Using bit.ly and Quicksilver to Shorten URLs

If you have a mac, and don’t use Quicksilver, well, you should!

Here’s how to use Quicksilver to shorten URLs using bit.ly. This is useful for many things, but especially for posting links to twitter.

Obviously you need Quicksilver installed, and you also need to create an account with bit.ly, and get an API key. (API stands for application programming interface, which is basically a set of standard ways to interact with bit.ly using computer code.) You find the key listed under your account once you register. You’ll also need Growl, which is a program that delivers alerts from different apps to your mac.

So, to start, you open Applescript, and paste the following into a new script:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
	on process text longURL
		-- Init
		my growlRegister()

		-- If we didn't get a text string then grab the URL from Safari
		if longURL is "" then
			tell application "Safari"
				if document 1 exists then
					copy the URL of the front document to longURL
				end if
			end tell
		end if

		-- Format the URL accordingly in case it was types sans http://
		if (longURL does not start with "http://") then
			set longURL to "http://" & longURL
		end if

		-- Convert the longURL
		set shellScript to ("curl --url \"http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=" & longURL & "&login=YOUR_BITLY_ID" & "&apiKey=YOUR_BITLY_API_KEY " & "\" | grep shortUrl | grep -o http.*[/a-zA-Z0-9] ")

		set shortURL to (do shell script shellScript)

		-- Display success message
		growlNotify("Short URL now in clipboard:", shortURL)

		-- Open the shortURL in Safari to test it
		--tell application "Safari"
		--set URL of front document to shortURL
		--end tell

		set the clipboard to shortURL

	end process text
end using terms from

using terms from application "GrowlHelperApp"
	-- Register Growl
	on growlRegister()
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
			register as application "Shorten URL" all notifications {"Alert"} default notifications {"Alert"} icon of application "Script Editor.app"
		end tell
	end growlRegister

	-- Notify using Growl
	on growlNotify(grrTitle, grrDescription)
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
			notify with name "Alert" title grrTitle description grrDescription application name "Shorten URL"
		end tell
	end growlNotify
end using terms from

Now, find in the script where I wrote in all caps YOUR_BITLY_ID and YOUR_BITLY_API_KEY — that’s where you plug in your info from bit.ly.

Next, save this file (I use the file name “Shorten URL”) in your Actions folder, which is located on your mac in:

Home -> Library -> Application Support -> Quicksilver -> Actions

One note — make sure your Actions folder appears in the Catalog in quicksilver. If it does not, open the catalog (apple-comma), go to Custom, and use the + sign on the bottom to find your Actions folder and add it in.

Rescan the catalog, and you’re done.

To use it, first copy a long URL to the clipboard. Then, invoke Quicksilver, paste the URL in, and tab to the second box. Type “Shorten URL” (or whatever you named the script), and hit enter.

You should see a growl alert with the new URL, and it will be in your clipboard. Paste away!

Credit where credit is due:

I didn’t write this script on my own, but found these two posts, which I used to create the script:

http://tanniespace.com/bitly-textexpander-applescript-win/

http://trumcgowan.tumblr.com/post/84901795/shorten-urls-using-quicksilver

Programming is all about remix, really… :-)

How To (Mostly) Block Ads in Fluid Apps

Fluid for the mac is a terrific piece of software. It allows you to create a separate “app” for specific web sites, and works especially well for websites that you frequently visit. For me, my RSS reader (which is google) is a constant go-to; it’s how I keep up with tons of blogs, etc. Other fluid apps I have setup are Brizzly, The New York Times web site, and Pandora. All good stuff.

One of my big frustrations, though, is that there is no ad blocking capability built-in to Fluid. (And there never will be.) Even if you add in an adblocker for Safari (Fluid basically runs a Safari browser), it will not carry through on Fluid apps.

I’ve searched several times for a solution, but have not found anything…until today. It’s not perfect, but works well enough.

Here’s how to do it.

