This how-to uses the command line. It's really not that hard, just type exactly what I tell you to.

First, create a new user:

sudo adduser --disabled-password anonymous

© 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.

While this how-to is simple, it does use the command line. I happen to believe the command line is not so scary as the GUI marketing people would have you think, even to new users. It's much easier to say "type this" and have a user understand than it is to try to describe the GUI actions.

First, install my subdirs script. This script finds a list of directories containing some other directory, and prints out the path to the subdirectory (if you don't get that, never mind, you just need to know that you need in installed for this how-to).

sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/subdirs http://github.com/singpolyma/singpolyma/raw/master/scripts/subdirs
sudo chmod +X /usr/local/bin/subdirs

Then, install the webfs HTTP server.

sudo apt-get install webfs

Edit the config file a bit:

sudo ${EDITOR=gedit} /etc/webfsd.conf

Change the line starting with web_root= to say:

web_root=/var/www

And the line starting with web_port= to say:

web_port=80

Then restart the server by running:

sudo /etc/init.d/webfs restart

Finally, to symlink the shares, run:

subdirs /home Public | while read DIR; do ln -s "$DIR" /var/www/$(basename "`dirname "$DIR"`"); done

You're done!

The last command will have to be re-run every time you add a new user. Or you could add it as the second-last line in your /etc/rc.local file to make it run every time you boot.

Now people can just visit your computer in their webbrowser (if they're on your local network… to get access from the Internet you have to configure your router, but you probably don't want that anyway). The address of any Ubuntu computer in a webbrowser (on a computer than supports mDNS, such as other Ubuntu systems or Apple systems) is just hostname.local. For example, my computer is singpolyma-mini.local. For Windows users, they'll have to type in your IP address (unless they install Bonjour for Windows).

You can find your IP address by running:

ifconfig | grep 'inet addr' | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{ print $2 }'

© 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.

Back when I was working a lot on their Google Reader Greasemonkey overlay, one of the features requested was "sort by PostRank", which never made a lot of sense to me. Sort what by PostRank?

Buckets.

I want to read basically everything that comes through my feedreader, or at least see the headlines, but I may not care about it all at this moment. I don't want an interestingness sort or filter, I want a bucketizer. I want to be able to say "I'll read the best stuff right now when I've got a few seconds, and the rest later."

I may never read the rest, which then amounts to filtering, but I may, and that's different.

The best way to implement something like this would be to allow for "filtering" by PostRank ranges instead of having a max cutoff. That way I could have a 7+ feed, a 3-7 feed, and a 3- feed, for each feed. I'd then make (in my reader) a "Best" folder, a "Good" folder, and a "Bottomfeeder" folder. I'd process the content in "Best" a few times a day, "Good" at least once a week, "Bottomfeeder" whenever I had extra time to read stuff.

I actually really like this idea. A lot.

© 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.

The next step, however, is really coherent UI. I've been talking about it off and on as my "ultimate aggregator", Marc Canter is calling it "dashboards".

One of the things he talks about in the presentation is "distributed friending". This is something I've brought up before. IMHO, the best way to go about this is to have magical buttons that, when clicked, take the user to their "dashboard" with the target's URI (or one of them, anyway) already filled in. At that point, you have an asynchronous friending model. The local software can then do different things (like permissions, autofilling searches, pulling in content, just making the list available to other services than then do these things, whatever) based on this data, but no magical "protocol" or anything is needed, because with an asynchronous model all you're really doing is making a note of the relationship in a data model and letting the software use that list for whatever.

Past integrating the posting/following/aggregation UI a bit more, I'm not really sure there's anything left, conceptually. I'd like to dig up some code and make OAuth+AtomPub work for sure with the newest version (so that any aggregator can talk to my WP blog ), and code can always be improved, but really, what is a social network? It's an aggregator of sorts, a posting mechanism of sorts, and email. We've had the later two for ages, which is why so much work has been dancing around the first one.

© 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.

Wars of prohibition are nothing new in America. This one is just something more extreme than anything we've seen before. We experimented with alcohol prohibition, at a time when the per capita consumption of alcohol was 1.5 gallons per capita per year. The war against drinking initially reduced that consumption to just 30 percent of its preprohibition levels, but by the end of prohibition, consumption was up to 70 percent of the preprohibition level. Americans were drinking just about as much, but now, a vast number were criminals. We have launched a war on drugs aimed at reducing the consumption of regulated narcotics that 7 percent (or 16 million) Americans now use. That is a drop from the high (so to speak) in 1979 of 14 percent of the population. We regulate automobiles to the point where the vast majority of Americans violate the law every day. We run such a complex tax system that a majority of cash businesses regularly cheat. We pride ourselves on our "free society," but an endless array of ordinary behavior is regulated within our society. And as a result, a huge proportion of Americans regularly violate at least some law.

This state of affairs is not without consequence. It is a particularly salient issue for teachers like me, whose job it is to teach law students about the importance of "ethics." As my colleague Charlie Nesson told a class at Stanford, each year law schools admit thousands of students who have illegally downloaded music, illegally consumed alcohol and sometimes drugs, illegally worked without paying taxes, illegally driven cars. These are kids for whom behaving illegally is increasingly the norm. And then we, as law professors, are supposed to teach them how to behave ethically–how to say no to bribes, or keep client funds separate, or honor a demand to disclose a document that will mean that your case is over. Generations of Americans–more significantly in some parts of America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today–can't live their lives both normally and legally, since "normally" entails a certain degree of illegality.

The response to this general illegality is either to enforce the law more severely or to change the law. We, as a society, have to learn how to make that choice more rationally. Whether a law makes sense depends, in part, at least, upon whether the costs of the law, both intended and collateral, outweigh the benefits. If the costs, intended and collateral, do outweigh the benefits, then the law ought to be changed. Alternatively, if the costs of the existing system are much greater than the costs of an alternative, then we have a good reason to consider the alternative.

© 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.