The first of these outages was entirely intentional; like many other sites on the web from the huge to the tiny, I blacked out my web presence in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act which was being voted on in the US Senate on that day. I did this for two reasons. Firstly the internet is a global network and the SOPA legislation, as worded, would have had a massive impact on the global internet and negligible impact on online piracy. Secondly, whilst I live in the UK and SOPA is a piece of US legislaton, past experience shows that the UK government have a rather good history of importing UK versions of poor US legislation. Here’s a helpful infographic which speaks more about SOPA that I ever could.

The second of these outages was also entirely intentional and solely down to me; vicchi.org, garygale.com and vtny.org moved home from their old web host to their new one. It took a while to rebuild these websites and to wait for the nameserver changes to propagate across the internet.

The first of these outages was important. The second was irrelevant and trivial. But if SOPA had passed, the second sort of outage would become commonplace for parts of the internet, but to you and me, it would just look like a change of hosting provider. Except the websites affected would never come back online.

But despite the initial teething problems, version 2.0 is out and the list of enhancements and fixes remains unchanged from the beta version, but the official version 2.0 release of this plugin is now both on GitHub and the WordPress plugin repository and while my Codeage page still remains the official home for this plugin, there’s a nicer looking home on GitHub for WP Biographia courtesy of GitHub’s pages feature.

The vast majority of those 1100 odd WordPress downloads are thanks to the WordPress community itself, who’ve had some nice things to say about WP Biographia, such as Kevin Muldoon on wpmods.com  …

As you will have established by now, I think WP Biographia is a great little plugin. Being able to insert the author box directly into an RSS feed will benefit anyone who runs a multi-author blog or website (or those who accept guest posts regularly). The plugin also adds new social media profile fields to users profile and displays them in the author box automatically.

I encourage you to try it out yourselves and see what the plugin can do.

… and on Smashing Magazine’s noupe.com …

Arguably the best looking author bio plugin available for WordPress, WP Biographia gives you complete control over what is shown in the bio area and adds Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profile fields to every users profile. You can choose whether the box is shown on posts, pages, archives and/or the home page and you can customise the colour scheme and border too.

Without a doubt the plugins best feature is the ability to display author bios in the RSS feed. 99% of blogs don’t include a link to the authors posts or website through their RSS feed therefore the guest poster loses a lot of potential traffic from RSS readers. WP Biographia corrects this by displaying a beautiful looking bio at the end of every post in the RSS feed.

… and Rick Bjarnason …

Authors like credit. Make sure you are using this plugin so everybody knows who the writer is. Adds Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus profiles, but the real killer feature is that it works in RSS feeds.

A next version of WP Biographia, which will probably end up as v2.1 is now in the works, which includes some of the additional feature requests that people have asked for on the WordPress forums as well as directly by email. Trying to keep the usual home life, work life, coding life balance in check means that quite when v2.1 will see the light of day is unclear and as the Christmas Holiday season is fast approaching it may well be sometime in early 2012, but only time will tell.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin’s Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security … the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

With this in mind, consider the following electronic boarding pass, taken from last week’s flight.

This boarding pass gets checked three times between the time I arrive at the airport and the time my posterior makes contact with seat 11C. The first time is at security when the QR code gets scanned; if the QR code is valid, I’m granted access to the airside part of the terminal at Heathrow, but my passport isn’t checked so as long as the QR code says it’s valid, I’m through. The second time is at the gate. Again, the QR code is scanned and this time it’s cross checked with my passport; so not only is the boarding pass valid, but I can prove that the name on my passport and the name on the boarding pass matches. The third and final time, is when I actually board the plane and the cabin crew visually check that the boarding pass is actually for that flight.

Now consider this version of the boarding pass. The QR code is able to be scanned and it contains exactly the same information as the previous one. It will get me through the first two boarding pass checks but apparently it won’t allow me onto the aircraft. Why? When boarding last week’s flight the member of the cabin crew who checked my boarding pass told me she needed to “scroll your phone” and “check that your boarding pass isn’t a photo“. the underlying assertion here being that if I wasn’t using a boarding pass on BA’s own mobile app, I couldn’t board the flight.

