Does Facebook perceive itself as a virtual society?

As the arguement rages about Facebook's liberal interpretation of free speech i.e. allowing Holocaust deniers the right to post freely on Facebook I am sure that the deniers and spreaders of hate are loving every minute of it but that is not the point of this blog.

Facebook and perhaps all Web 2.0 technology used for Social Networking de facto provides the infrastructure for a virtual society. One might say that the founders/ owners of Facebook have the right to define TOS however by creating a virtual society online that has little if any semblance of law/ code of acceptable behavior then is Facebook opening Pandora's Box?

In the real world and in civilized society "hate crimes" based on race, gender, religious practice or orientation are treated as a special class of crime because of the actual not potential influence these incitements have to violence.

If it wasn't simple Holocaust denial but perhaps recruiting Facebook residents for cyber or real-world acts of terror then we would certainly see a real world law enforcement response.

The freedom of speech issue is an American one and Facebook is an American company. Is Facebook liable for any acts of incitement and subsequent violence caused by the incitement that occurs within their virtual society? Moreso, is Facebook breaking the law, US Federal law by providing a platform for hate of this nature on servers that probably sit on US soil owned and funded by US citizens?

Perhaps the founders should visit Germany where Holocaust denial is illegal and admit that they provide a platform for this "free speech" or try to set up a Facebook server farm there. It would be interesting to see the official German response to this.

What is a legitimate reaction to encountering this kind of hate online? Should users indulge in Facebook petitions, or approach advertisers to leave Facebook, will users themselves boycott and leave Facebook as a result of this or will some users define a more militant approach to this?

One thing I do know is that Holocaust denial and other hate crimes have no place on Facebook or any other open social network platform. Legitimizing this kind of thing whilst hiding behind the constitution seems liberal naivete at best and at worst leaves us to question the true beliefs of the management of Facebook.

The cellphone sage in a nutshell

About 8 months ago my cellphone stopped working. I dutifully took the Nokia 6233 to my cellular provider and received it back as unfixable from the service center. They told me I could pay for another device for a reduced fee but as that phone was on a 3 year contract I decided simply to get another phone.

My brother had an unlocked Windows Mobile 2003 iMAte SP3i in an office drawer so he sent it over. The phone was by no means perfect but I was happy to have a working phone. He warned me this was a relatively old phone and might not last forever so perhaps I might want to consider a more permanent option.

With alink to his cellphone supplier in the UK I checked the site for details until a very nice MwG Windows Mobile phone went on sale. The company had 100 units and I made my order online. A week of emails and phone calls later I discovered the UK company would not honor an Israeli international Visa card nor would they use PayPal without receving so much personal info as to render the whole concept of PayPal redundant. By now all 100 units were gone. As you can imagine I was a little displeased by the experience.

Ideally I wanted to hold out for the Google Android phone from HTC but I needed to set myself a budget and a phone like that was more than I wanted to spend. meanwhile the stand-in phone, the iMate was becoming idiosyncratic to say the least. I bit the bullet and decided to try an Israeli e-commerce site for phones and ordered a nice Nokia slider with wifi and the trimmings.

The phone arrived unlocked but regardless it simply would not work with my Cellular provider, a defective unit but unfortunately the last one in stock of this model.

An email arrived from another UK phone supplier with a sale on a really gorgeous Windows Smart Phone. I made the order and it was confirmed. I had the phone shipped to my family for my brother in the UK to test (I was getting a little gunshy of the whole thing by now).

To cut a long story short I now have in my possession the Toshiba Portege G810 with Windows Mobile 6.1. It is a wonderful phone, clear reception and sound, excellent GUI similar to the HTC Windows interface and a plethora of goodies on the device.

The wait was worth it now I just have to deduplicate my Contacts from the old phone and sync the data.

The great PC meltdown didn't happen overnight

I've been away awhile and it has been a combination of a few things, work gettting in the way of life, a stint wrestling with writers block and finally the creeping meltdown of my PC.

Deep down when the PC was taking a long time to shut down and doing minor, irritating things during operation I knew it was time to do a format and reinstall. The real problem was I just didn't have the time or will to deal with a comprehensive reinstallion of Windows XP never mind all the apps, drivers, codecs etc.

