Face Facebook Sharing Security Head On

Sharing Policies on Facebook just got an upgrade. I thought you might like to see the new enhancements.

1. Say who your with. Right off the bat, you can select the friends you want to be involved with a particular stream or conversation.

2. Add Location to your posts. You can now define places where your conversation has relevance.

3. Control privacy when you post – or after. If you realize a conversation might be better kept between certain people, you can now change the way your wall posts are published during or after the conversation starts.

Visit this page on the Facebook.com Help pages For a more in-depth look at how to use Facebook’s newer, more secure sharing features.

How to Add Products to your Home Page in Magento

In just 10 easy steps!

Here are the steps:

1. Download Magento and get it set up and running on your local box or web hosting account. I wrote about that before.
2. Login to the backend in one browser tab, and load up your frontend in a new window.
3. Turn off caching on the System -> Configuration screen.
4. Configure your default store, or copy the default theme (or better yet, follow this tutorial to create a new Magento theme as your_interface/your_theme)
5. Go to  System -> Manage Stores -> Website, Store, Store Layout and create one, point it to your_interface/your_theme
6. Configure at least one Category and activate it.
7. Configure at least one Product, assign it to the active category, and set it to enabled. Add Inventory of more than zero, and change Out of Stock to In Stock on the product editor.
8. Assign the product to a website by checking the product on the Manage Products list and choosing Update Attributes in the upper right-hand corner. On the Manage Product -> Update Attributes screen is a right-hand tab that says “Website”. Choose that and check the store(s) you created in step 2 to assign the product to the website.
9. Edit your Home Page content to have the following code, where 2 is Category ID shown on the Manage Categories -> Edit Category page.
10. Go back to the Home Page browser tab and hit refresh (option refresh to force reload, in some browsers, or to be sure, clear your browser cache first).

If this isn’t very clear, please watch this great screencast by Scott W on Vimeo.  In less than 10 minutes it will all be clear.

Laser Projection Keyboard for iPad, Mobile Devices a Cruel Hoax?

If you’re looking for a projection keyboard that uses a laser to project an image of a keyboard onto any flat surface, I was too, so I did some digging. Below are my (disappointing) findings.

Here’s a YouTube video from CES.

One of the comments on the YouTube page for this video says, in part,

This is yet an unproven technology. It has no corrective Artificial Intelligence to correct your mistakes as you type. Try the Cellulon keyboard and you will find it frustrating to type, unusable and seriously flawed. You will end up writting garble after garble. They seriously need to work on a fix. Don’t buy this overpriced fail of keyboard.

Dang it! What a cool concept. Maybe it was too good to be true. These devices appear to be mysteriously unavailable. In fact, most of the information is from 2008-2010. Why is it that nobody appears to be selling the coolest thing ever? Maybe it’s a bunch of hype or they went back to the drawing board to get the concept working better.

Think Geek says

$149.99
Out of stock ( no ETA available )

This random site looks too cheesy to buy from.

The Celluon Laserkey CL800BT on Amazon says

Currently unavailable.
We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.

Google has a few stores listed, but at $2,500+? Hmm, now this is just strange.

Does anyone have one of these devices?

Are these cruel hoaxes from some April 1 news release or are newer, better models coming out soon to an Android, iPhone, iPad or your favorite 4G Tablet coming out any time soon?

I think someone needs to get to the bottom of this.

Infinite Starlight: A Thought Experiment

Albert Einstein, a patent clerk in Bern, performed what are now called “Thought Experiments”. He was born in 1879 and received the Nobel Price in Physics in 1922. So, he was just 42. What makes Einstein’s story so unique is that he wasn’t classically trained in physics.

Like Einstein, I’m also not an astrophysicist, but the topic of stars, space and astronomy has always intrigued me. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to come up with my own thought experiment, and I think I finally have one.

When I look around at the world around me, I find the level of detail in the cosmos utterly mind boggling. The farther you zoom in, the more and more detail you see. It’s almost infinite.

Most of us with even a basic science or astronomy class know what a star is: a gigantic ball of burning hydrogen in the void of space. Carl Sagan described the universe most simply and profoundly: 100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars. That’s an incredibly large number of stars to be sure, but it’s not infinite, I think we could all agree on that.

My theory is that the amount of energy a star has is infinite, and it gives off an infinite amount of energy at all times. I know that sounds crazy. Impossible. There must be a limit, although very large. But nothing is truly infinite, right? So this brings about a paradox then, and I would love to understand it fully.