If your eyes are crossing from concentration at this point, you’re not alone. I still haven’t been able to comprehend what the difference is between a valid QR code, which is itself a graphic image, in BA’s mobile app and a screen shot of the QR code, which is, err, a graphic image. I have an even harder time comprehending how this makes the theatre of airline security any safer for me or for my fellow passengers.

So whilst I’m going to Nokia, I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

… and I meant every word of it. The Yahoo! APIs were stable, powerful and let create web experiences quickly and easily. But now a year later a lot has changed. I still use Flickr on a pretty much daily basis, but Delicious is no longer a Yahoo! property and I transitioned my other web presence from using YQL for RSS feed aggregation to use SimplePie as YQL was frequently down or just not working. The original core set of Yahoo! APIs I use in anger is now just down to Flickr and YUI.

Sadly, this trend is continuing and on September 13th, to badly mangle the quote from Cypher in The Matrix, “buckle up your seatbelts Map scripters, ’cause the Yahoo! Maps API is going bye-bye” and writing …

var map = new YMap(document.getElementById('map'));

… will be a thing of the past. Adam Duvander, author of the excellent Map Scripting 101, has written a eulogy for the Yahoo! Maps API over on Programmable Web, including some pithy quotes from old friend Tyler Bell, whom I worked with when I was part of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies group, which sadly echo my comments on the overall demise of Geo at the company.

Thankfully all is not doom and gloom in the world of mapping APIs and Nokia’s Maps API is firmly in the spotlight to take up the slack left by the addition of the Yahoo! Maps API to the deadpool. And if you’re using Mapstraction with the Yahoo! Maps API, it should be relatively trivial to swap your code over to the Nokia API as Mapstraction now supports Nokia Maps. I may have had a hand in that.

As a fully unreconstructed maps nerd, I love the variety and richness of the mapping APIs available on today’s internet. One of the best books on how to use these mapping APIs is the “does just what it says on the label” Map Scripting 101 by Adam DuVander. While the book touches on the power of the APIs from Google, from Yahoo, and from Bing (amongst others) its main focus in on Mapstraction, the JavaScript mapping abstraction library.

As the name suggest, Mapstraction abstracts, or wraps, the differences between the variety of approaches that each JavaScript mapping API uses into a single consistent interface. With Mapstraction, the API methods to create a map, to change the zoom level, to centre the map, to add a marker or push pin to the map are the same, regardless of which underlying mapping API you use.

Mapstraction allowed you to use the mapping APIs from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Cloudmade, GeoCommons, Cartocuidad, Yandex and MapQuest. But not Nokia’s Ovi Maps API, which was released in February 2011. This is where my local Apache installation, TextMate and the aforementioned hotel room and flight time comes back into the story. Cue a frantic crash course to reacquaint myself with JavaScript, some trial and error, some swearing and some background reading to convert my slightly outdated knowledge of CVS into how to use git and Mapstraction now supports the Ovi Maps API. No, really. It’s on github right now.

There’s a demo of some of the major features of both Mapstraction and the Ovi Maps API over at maps.vicchi.org and, in the spirit of social coding, the source for that is on github as well.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that if the current geo day job falls through I can happily pick up a replacement role coding JavaScript, or coding anything for that matter, but it’s oddly reassuring that I still have the vague ability to continue the profession of coding software that earnt me a living for almost 25 years.

But in the online world we don’t so much as own our names, we … lease them. I’ve “owned” the vicchi.org domain name continuously since April 2001 but it’s not ownership as we understand it in the real world. If I don’t renew my domain every so often it’ll lapse and someone else, should they wish to, can take it over. This is an arrangement I can live with as it’s the way the Internet domain name system works, like it or hate it. I will, at least, get some warning to renew my claim on (temporary) ownership of the domain as there’s a financial arrangement at play. I pay some money and, domain grabs notwithstanding, I keep the domain for the duration of the period I’ve paid for.