Still this is exactly when fate reaches out and slaps the back of your head ... I was having what I called a Bad Hardware Karma Month, it seemed work laptops, my cellphone, my watch and other hardware would stop working on me for no apparent reason.

I decided that I needed to draw a line in the sand and that would be the task of getting my desktop PC back to full operation.

First I did an inventory of the hardware, OS, service packs, hot fixes and drivers using Belarc's Advisor Tool and for the drivers the very neat Drivermax tool.

I created a plan and then set to work ensuring that I had downloaded everything I needed to install and put it on Disk on Key and a backup DVD. All the data was backed up to the Seagate Free Agent pocket USB Hard Drive.

My biggest indecision was all the updates; how was I not going to sit in front of the PC ding Windows and Antivirus updates? I thought about creating a slipstreamed DVD but in the end decided to do the install over two evenings and use my laptop until the Desktop PC arose from the dead.

My install disk fro Windows XP was Service Pack 2 and I had the ISO install of SP3 so much of the hard work vis a vis the OS was done. I decided to do all the Windows Updates in one go via the Custom option which includes all the critical updates (Hotfixes, security patches, service packs etc) and all the other stuff you can choose to install or not.

The truth is the process was pretty fast and all in all took about 3-4 hours. In short this was the classic adage: 

Proper planning prevents problems.

Now as you can tell I am back and hopefully the writers block is gone.. time will tell 

Shared knowledge (or skills) is power

Those of you lucky (lol) enough to have read my resume have seen that I have led a diverse career in terms of the types of employers I have had; start-ups, software houses, factories, public sector and big business.

As I passed thru my 20’s into my 30’s and rose up the ladder from QA Engineer to Team Leader and Manager I noticed that no matter the scale of a company or its background if the corporate philosophy was unhealthy in other ways then the concept of information is power (in it's classical or negative sense) was prevalent.

Early on I realized that this paradigm is a precursor to failure at many levels unless you shift the paradigm to shared information is power (or empowering). Whilst magicians do not explain their tricks I have always believed that if you know something valuable perhaps how to do something then passing the information on to your team or anyone else shows you as an investor in others, empowers you and empowers those who you share with.

It doesn’t detract from the value of your innovation or source knowledge now that others know what you know as they may add to this or even reciprocate. Furthermore, demonstrating a depth of knowledge or a skill in mentoring others ultimately defines you in a positive light.

During several social networking events (particularly) my skill cloud was noticed on my business card and compliments paid for originality. Beyond the ego boost (yes that too, feeling good is a reward unto itself no?) several people did ask me how I did it and I was happy to explain the process and even sketch out notes.

Do I fear seeing emulations of my card? No not in the least. Firstly this was only a customization of an existing tool and secondly if others copy it then I was doing something right.

My real question for myself is what skill or knowledge do I want to acquire next?

del.icio.us Tags: Skill set,Social Networking,Shared Knowledge,Mentoring,Job Hunt,Career,QA and Software Testing,Productivity

Technorati Tags: Skill set,Social Networking,Shared Knowledge,Mentoring,Job Hunt,Career,QA and Software Testing,Productivity

Web 2.0 Resume etc continued

Web 2.0 and my Resume (see earlier article)


Well last week was the hi-tech job fair in Tel Aviv and even knowing what to expect (it used to be in the main hall of the Tel Aviv Conference Center; about 5-10 times larger) on walking in I was a little shocked to see 5 companies recruiting there instead of the usual throng. Yes, it was just a little depressing and worrying for even the most positive of us. Many of us standing there in queues to get to the recruiters discussed this but really, no one knows what will happen next.

Regardless, I had prepared for the event doing more work on my resume and business card. As I have said both had to be memorable and I wanted the business card to leave an impression. Whilst I haven't taken the time and invested in getting a print house to run me off a batch I have created, designed and printed a bunch myself using Word and Office Depot's marvelous Business Card Inkjet Paper.

