food or drink, clean up your newspapers when you leave, etc.. But the one that probably causes the most trouble and confrontation is the one that states “Cell Phone Use Prohibited”.
I’ve had many discussions about this rule over the years and the argument goes as follows: Those for the rule state that the noise of the phone conversation is disruptive to other riders. I understand and agree with this. But those against the rule counter by arguing that the noise generated by a phone conversation is half as much noise as a conversation between two people sitting next to each other on the bus but conversation is allowed. I understand and agree with this too. So while I avoid talking on my phone when I’m on the bus there are rare occasions where I do.
One such occasion occurred the other day. While waiting to board the bus I called my mother who I had been out of town for a few days. I hadn’t spoken with her since she got back and figured I’d call while I waited to board. (As far as I know there is no rule against cellphone use in the bus terminal.) I know how annoying it is when other people talk on the phone in public so, just as I try to avoid talking on the phone on the bus, I also try to avoid having long phone conversations in public places. This was a rare exception.
At some point the bus started boarding and I got on as my mother talked to me. I remained silent for a minute as she talked and I found my seat. When she finished what she was saying I jumped in to say “OK, I’m on the bus now so I have to hang up” but before I could finish saying “OK” the man in the seat in front of mine was already on me.
“NO, NO, NO. YOU CAN’T DO THAT”, he shouted. “IT’S NOT ALLOWED!”
I tried to explain that I was just signing off but he wouldn’t let me get a word out. So I just ignored him while I said goodbye and hung up the phone.
I understand where this guy was coming from and have no problem with his point of view. What I have a problem with was his approach. I can understand getting a little hot if I was talking through a whole trip but to raise your voice to me seconds after boarding when all I was trying to do was end the conversation was a bit much.
I also noted that this guy had been eyeing me while we were on line waiting to board the bus. He was clearly annoyed at my phone use. As stated earlier I understand the annoyance and usually avoid this very situation. But this guy appeared to be looking for a confrontation.
This is just one example of what’s wrong with our society today. Though I admit I was part of the problem in this story it’s no excuse for a total stranger to raise their voice the way this guy did. A simple “Excuse me, can you please keep to the no cellphone use rule” would have sufficed. My reply to this would have been “I’m sorry. I’m just signing off now.” and the whole thing would have been done with far less stress. But no. People feel they have to get in your face for the simplest reasons.
Can’t we all just get along?
Comments to this post
MLB Standings Plugin Now Available
A few years ago I was looking for a plugin to display the standings of a Major League Baseball (MLB) division on one of my other blogs. I came across only one plugin for this and luckily it worked very well. Unfortunately it depended on something on MLB’s site which was changed just prior to the start of the current baseball season. The change rendered the plugin useless leaving the WordPress community with no such plugin. (I know it’s a small market but it’s still a shame to not have this covered.)
After trying to troubleshoot the plugin with no success I decided to write my own plugin. Instead of depending on MLB’s site I decided to base my plugin on XMLSTATS. Using XMLSTATS, erikberg.com has been publishing an XML file for MLB standings daily for several years. I used this file for a custom plugin in 2006 and the data has always been there for me.
Now that I’ve been using a finished version of the plugin for a few days I decided it was time to make it available to the public. If you’re interested in it check out the MLB Standings page for more details.
Comments to this post
Updating A Twitter Profile Image With PHP
I had an interesting issue come up recently when working on improvements to a Twitter bot I hadn’t used in a while but wanted to start using again. The new feature I was trying to add was to update the profile picture of the Twitter account the bot used based on a certain criteria determined by the bot script. The criteria was easy to work out but it took me a while to figure out exactly how to execute the change in profile pic.
(I’ve written before about creating a Twitter bot so I won’t repeat all of the details here. Just as in the previous post I’m using PHP with Abraham Williams’s PHP library for Twitter OAuth. The balance of this post assumes you’re already logged into Twitter using this library.)
Twitter’s API includes a command called update_profile_image. On the face of it this seems like a simple enough call to make but for some reason I had some trouble getting it to work. After some research and a whole lot of trial and error here’s how I got it to work.