But in social media, where most services are “free“, it’s by no means as clear cut. I’ve been @vicchi on Twitter since March 2007 and, for those people who know me on social media, Gary Gale and @vicchi are inextricably linked. But as Twitter giveth, so can Twitter taketh away.

A recent post on Paul Clarke’s blog highlighted this. The ever ingenious Tom Armitage used to have a Twitter account for @towerbridge, which was run by a Twitter ‘bot which tweeted the times at which this London landmark opened and closed the bridge over the River Thames. Twitter recently decided to take this account away, with warning but with no dialogue, and give it “official” status to the exhibition which runs inside the bridge structure, which may or may not be owned by The City of London, which actually owns the bridge. Twitter, as part of their terms of service says this …

Using a company or business name, logo, or other trademark-protected materials in a manner that may mislead or confuse others with regard to its brand or business affiliation may be considered a trademark policy violation

… which makes sense. But they then go on to say …

When there is a clear intent to mislead others through the unauthorized use of a trademark, Twitter will suspend the account and notify the account holder.

When we determine that an account appears to be confusing users, but is not purposefully passing itself off as the trademarked good or service, we give the account holder an opportunity to clear up any potential confusion. We may also release a username for the trademark holder’s active use.

A search of the UK Trade Mark database yields many matches for Tower Bridge. For an electronics company in the US, a software company in the US, a tobacco company in the UK, a clothing company in the UK and a leather good company in the UK. But the bridge itself? That’s trademarked as Tower Bridge Events, Tower Bridge The Venue and Tower Bridge Exhibition.

To my mind, Tom’s Twitter bot isn’t using a trademark nor is tweeting the opening and closing times of the bridge likely to mislead through unauthorised use of a trademark. But that’s just my opinion.

It does make me think about how much or how little control we have over our social media identity though. I’ve been Vicchi for as long as I can remember (or at least 15 years); the name is a contraction of a nickname I was given when I returned to the UK from Italy and started out as Gazzavicchi. The precise origins are lost in the mists of time but I can recall it was coined one drunken evening as it “sounds vaguely like an Italian version of Gary“, which is often how the best nicknames originate. This coincided with the explosion of the Internet and the Web and I needed a unique identity to register on the many and varied services which sprung up. Vicchi seemed to fit the bill and it’s been Vicchi ever since. Thankfully, it’s not (currently) a UK trademark although there do seem to be a couple of companies in Asia using the name. So far, they’ve not come calling asking for the name. I hope they never do but if this does happen, how much right over the name do I have, even though it’s fairly evident that I’m not trying to pass myself off as them nor to cause potential confusion?

But then again, the same could be said of Tom’s Tower Bridge bot as well.

Step forward the aforementioned John Goodwin who, with a bit of internet detective work, managed to find a mirror of the post. While I much prefer to link to blog posts rather than reproduce them in full, in this case I’m plagiarising myself and making an exception on the ground of inaccessibility, and have mirrored the post in full here. It’s worth mentioning that this post was originally written in February of 2009, when I was still working for Yahoo! so it’s a little out of date and was originally posted as …

UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules of Geo or Help! My County Doesn’t Exist

George Bernard Shaw once said the golden rule is that there are no golden rules and at Geo Technologies we understand that there is no one golden rule for geo and so we try to capture and express the world’s geography as it is used and called by the world’s people. Despite the pronouncement on golden rules, a significant proportion of the conversations we have with people about geo lend themselves to the Six Non Golden Rules of Geo, namely that:

1. Any attempt to codify a series of geo rules into a formal, one size fits all, taxonomy will fail due to Rule 2.
2. Geo is bizarre, odd, eclectic and utterly human.
3. People will in the main agree with Rule 1 with the exception of the rules governing their own region, area or country, which they will think are perfectly logical.
4. People will, in the main, think that postal, administrative and colloquial hiearachies are one and the same thing and will overlap.
5. Taking Rule 4 into account, they will then attempt to codify a one size fits all geo taxonomy.
6. There is no Rule 6, see Rule 1.