I’m assuming here you have some experience with setting up Fluid, setting the allowed URLs, and all that. If not, please leave a comment, and I’m happy to provide more of a step-by-step.

First, download the CSS file found here at this site (the file is called userContent.css). This is built specifically built to block the images from well-known ad services.

Next, following the instructions here on a site for an unrelated application for Fluid, goto the Preferences inside your Fluid app, and select the “Userstyles” option. Once there, you’ll hit the plus sign, and check the box next to “URL Pattern.” in the right column box, type in an expression to allow the URL of your app. (This is the same thing you do under “Advanced,” where you allow the site’s URL.) For example, in my google reader fluid app, I simply put “*google.com*” (without the quotes…).

Below that, you’ll want to paste in the contents of the CSS file you downloaded in the first step. It’s easy to do — open the CSS file on your mac (using TextEdit, or, as on my mac, DashCode), select it all, and paste it into the field in the Fluid preferences.

Close the preferences window, reload your app, and the ads should (mostly) be gone. No more eye-burning ads on your screen!!!

Well, again, it’s mostly. It doesn’t work perfectly, as some get through. And I’ve only done limited testing, in just a couple apps.

But, so far, it’s the simplest way I’ve found to do this.

A Keyboard for your iPhone?

Really?

“Semantic Analysis”

The shiny new Web2.0 name for data mining.

The Materiality of Netflix

Netflix seems like magic. You click a few clicks on your web browser, and in a couple days, a movie appears in your mailbox.

Like Amazon, Zappos, and the other businesses thriving in the doc-com world, Netflix is a business that keeps hidden from its customers all the messy physicality fueled by our mouse clicks. Point and shoot retail.

Broadly speaking, in fact, the net — by design — hides the materiality of information. Terms like virtual communities, cloud computing, and software as a service are devices of obfuscation. Click the mouse, and things just happen.

But things actually just don’t happen in the world; they happen somewhere. Bits and bytes cannot remain hidden forever, and eventually reveal, or manifest, themselves. In the world of Web 2.0, this manifestation usually happens in a data center — a security-hardened, temperature-controlled facility filled with very few people, but many, many racks of computers. The Times recently foregrounded this largely unknown world of the data center, with an excellent piece on Microsoft’s computer storage facilities:

For companies like Google, Yahoo and, increasingly, Microsoft, the data center is the factory. What these companies produce are services. It was the increasing “viability of a service-based model,” as Ray Ozzie, now the chief software architect at Microsoft, put it in 2005 — portended primarily by Google and its own large-scale network of data centers — that set Microsoft on its huge data-center rollout: if people no longer needed desktop software, they would no longer need Microsoft. This realization brought new prominence to the humble infrastructure layer of the data center, an aspect of the business that at Microsoft, as at most tech companies, typically escaped notice…

Netflix, on the other hand, might be a service, but because they are not software-only like Microsoft or Google, there is a greater materiality at hand, contained in a factory-like setting of the Netflix warehouse. Only what is produced here is the packaging and repackaging of the same DVDs, over and over.

The process begins in an undisclosed location:

Its biggest secret remains the warehouses themselves…Indeed, one of the few things about the building that suggested it was not a meth lab was that, at sunrise, the parking lot was full — shifts begin at 3 a.m. The busiest time is around 7 a.m., but as I entered, the first thing I noticed was how silent it was. No one was chatting. The second thing I noticed was how, for a Web-based business, there were few computers — maybe seven in the building, which has towering white walls and a concrete floor. Every Netflix warehouse looks like every other Netflix warehouse, down to the same flat, bright wattage of its light bulbs. It’s not attractive, which might explain the hasty mismatch of promotional posters taped to its walls like college dorm decor — a poster for “Atonement” alongside a poster for the direct-to-video “Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief” alongside a horror flick poster.

There’s no there there, by design.