For this thought experiment, though, let’s talk about just one star, any star. Look up in the night sky and pick a star, and gaze at it. Which star you pick is irrelevant.

How about Betelgeuse, a red supergiant, Orian’s shoulder in the constellation of Orion. You see that bright star, one of the brightest in the heavens? Good. Walk around your back yard (be careful in the dark) and pause and look up again. Still see the Orion’s shoulder? Yep. Go down the street a ways. Yep, you can still see Betelgeuse. No matter where you walk, and look up, you can still see that star. Go to the other side of the world (stick to the same hemisphere, consult a star map, etc.) — somewhere and sometime that Orion is visible. Arizona in the spring, for example.

The point is, no matter where you look, there’s Orion and Betelgeuse. No matter where you go, light from that star is hitting your retina. If the moon ever goes in front of Orion, the light that would’ve hit your retina is instead going to hit the dark side of the moon. Technically, Betelgeuse casts a shadow on earth when the moon passes in front of it (when the moon casts a shadow on earth from our own star, it’s an eclipse.) Still, had the moon not been in the way, you could’ve seen the light that was destined for your retina.

Theoretically, you could travel to another star in a different constellation, and assuming you could keep track of where you are in relation to Betelgeuse, you could land on an earth-like planet orbiting around a different star, and look up, and see Betelgeuse from that vantage point, too.

The point of all of this is to visualize more clearly the way that light expands outward from a star.

Time divides infitely. How many moments are in between the start of the big bang and now? How many nanoseconds are inside of a second? We use the term nanosecond today because that’s the thinnest sliver of time we can measure with modern technology. But any mathematical scholar will tell you that you can always take half of something, or a quarter, or an eighth or sixteenth – we can increase the denominator all the way to ∞. So how many 1/∞ths of a second are in a minute? ∞. How many 1/∞ths of a nanosecond are in a billion years? ∞ of them.

Angles divide infinitely, too. How many angles are in between 0° and 90°? For example, an arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree. But how many photons fit into an arcsecond? The farther away you go from the origin of the angle, the easier that is to measure, right, because the angle is getting wider. But how can it work that way? If you think about it for a moment, you’ll have to realize that there are ∞ angles which are each 1/∞th of one degree in size, in between any two other vectors that converge at a point.

We can describe this expansion of light from a star as an ever-enlarging spherical volume. You can think of a sun as a huge beachball factory releasing an ∞ number of beachballs every 1/∞th of a moment. The edge of each beachball is a photon ready to hit any eyeball that might be gazing upward to see it.

We proffered before that angles are infinitely divisible. To think about this some more, lets say you had a Sharpie marker and a beach ball, and you started drawing black dots on the beach ball and counting up how many dots it took to color the beach ball 100% black, at some point way in the future, the ball would be totally black and you would have a number of dots recorded which represented how many sharpie marker dots fit on the surface of the sphere. Now switch to a razor fine-point pen. Obviously it would take a lot more fine-point dots to cover the ball than the larger dots made by the sharpie marker, but it should still be possible to turn the ball black and record the number of fine-point razor dots it took to color the ball completely black.

How does that apply to starlight? Well, we described before the way light expands out from the source star as being an expanding sphere. If we imagine the light expansion edge-horizon as a huge beachball, then we can imagine that for every photon-width point on the edge of the light-sphere, as as well as for every place inside the volume of the light sphere, at any moment in time there has to be at least one photon there, had our eye been in that exact spot to observe it. In other words, if you could have ∞ eyeballs from ∞ imaginary people all forming a circle (sphere) around Betelgeuse, then every single one of the ∞ eyeballs would get hit by a photon.

That brings us to the width of a photon. If a photon has a width, which I’m fairly sure it does, then there should be a finite number of photons required to draw the light sphere. Or, if the width and height of a photon is 0, then it would take ∞ photons to cover the edge of an arbitrary light sphere some time/distance from the star. So let’s call the width of a photon, ƒ. I’m not sure what the equation would be, but I think we would all agree that if ƒ is > 0 then some finite quantity of photons would be required to ensure that any eyeball pointed towards the source would receive a photon.

The farther away you go from the star, the wider the ∞ angles become. In other words, if you go 1 billion light years away from the source, then you’re on the edge of a light sphere whose radius is 1 billion light years. We can focus on two arbitrary photons next together at this distance. If a photon has a width, ƒ, and we choose two photons π and ∂ which are next together, their combined width is 2ƒ.

