One computer and one system-upgrade ago, I tried to convince people to set up their own MOPP (My Online Publications Page).

The essence of such pages is that they need an update, once in a while… I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but, I failed to re-install the package, following my own instructions.

Fortunately, there are plenty of good alternatives around, today. After playing a bit with bibtex2html, Ive settled for the bib2html perl script by Patrick Riley.

Included are well documented directions. The most important being that you have to do a

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/perl5¹

and change the user-specific entries in the bib2html.conf configuration file (if you have already key.pdf files around, you can just drop them in the output-directory and set . as the paperfiledirlist, and they will be found and linked to automatically. If not, you can always include links in the bib-file). Further, if you want to link to web-pages of your coauthors, remember that the script expects you to use : LastName, FirstName | http://webpage even if you used a different convention in your bib-file.

The result can be seen here. For ebook-download-junks : Ive included again full PDF-files of all versions of my book (starting with version 1 from 1999 to the final published version of last year). They can best be found using the sort-by-type page.

1. thank you Rupert, via the comments [↩]

In the iTouch warwalking post I was considering trying to gain access to closed networks for innocent purposes such as checking mail, rather than stealing secret passwords from people allowing you free access to their wireless network, but still, I should have thought of the following possibility

Here’s a walk-through :

• type the following command into your iTouch Terminal.app (assuming you’ve installed the BSD subsystem) :

tcpdump -v -s 65535 -w log.txt

• once you’ve collected enough packets, cancel the command (ctrl c), AFPd the file from the iTouch to your Mac and open it with Wireshark (this is the most convenient way to install binaries under Leopard as well as an updated version of X11. For other platforms, or source code, see here)

• do whatever black magic you feel you have to perform using Wireshark (the new name for Ethereal) or other password crackers

When more than 200.000 websites are using google analytics, a one-man action proposed last time to de-activate GA on neverendingbooks is pretty useless. Perhaps a better alternative is :

When you use google analytics on your site, announce this and add a link to CustomizeGoogle BLOCK GOOGLE ANALYTICS COOKIES. Your visitors can then decide whether or not to block google analytics cookies only.

Or link to this post, as I’ll give a detailed step-by-step instruction so that even web-newbies can protect themselves agains google analytics stalking cookies.

1. Surf using a Firefox-clone Because CustomizeGoogle “is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam)” it only works on Firefox-like browsers. Screenshots below use Flock, the mac “social web browser”.

2. Go to CustomizeGoogle BLOCK GOOGLE ANALYTICS COOKIES and click on the Install Now! link (upper right)

3. A warning message will appear saying “Flock prevented this site from asking you to install software on your computer”. As we do want to install, click on the Edit Options button (on the left).

4. A pop-up window appears and click on the allow-button.

5. Click again on the Install Now! link from CustomizeGoogle. A pop-up will appear asking you to confirm installation of the extension. Click on the install-buttom (right below).

6. Installation complete! But you have to restart before you can use it. Click on the restart button and Flock will do it.

7. Select under Flock/Tools CustomizeGoogle Options.

8. A pane pops up with plenty of configurable options.

9. Select “Privacy” and mark the ‘Don’t send any cookies to GoogleAnalytics’ option.

10. Done! You can now surf to any of the 200.000+ google-analytics-powered sites without being stalked!

Using this feature makes you more anonymous. But your visit on a single webpage can still be logged. This way, both Google and the owner of the website knows that someone visited a webpage, but it’s difficult to track all pages you’re visiting. And it’s really really hard for Google to track that you visited both Website A and Website B.

The next thing on my tech-to-do-list : learn all about Yahoo Pipes :

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. Here are a few popular ways the service can be used:
- create your ultimate custom feed by combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating them.
- geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
- remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
- build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
- power widgets/badges on your web site.
- consume the output of any Pipe in RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

I’ve posted before on setting up your own lifestream, or your own planet, or scraping feeds, or subscribing to my brain, or … whatever. The good news is : all these ideas are now superseded by Pipes!

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. You make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together in the Pipes Editor. Once you’ve built a Pipe, you’ll be able save it on our server and then call it like you would any other feed. Pipes offers output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats for maximum flexibility. You can also choose to publish your Pipe and share it with the world, allowing other users to clone it, add their own improvements, or use it as a subcomponent in their own creations.

This is the essential message to get : yahoo-pipes allows you to remix the web, filtering out all noise! And the good news is

1. There are plenty of public pipes around to get you going, and
2. Pipes has an iTouch-friendly interface (see above left). All you have to do is to Safari to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com and use them.

Here are a few public-pipes you can use out of the box!

• iPhone / iPod Touch: The Most Comprehensive Feed Ever!, doing what it promises : giving you the best iTouch-posts without having to roam for them.
• JSON Geocoder, returning lat/lon/address info from the the given address.
• Uber Blog Search, Search all the blogosphere with one query. Hits Google, Ask, Technorati, and icerocket then returns the unique results. Below the web-interface giving the results for ‘noncommutative’…

• Meta Search Alerts if you want a less ‘neverendingbooks’-based reply

and finally, one of my favorites, implementing to some extend the Lifestream-idea (iTouch-interface above left)

• lifefeed - virable, Easily Aggregate your social whereabouts great for blogs profiles and more! Aggregates Your Feeds From: -Digg -Last.fm -Twitter -Flickr -Del.icio.us and your very own blog Adopt and Improve, enjoy!

I’ll promise to spend some time soon to set up my very own pipes and make them available…

MacBookAir? Is this really the best Apple could come up with? A laptop you can slide under the door or put in an envelop? Yeez… Probably the hot-air-book is about as thick as an iTouch. The first thing I did was to buy a leather case to protect the vulnerable thing, making it as thick as a first generation iPod… (needless to say, when my MacBookPro breaks down, ill replace it with a MacBookAir, clearly!)

Ranting about MacWorlds : Wired has a great article on last year’s event. Steve Job’s iPhone presentation is something that will be part of the collective memory when it comes to 2007-recollections. Few people will have realized that the Apple-team didnt have a working prototype a few weeks before… Here’s The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. A good read!

If you plug in your jailbroken iTouch, you will be asked wether you want to upgrade to 1.1.3, something we all feared for a long time and so it takes just nanoseconds to hit the cancel-button. But, there is good news! Rupert Gee reports that you can downgrade to 1.1.1 and redo jailbreak. I won’t try it for some time, but still…

In the unlikely event that you come here being a mathematician, here’s what I did with my iTouch today. Ive downloaded the Connes-Marcolli talks on Renormalization and Motives part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8 at work. They are in mp4-format so you can load them into iTunes and onto your iTouch!!! Weather is not favorable for outdoor-cycling at the moment, so I used the home-trainer, put the iTouch in front of me and, boy, was I educated…