No computers — Netflix runs on manual work, with employees flipping through each DVD one by one:

…at the 28,500-square-foot warehouse, from which more than 60,000 discs are shipped daily in the Chicago area alone, cartons are placed at the feet of employees, who glance in two directions — down (to pick up an envelope) and up (to look at the disc), and that’s about it. This is the first, and least automated, stage of the process, performed mainly by women, including a seemingly disproportionate number of local grandparents; they have full medical benefits and a 40-hour workweek.

They inspect each returned disc. They rip open each envelope, toss it, pull the disc from its sleeve, check that the title matches the sleeve, inspect the disc for cracks or scratches, inspect the sleeve for stains or marks, clean the disc with a quick circular motion on a towel pulled tight across a square block of wood, insert the disc into its sleeve, and file the disc in one of two bins. The bin to the right is for acceptable discs, the bin to the left is for damaged discs or discs not in the proper sleeve.

To a casual observer, this all seems to happen in a single motion, a flurry of fingers.

The image of a Netflix worker, inspecting thousands of individual DVDs for scratches and cracks, dispels the utoptian notion of cyberspace, where all of our disembodied minds are floating around the net. In typical Web 2.0 rhetoric, our second lives leave our first lives behind; the truth is, though, even our second lives have to run somewhere.

There is a there there. Just no escaping it.

XML Insecurities

The thing about computer security is, the more you learn, the more you realize the Internet is essentially patched together with duct tape and butcher’s twine:

Security researchers today unveiled details about a little-known but ubiquitous class of vulnerabilities that may reside in a range of Internet components, from Web applications to mobile and cloud computing platforms to documents, images and instant messaging products.

…Researchers at Codenomicon Ltd., a security testing company out of Oulu, Finland, say they found multiple critical flaws in XML “libraries,” chunks of code that are typically used and re-used in software applications to process XML data.

…XML is used in a variety of document formats (docx, openoffice, playlists, configuration files and RSS feeds, to name a few). As a result, there are numerous vectors for attacking XML flaws remotely, such as sending malicious documents or network requests, said Jussi Eronen, an information security adviser for CERT-FI, the Finnish Computer Emergency Response Team.

Um, yay?

Kurzweil BS’s Facebook

In an otherwise worthwhile interview with Ray Kurzweil, there is this:

Is Facebook helping people live longer?

Facebook is enabling us to share knowledge and achieve the wisdom of crowds. By being able to harness the wisdom of 250 million people, now on Facebook, we can ferret out the truth of what’s going in the world very quickly. We can see this in recent political events. From a practical perspective, it enables somebody with a new idea or new insight to share that, for it to spread virally through these kinds of knowledge-sharing sites.

It really does foster freedom and democracy, and not just on the political level but even things like health and medicine. Patients are going to their doctor’s office, armed with the latest knowledge. By being part of the community of people who have their condition, they’ll be more knowledgeable than the doctor. [This] changes the nature of the relationship.

Kurweil is a futurist, and no dummy. I think he was simply being courteous here — Facebook might be many things, but it ain’t helping people live longer.

That aside, I simply cannot wait for Kurzweil’s version of the future to happen:

There are early prototypes of where I think computing is going. To make devices smaller and smaller, they are more and more convenient, but we actually don’t want to look at a tiny screen. We’d like to actually have full immersion screens that we sort of live in. We are going to put these devices in our eyeglasses. We can just create a virtual screen that’s large and hovering in air that’s high resolution. Electronics will be just woven in your clothes or your belt buckle. The display will be augmented reality, and we’ll be online all the time.

Cool. Just like Manfred Macx.

Why Google Chrome OS?

Google moves in on yet another market:

… Google has upped the ante yet again with its plans for a new operating system based on Google Chrome.

The new operating system, aptly named Google Chrome OS, will be an open-source operating system initially geared toward netbooks, Google announced in a blog posting late Tuesday evening.

What’s not all that clear in the news that’s out so far is that this is simply a new Linux distro. So it’s not really all that groundbreaking.