What happens if we go another 1 billion light years farther away to 2 billion light years away from the source, parallel to π’s original trajectory. At twice the distance, isn’t the number of ƒ-width photons needed to cover the light-sphere equal to twice the number of photons required to cover the light sphere at 1 billion light years? If photons have a width ƒ > 0 then would it be correct or incorrect to assume that only a finite number of photos could fit around the edge of the star, during every 1/∞th moment in time since the star started burning?

So, either stars have an infinite amount of energy, or something special about the speed of light (faster than light communication?) enables photons to be a wave (no energy required?) until they are observed (photon created at moment of observation). Since I think any sane person would argue that there is no possible way for a star to possess infinite energy, then there are clearly some things I am missing.

LVS-TUN How To on RackSpace Cloud

I have to hand it to the sales/techs over at RackSpaceCoud.com.

After just a few minutes with their Online Chat Sales, I was intrigued enough to create an account. Heck, it was free, and would give me a chance to experiment with server configuration via one of the hot topics today – virtualization.

One of the first things I mentioned to Zack (I think that was his name) was that I was interested in making a more fault-tolerant web server setup. My client at the time had a dedicated server, but was planning on a few different television appearances, and didn’t want his site to go down with the surge of traffic.

Load Balancer How-To using Apache Mod_Proxy (Easy)

The RackSpaceCloud tech linked me to this article by Brandon Woodward on how to set up a simple load balancer using Apache. I followed that article to the letter, using one CentOS VM for the load balancer, and two CentOS VMs for web heads.

Well, I have to admit, it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. Now granted, it’s not super robust, but for a simple round-robin load balanced setup, it only took an hour or two to setup and configure, and it is still in place on the client’s domain. Not bad, considering it’s the equivalent of 3 servers for less than $50/mo.

Load Balancer How-To using LVS-TUN (Intermediate-Advanced)

Having found the RackSpaceCloud article on setting up a load balancer with Apache just a few months prior, I was interested in learning more when I saw this new article by the same author on installing and configuring LVS-TUN.

I was intrigued, because even though I believe having a mod_proxy-based load balancer solution on 3 servers in the cloud is preferrable in many ways to a single server with no load balancer at all, I could still see some areas for improvement and wondered what else was out there.

Woodward explains it like this:

LVS-TUN is a tunneling load balancer solution that will take all incoming requests through the load balancer and forward the packet to the web nodes. The web nodes will then respond directly to the client without having to proxy through the Load Balancer. This type of solution can allow for geo-load balancing, but will more importantly allow a customer use the bandwidth pool available from all web nodes, instead of relying on the limited through put of the load balancer.

In other words, whereas the mod_proxy-based load balancer is quick and easy to set up and manage, the load balancer itself is a single point of failure, since it is acting as a proxy for the two web heads behind it. LVS-TUN on the other hand, enables the load balancer itself to be distributed, and also takes advantage of the web heads serving content directly back to the client.

Whether you’re looking at a load balanced setup for scalability or just your own hardware architecture experimentation, without a doubt, the cloud is the best playground.

New Apple Device – Kevin Nealon LOL

New Apple Device? I don’t think so. Funny Kevin Nealon joke on Twitter

A Search Engine Better Than Google? Maybe. WolframAlpha

So My MacBook Pro recently failed to wake up from sleep. I held the power on button for about 15 seconds, then let go. Nothing happened. I pressed the on button again and it booted right up again.

Next I see this:

Interested, I click Report to see what anonymous statistics it collected.

In addition to a ton of other stuff, it says:

System Uptime: 53599109180380 nanoseconds

Hmmm, I wonder… How long is that?

This is a perfect example of what Wolfram Alpha is perfect for.

Sure, you enter the search term like…

53599109180380 nanoseconds in hours

…into Google, to take advantage of a hidden feature called Google Calculator.

As exciting as it may seem to use Google for a calculator, wait until you check out Wolfram Alpha, a knowledge engine that uses natural language search to give you a wealth of information about your search term.

Here’s what you get when you search for 53599109180380 nanoseconds on WolframAlpha.com.

…plus a whole lot more interesting things, too, like the distance light can travel during that time.

If that doesn’t get you going, check out this Wolfram Alpha overview screencast.

Thanks to Alan for sharing this great link!

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