I codified these rules after a conversation last week, via Twitter and Yahoo! Messenger, with Andrew Woods, a US based developer who was, understandably, confused by the vagaries of the how addresses work in the UK. Andrew’s blog contains the full context but it can be distilled into three key questions:

• If the country is The United Kingdom, how come the ISO 3166-2 code is GB?
• If the country is The United Kingdom, is England a country?
• If England is a country, do I use it in an address?

As a US developer, Andrew is naturally fluent with the US style of addressing, with all of its’ localised and regional exceptions. This is a good example of both Rules 3 and 4 in the real world; most people in the US will use number, street, city, State and ZIP for specifying an address. But how does this transfer to the UK? What’s the equivalent of a State … England, Scotland or Wales? Let’s try to answer some of these problems:

If the country is The United Kingdom, how come the ISO 3166-2 code is GB?

The UK’s full name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and although the United Kingdom and Great Britain are used interchangeably, Great Britain really refers to England, Scotland and Wales. At the time of writing, both GB and UK are formal ISO 3166-2 codes for the United Kingdom with GB being the assigned code for Great Britain and UK being exceptionally reserved by the United Kingdom.

If the country is The United Kingdom, is England a country?

To be formal and precise, the United Kingdom is a unitary state, not a country, with four “member” countries; England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

If England is a country, do I use it in an address?

Normally, no. A full UK address consists of the following:

• The addressee’s name, if known or applicable
• The company or organisation, if known or applicable
• The building name; optional if the building has a number
• The number of the building and the name of the street
• The locality name;optional
• The Post Town
• The county; optional if a Post Town and Postcode are supplied
• The Postcode

… for example, take our office address of Yahoo! Geo Technologies, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8AD. This address has no building name, a building number and street, no locality name, a Post Town, no county as we have a Post Town and a Post Code, and a Post Code.

Which brings me neatly to another example of Rule 4 and the missing county of this post’s title. The UK’s postal hierarchy and administrative hierarchy are not the same. Since 1996 the first half of a UK postcode, known as the outward code, has been used to help in the sorting of mail but prior to this a set of postal counties were used as part of addresses and these frequently do not match the current set of administrative counties. For example, the county of Middlesex was formally abolished in 1965 with the majority of the county becoming part of Greater London. Despite this and despite the 1996 postcode changes, Middlesex lives on as a postal county and as informal area name with the side effect that it is still possible to send mail, and have it delivered, to places in a county which hasn’t existed for over 40 years.

Oh, and Yahoo! GeoPlanet, naturally, recognises Middlesex and correctly identifies it as a Historical County.

You may not have realised it but Friday May 27th. was a sad day for the Geo industry in London. Even without the benefit of knowing what was going on from ex-colleagues inside the company, the signs were there if you knew where to look for them and how to read them.

Before the Internet, companies, teams and projects could fade quietly into anonymity and into oblivion. But on the Internet, everything is in public and it’s much harder to hide the tell tale signs. API updates and bug fixes cease. A web site or blog stops being updated or goes down altogether. A Twitter feed stops being an active living thing and becomes merely a historical record. Ex-colleagues start following you on Twitter or you start getting connection requests on LinkedIn whilst other colleagues start polishing and updating their LinkedIn profiles.

And May 27th. 2011? That was the day that the last of the remaining members of my old team at Yahoo! Geo Technologies left the Yahoo! office in London and that was the day that Yahoo! ceased to have a Geo presence in the UK.

I joined Yahoo! in 2006 as Engineering Manager for Geo Location Targeting, also known as GLT (and not standing for Gay, Lesbian and Transgender, a mistake once made by someone at a conference with hilarious consequences), a group formed from the acquisition of WhereOnEarth.com a year earlier in 2005. As the name suggests, GLT was formed to use WhereOnEarth’s technology to build Panama, Yahoo’s geotargeting ad platform, a task which the technology was well suited to and a task at which the team succeeded.