And what’s troubling about this announcement is, given that Google’s business model revolves around data-gathering and data-tracking (to feed their ad business), you can be sure this OS is going to monitor and track everything you do, instead of “just” monitoring what you do on Google.com and Google-related websites.

Simply a guess, but why else would they get into the OS business?

The Future of the Internet and How To Review It

I finished reading Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It” many weeks ago, and have been struggling with just what to say as far as a review. (Several folks on Twitter asked my opinion when I tweeted about it…) On one hand, it’s a terribly important book, as it gets at a critique of the direction technology is quickly moving today. On the other, I think it falls short in two ways; one that might be particular to me, and another, that’s far more important.

A google search for reviews of FOTI yields 150,000 results — apparently, the last thing this world needs is another review of this book! So, for brevity’s sake, here is the 30 second version: Because computer security has become so difficult to manage, there is a trend today pushing computer tech “safer” by making it more proprietary; unfortunately, this also makes computer tech less “generative.” In other words, we’re trading innovation for security. And that’s bad.

There are, overall, two very compelling components of this book. First, Zittrain writes a thorough history of the Internet, weaving the themes of security and innovation throughout. He spends time detailing the pre-web days, a history that is often overlooked. The “Internet,” of course, did not begin with Netscape — online pay services, such as Compuserve and Prodigy, provided the precursors to today’s distributed communities, the first time a critical mass of users were introduced to each other virtually. (Previously, online interaction had primarily been the domain of techies…) Yet these private pre-web domains also provided a model for a locked-down net — unlike today, where anyone can put up a website with relative ease, it was very difficult for users to get their content into these “walled gardens.” Fast-forward to today, and sites like Wikipedia enable user-generated content and, more importantly, a social community with guidelines and standards that have helped it become one of the most popular sites on the Internet.

Zittrain’s history of the net is certainly important for anyone not familiar with this subject matter. The problem, though, is for anyone who has studied this history, or — ahem — may be of a particular age, as — ahem — I am, may have actually lived through this history. For anyone who remembers the sound of a modem dialing up into their college’s bank of access numbers (some readers at this point may be asking, “What’s a modem?”), or remembers the feeling when they first entered a place like LambdaMOO and saw people interacting with people — and bots(!), or surfed the text-only web with Lynx, Zittrain’s version is somewhat, dare I say it…bland.

While this text could certainly serve as, for example, a college course’s text as a means to guide students through the early days of the net, there are much richer, more compelling texts that get at this period of time — Rheingold’s “Virtual Community” and Dibbell’s “My Tiny Life” immediately come to mind.

And while providing a more compelling narrative of the net’s history wasn’t at all Zittrain’s goal, it made the book somewhat, again, dare I say it, boring, only because so much of that history was already known to me. Throughout the first half or so of the text, I just kept wanting to fast-forward, to get something that was new. (It also did not help that I had seen JZ speak twice before reading the book, so I generally knew his argument going in.) So, while this may be particular to me and my personal knowledge of the subject matter, much of FOTI felt like a familiar history review.

The second compelling component of this book is, of course, the thesis itself. Zittrain’s warning is an important one. The trends we see today in computer tech — the popularity of devices such as the iPhone, the success of “cloud computing” and “SaaS,” the Facebook Terms of Service fiasco — all point in the direction of a less innovative, more controlled Internet. His notion of less-generative, “tethered” connections are similar to the central theme of Nicholas Carr’s “Big Switch,” in which Carr compares the Internet to electricity. Just as we get power from a monopoly, and the service is essentially unhackable, one day we may find ourselves using centrally-managed, completely unhackable software and hardware.