- In reading the API documentation I learned that the only required parameter is the image. But the image must be base64-encoded. (The same requirements for uploading a profile pic on Twitter’s website also exist here: it must be a valid GIF, JPG, or PNG image of less than 700 kilobytes in size.) So the first thing I needed was a function to convert a given image to base64 encoding. I don’t remember where I found it but I turned up the following function to do that. (My apologies to the original writer of this function. If someone points out to me who the writer is I’ll gladly cite them in this space.):
function base64_encode_image ($filename=string,$filetype=string) {
if ($filename) {
$imgbinary = fread(fopen($filename, "r"), filesize($filename));
return base64_encode($imgbinary);
}
} - Once I had this function in place it was time to set up the API call to change the pic. First set a variable to the filename of the image to use:
$image = "profile.png";
In this case the image is called “profile.png” but you can use any PNG, JPG or GIF that fits the criteria mentioned above. - Next set a variable to the base64 value of the image. This is where the base64_encode_image function is called.:
$base64 = base64_encode_image ('images/'.$image,'png');
Note that the image must be located in a place where the script can get to it. In this example the image is in a subdirectory called ‘images’. Change the directory name in the script as needed. - And finally make the API call to change the image on Twitter:
$connection->post('account/update_profile_image', array('image' => $base64.';type=image/png;filename='.$image));
Note that in this case I’m setting the image type to PNG. Change this as needed.
It seems very simple but for some reason the last line took some time to figure out. Just sending the base64 encoded image didn’t work. After some Googling and trial and error I figured out that adding the type and filename parameters was needed.
Comments to this post
Mormon Posthumous Baptism Cafe
Comments to this post
The Difference Between Misusing And Exploiting Personal Information
There’s constant talk in the “internet space” about what can and can’t be done with personal information collected from users. The most benevolent way this data is used is when the data is mined for certain demographics and the demographics, not the data itself, is used to sell advertising on the web presence of the service. Many free services use this tactic.
But in some cases this personal information is exploited. The data itself may be sold to third parties who you may or may not want to have you data. In most of these cases you’ve actually agreed to allow this data to be shared by way of a ‘terms of service’ agreement or similar legal agreement you accepted when signing up for the service.
I’d agree that in many cases where this data is exploited there actually is no regard taken for the users. But I’d stop short of saying that all exploiters are nefarious because I don’t believe this to be the case. In fact I’d say that there are many cases where the person making the decision to use this data in such a way is just out of touch with what the users would actually allow and, in some cases, what is actually legal.
One example I can cite is an incident that occurred several years ago when I worked in online advertising. We had an agency who wanted to run an ad that included a form in which the user could enter their email address to receive more information about the advertised product. The project manager working on building our infrastructure to handle the collection of the email addresses and the mechanism to deliver them to the agency had a brilliant idea. What if we build into the contract a clause that gave use permission to keep a copy of these email addresses and use them for our own purposes? Imagine what we could do with such a list! And if we do it with one agency on one campaign we could certainly do it with others as well and eventually have a large email list that we could make a lot of money with!
Though the idea was great from a money making perspective it really sucked from an ethics point of view. I explained to the project manager, who never had a problem bragging about his MBA, about the ethical side of this and the fact that we’d be upsetting everyone who unknowingly submitted their email addresses for this project. He responded that we’d put up a legal disclosure allowing us to do it. A legal disclosure makes the practice legal but does not make it ethical.
We talked about the issue for a while and he just couldn’t step out of his own shoes, those of someone who sees an opportunity to make money and the technical means to do it, and look at it from the user angle. Hence he couldn’t understand any of the arguments I made against collecting the email list. In the end the legal department would not let him go ahead with his idea but he was kicking and screaming the whole way.
My point is this: Here’s is a smart individual (who also was a very nice guy that I will always remember as a good person) just couldn’t see that there was something not quite right or nice about a particular idea he had. It’s not that he was purposely looking to irk the people whose information he’d be collecting but rather that he couldn’t see why anybody would be upset by it. There was a disconnect that had no hope of being connected at that point in time.
How often do such disconnects end up in ill advised use of user’s personal information? I don’t know. But I’d certainly say that this happens more than people think. It may even happen more than purposely evil use of such data.
Comments to this post