But post Panama, we faced the challenge that most acquisitions face … “we’ve done what we were acquired for … now what“? In 2008 we started to answer the “now what?” question. With Tom Coates and the Yahoo! Brickhouse team, we provided the back-end geo platform for Fire Eagle. With Aaron Cope and Dan Catt, we provided the back-end geo platform for geotagging photos on Flickr. And with Martin Barnes, Tyler Bell and Mark Law we launched the GeoPlanet geodata gazetter API and the Placemaker geoparsing API. These were heady days for geo; GPS was reaching critical mass in consumer devices and web service mashups were ready to take advantage of powerful geo APIs and with Chris Heilmann evangelising furiously as part of YDN, the Yahoo! Developer Network, we were well placed to take the lead in the explosion of interest in all things geo that was starting then and continues to this day.

Yet the company didn’t seem to know what to do with their Geo Technologies group. We were reorganised more times that I can remember, starting again with another Vice President and another group. The promising lead in this area started to loose ground and the long promised investment never seemed to materialise. In May 2010, Nokia made me an offer to be part of the their location group that I couldn’t refuse and I jumped ship. TechCrunch seemed to like this; twice to be exact. Over the next 12 months the group in London continued to shrink and continued to lack investment. The signs were all there for anyone to read … the YahooGeo Twitter feed was last updated in January 2011 with a total of 5 Tweets since I handed over the reins on May 28th. 2010. The blog at www.ygeoblog.com has been down for almost a year as well.

And on Friday May 27th. 2011, the last of the London team left the office in London’s Covent Garden for the final time as the Geo Technologies group transitioned and relocated to the Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California and to Bangalore; a sad day for the team in London and a sad day for the Geo industry overall. Hopefully the future will yield more developments of the YDN Geo APIs and the WOEID geoidentifier and while Geo Technologies in the company continues to live and to power the successor to the Panama geotargeting platform, the London presence where the technology grew and was developed is over.

I’m also, in some cases inadvertently, a reasonably prolific user of Cloud storage. I store large amounts of data in The Cloud; photos, software, general data, web pages, databases, emails and so on. With safely secured backups of course, as Cloud services are just like any other computer resource; sometimes they fail and go offline.

I don’t, yet, store music in The Cloud but we’re now starting to see so called music lockers being created for just that purpose. Amazon have just started a music locker and Apple are expected to follow soon. This is where the problems start.

I don’t need a license to store the data I currently store in The Cloud. I don’t need to seek permission from software companies to store backups of applications I regularly use. I just store them. I don’t need to seek permission from the manufacturers of the cameras which take the photos I store in The Cloud. I just store them. I don’t need to seek permission from the companies whose software I use to create slide decks that I store in The Cloud. I just store them.

But music is a whole lot more contentious and, if the record labels and other media organisations get their way, I may never end up storing my music in The Cloud. On the face of it, The Cloud is purpose made for The Cloud; upload my music, download it anywhere, stream it to any device. It should come as no surprise that the record labels don’t like this.

Universal Music want only songs with digital receipts to be able to be uploaded to music lockers. Songs without such receipts would be considered unauthorised, including songs from CDs I own that I’ve ripped, songs purchased from retailers without such receipts, promotional songs without such receipts.

Sony want only a single computer to be designated to be able to upload to a music locker, without seeming to consider what happens when we upgrade or buy a new computer.

Warner Music Group go one step further and want a central music locker authority, ostensibly to be able to track you and sue you if you use your music locker in a way they don’t like.

Amazon’s music locker offering is built on the assumption that no additional licensing is required; a music locker is just network connected storage. The music labels don’t agree with this and it will be interesting to see if Apple goes down the licensing route or stands its’ ground with Amazon.