The card has my name, job description or title, email, linked in, blog address, twitter and cellular phone number on the front. On the back I wanted to put a tag cloud describing me and my skill-set. To this end it behooves me to give credit to a great web app that allowed me to create my personal Tag/ Skill cloud: http://tagcrowd.com/ - TagCrowd takes free text, a file or URL and with various options allows the user to customize their very own Tag Cloud.

But (big but) this is a Java app and there is no export feature to allow the user to take the Tag Cloud and make something off it in a textual format. Enter the trusted screen grab or Print Screen button. Alternatively you can use a PDF driver like Cute PDF to print the Tag Cloud to PDF.

Needless to say with a little magic and a dash of luck my Skill Cloud now resides in my resume and business card (as seen below).

What it took for my Nokia 6233 to die

I have been Twittering a lot recently about my Nokia cellular phone which needed repairing. I had my backup phone an iMate sp3i which my brother Jeremy, CEO of First Contact UK supplied me with in my time of need (Cheers Jeremy .. oh yes: First Contact they do so much more than this, Website design, content management, SEO, IT and IT ROI).

Finally, I had the time to take the Nokia for repair two days ago and for the nominal fee of 100-150 NIS (approximately $25) they told me it would be back fixed today.

Why not settle for the iMate? Several reasons, I do like it and Windows Mobile really does rock but it is an older phone with little support, limited functionality and a few hang-ups (no working speakerphone, no Hebrew font support and compared to the Nokia contacts well, it doesn't stack-up; the Nokia allows me to personalize each contact to a greater level). However, the Nokia doesn't use ActiveSync but Nokia's own program thus Outlook may be supported to sync but not directly whereas the iMate with Windows Mobile on it obviously does.

Anyhow, this morning I trotted merrily to my cellular provider to get my repaired Nokia back. A sincerely sad customer support rep informed me that the on/off button was broken (tell me what I didn't know) rendering the phone irreparable and for a small (but larger fee) I could purchase an identical Nokia and finish my contract happily.

As you can imagine I was torn between annoyance at the provider for failing to fix a wear and tear issue and at Nokia for making what should be a simple problem unfixable. Obviously I have no intention no matter how much I liked the phone of having the same issue occur in another several months so I declined her offer.

Perhaps a brief email to Nokia regarding this might help but I doubt it.

Oh well, one more reason to hold out for the when the G-Phone becomes available in Israel.

Technorati Tags: Activesync,Cellular phone,Consumer dissatisfaction,G-Phone,Nokia,iMate,Outlook Contacts,Repair

del.icio.us Tags: Activesync,Cellular phone,Consumer dissatisfaction,G-Phone,Nokia,iMate,Outlook Contacts,Repair

How SATA left me with a shelf of redundant Hard Disks and what I did next

Technological progress is a great thing. We want our devices smaller, faster with longer lasting power and so forth but what do we do with the stuff from before the great techno-leap?

One example is the jump from IDE to SATA Hard drives and the changes in the motherboard and connectors.

Pragmatically when I upgraded my PC several years ago I didn't really think about being able to mate my old IDE Hard drives to the new, speedy-fast SATA PC.

With time the older PC sat around and as the little guy came along I found it necessary to do away with what became excess hardware. The only thing I really kept from the old PC was two 80 GB IDE Hard Drives.

What's the problem? I can't connect them to my existing PC as it is SATA technology and my external hard drive is a generic box with IDE to USB .. Windows XP just can't recognize it and handle the driver.

So I was left with a dilemma; either disassemble and destroy the old disks or get creative and find a solution.

I was in my local PC store to get a RAM upgrade and happened to mention to the owner about this and he smiled and rummaged in his desk. Laughing about he had just had the same problem himself he hands me an 80 NIS ($20) printed circuit board with two connectors IDE and SATA.

It was very similar to something I had found online for sale off a website for a PC hardware company in Taiwan (if I remember correctly).

Anyway, tomorrow I will be hooking up at least one of the old IDE Hard Drives to format and subsequently use as additional storage space. Results to follow installation and some testing.

Technorati Tags: Driver,IDE,Practical Technologies,Repair,SATA,Windows XP

del.icio.us Tags: Driver,IDE,Practical Technologies,Repair,SATA,Windows XP