Yet, just as I agree with the importance of Zittrain’s message, I find myself less enthusiastic about his solution to this problem. Whether or not you agree his book falls short here may depend on just how optimistic or pessimistic you feel about human nature in general, for the future of the Internet, according to Zittrain, depends on our ability to pull together, to find common cause in an ethical approach to technology:

…we must figure out how to inspire people to act humanely in digital environments that today do not facilitate the appreciative smiles and “thank yous” present in the physical world. This can be accomplished with tools—such those discussed in the previous chapter and those yet to be invented—to foster digital environments that inspire people to act humanely. For the generative Internet fully to come into its own, it must allow us to harness the connections we have with each other, to coordinate when we have the time, talent, and energy, and to benefit from others’ coordination when we do not. Such tools allow us to express and live our civic instincts online, trusting that the expression of our collective character will be one at least as good as that imposed by outside sovereigns—sovereigns who, after all, are only people themselves.

Zittrain points to Wikipedia as a model of this collectively ethical and humane behavior. And while it’s true that the Wikipedians have helped to build a useful system that manages to somehow pull order out of the chaos that is a completely open and editable website, at the same time, Wikipedia is vulnerable to a very fair critique that, rather than being an encyclopedia of human knowledge, it has become a repository of “things that can be verified by CNN and other corporate-owned media.”

The Wikipedia Art project helped raise this critique. For another example, one I found somewhat at random, look at the discussion page for media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz in Wikipedia, whose entry was nominated for deletion on January 2, 2008. It was flagged both because, to the wikipedians, it seemed to be written be the author himself (“vanity” violations), and also failed for a lack of “reliable sources.” Now, the fact that his wikipedia entry stands today is perhaps a testament to how well Wikipedia works. But reading through the discussion page, I get the sense that if different, more adamant wikipedians were involved, Meyrowitz’s page may have been deleted. In any case, the point remains that “reliable sources” really means, “what we can find in a google search” — making Google the determining factor in Wikipedia’s usefulness.

Zittrain’s FOTI, then, left me feeling somewhat divided at the end. His message is a significant achievement in distilling the dangers of where we’re headed — I don’t think there’s any doubt we’re moving into uncharted territory when it comes to personal data being handed over to this “cloud” of a small number of corporate, profit-driven entities who may or may not protect our data, depending on whether or not it makes financial sense. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that making Apple the gatekeeper of what is “good” software and what is unacceptable (as they do for anything that gets onto the iPhone) is counterproductive.

At the same time, I worry that figuring out how to “inspire people to act humanely in digital environments” is an insufficient solution to this trend. While we can build tools and put our faith in the kinds of communities created on sites like Wikipedia, it may not be enough to stop the juggernaut that is the corporate entity. What’s most worrisome is that people seem to have no inhibitions about turning over their lives to Facebook and Google. That people are willing to submit themselves to becoming marketing fodder for the “free” use of a website. That people don’t know, and don’t seem to be interested in, even the basics of computer security and safety. (You sent me a link? Sure, I’ll click it!) And that these things are done day after day, without self-reflection, without questions.

The future of the Internet is unknown, but if it depends on people becoming more conscientious users of technology, I have my doubts.

Tweeting The Revolution Is Not Without Risks

The biggest story about Iran, besides the protestors themselves, is the protesters’ use of social networking sites, especially Twitter, to help perpetuate the images and stories of what is happening on the ground.

But these same sites that can fuel a revolution can also be misused, as noted here in a recent SANS ISC diary:

From an information security perspective, the threat is leading people to malicious websites. Set up a blog with an archive of posts on the issue, “borrow” a few pictures of the conflict and post them. Tweet a message that says “live images of protestors being shot at” and point to your blog that also includes pre-tested malware that is known to be not detected by AV vendors. Twitter and social networking tools provide another mechanism to lead people to the cyber-threat where only e-mail was used before. Twitter has no “anti-spam” features, everyone talking about a subject shows up.

So while the use of twitter and other tools provide for a means to breach censorship rules of foreign regimes, it does not come without risks. Is the information valid? Is it leading you to malware infecting your machine?

Simple precautions should be taken when viewing these sites — at the very least, make sure your AV is up to date, and use Firefox with the NoScript add-on.

We’re only at the early stages of this kind of political “hacktivism,” and as our lives turn increasingly digital, the tools and technologies we use are simultaneously connecting us to others as well as putting us at risk.