Until then, I’ll just keep my own music collection safe and secure on resources and devices I own and control. But for The Cloud in general and for music lockers specifically, the cloud seems to be distinctly stormy and threatening right now.

Firstly, let’s get the conspiracy theory out of the way; this theory has been presented in a variety of ways but all of them seem to think that your iOS device is tracking your location and that the reason for this is some shadowy request from government or intelligence agencies. Perhaps the most eloquent case for this was on Frank Reiger’s blog.

Now I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person and Frank’s blog post was a great read. But I have to take issue with the two main points he raises. Firstly there’s “if it was a bug then it would have been fixed … it hasn’t been fixed so it can’t be a bug and must therefore be deliberate“. Secondly there’s “not only has the bug not been fixed but the file even moved location without being fixed so it must be (even more) deliberate“.

I’ve worked in the software industry for almost 25 years, many of those cutting code, and can say with hand on heart that bugs, oddities and plain wrong behaviour stay in code bases not because they don’t need to be fixed but because other factors push them down in the priority list, factors such as hard release dates, new features taking precedence and the ill defined side effects of complex software systems not being able to be fully QA’d. Just because a bug or an unforeseen side effect remains in a production code base does not make a conspiracy theory of government or intelligence agency intervention.

We also live in a world of distributed software development teams. It’s enough of a challenge to keep teams in different floors of the same building in synch; it’s even more difficult when language, time zones and different countries get into the mix. Just because the consolidated.db cache moved location again, does not make a conspiracy theory.

So all in all, nice post, great conspiracy theory but, sadly, very little to back up the assertions.

But if your iOS device is tracking or caching your location, why is the data so inaccurate in places, showing places you’re pretty sure you haven’t been or have visited only fleetingly, yet not showing places you’d think would show up, such as where you live or work?

For the answer to these questions, I’d recommend a thorough reading of Peter Batty’s excellent three posts on the topic, which actually digs into the data that is present on iOS devices, rather than making shrill conspiracy theories based on other, equally shrill, media headlines.

Peter’s posts, “So actually, Apple isn’t recording your (accurate) iPhone location“, “More on Apple recording your iPhone location history” and “The scoop: Apple’s iPhone is NOT storing your accurate location and NOT storing history” go into great detail about what the consolidated.db location data cache does contain and, more importantly, what it doesn’t.

An anonymous comment on one of Peter’s posts points to a document submitted by Apple to US Congress in July 2010, which includes the following

When a customer requests current location information … Apple will retrieve known locations for nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points from its proprietary database and transmit the data back to the device … The device uses the information, along with GPS coordinates (if available), to determine its actual location. Information about the device’s location is not transmitted to Apple, Skyhook or Google. Nor is it transmitted to any third-party application provider, unless the customer expressly consents

Another comment from Jude on one of Peter’s posts makes this observation …

My Guess?

It’s not a list of cell phone locations that you’ve been to, but the opposite, a list of cell phone locations near you downloaded to the iPhone from Apple in case you move into range of one of them. i.e. At a guess what is happening is location services identifies a cell tower and asks for its location, and is replied to with the list of locations that contains that cell tower, that list is then cached so that it does not need to be requested again.

Of course, this is only a guess based on the wide range of addresses people are seeing and how its near to, but not exactly where, the people have traveled.

So rather than iOS actively and accurately tracking you and reporting this information to some, unspecified, intelligence agency it’s actually the complete opposite; your device is actively downloading the next cell tower and, in some cases, wifi information that is near you and where you might be going to provide a better location experience. Which explains the inaccuracy of the locations people have been seeing in their version of the cache data and explains why there’s some places they haven’t been showing up in the data and why places they have been aren’t showing up.

Of course, this information still has personal value and should really be secured by iOS and not by an individual having to secure their handset and encrypt their backups but if anyone still thinks they see the black helicopters circling, it looks more and more unlikely and, as Ed Parsons pointed out, a smartphone without location just isn’t … smart.