gregmarra

Sounds better than fat full

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:51:31 -0500

Sounds better than fat full

Name things

Mon, 16 May 2011 03:38:04 -0400

It makes them real

"Famous"

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:38:39 -0400

Last weekend, while visiting San Diego, I passed a place called Jimmy’s Famous American Tavern. From this, I can only infer the following:

Jimmy started a restaurant called Jimmy’s American Tavern
Many people came to it, and started talking about it
When people came to the Jimmy’s they were unsure if it was the Jimmy’s they had heard about
In order to stem confusion, Jimmy renamed his establishment in order to reflect its newfound fame
Everything was much clearer

Otherwise, how else would Jimmy know it was going to become famous?

Gepetto's Army

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:34:40 -0400

Yesterday, I talked about Social Robots at SXSW. It was great sharing this new topic with the audience, and I was flattered by the feedback on the #twitterbots hashtag.

Unfortunately, the talk wasn’t recorded, but I’ve put the slides online. You don’t get the narration, but you can check them out! Hopefully you’ll find them thought provoking.

Gepetto’s Army: Creating International Incidents with Twitter Bots

Social Robots, SXSW, and the future

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 03:06:00 -0500

Almost two and a half years ago, before Ashton and CNN, I embarked on a challenge to see if Social Robots could infiltrate online communities. Zack Coburn and I launched a small armada of fully autonomous Twitter bots against clusters of users who already knew each other. A project in Mark Chang’s course at Olin College, we called it Project Realboy after Gepetto’s puppet Pinocchio. Each bot, acting completely without human intervention, tried to sneak in to a group by camouflaging itself with forged tweets.

The project was overwhelming successful at creating emotional connections between the target users and bots. One bot, @trackgirl, was deployed against a group of running enthusiasts. Every day, completely on “her” own, trackgirl tweeted about her marathon training. The runners she followed followed her back, and she wove her way into the community. One day trackgirl tweeted that she had fallen and hurt her knee. Her followers immediately replied with concern, asking if she was ok.

Luckily, trackgirl was a Python script running on a server we got from eBay, impervious to scraped knees. However, the lessons that Realboys like trackgirl and our dozens of other bots teach us have a worrying theme: social media can be manipulated at scale by a few puppetmasters.

Twitter has proven to be an invaluable tool for communication during breaking news intense periods of political unrest. When thousands of people tweet, the outside world gets a chance to understand events on the ground. But what if none of those thousands of people were real, and the events never happened? A malicious puppetmaster could create hundreds of Twitter bots, letting them live perfectly normal and believable lives for months while they build up followers. Then one day, a careful crafted false story unfolds on the stage of social media, played out by a single director with hundreds of actors. Incidents like the attack on Congresswoman Giffords demonstrate that powerful stories can become widespread before there is time for fact checking. Before anyone realizes all the TwitPics are faked, the false news will have made international headlines.

Social Robots challenge our preconceived notions of what social media can be used for. They present a dangerous threat to the news industry, but also a powerful opportunity to help people. If you’re going to be at SXSW, come learn more about how Social Robots work, what they’re capable of, and where they might go next.

Gepetto’s Army: Creating International Incidents with Twitter
Monday, March 14 at 9:30AM
Sheraton, Creekside Room
701 East 11th St

Captive Audience

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 02:59:32 -0500

I send a disproportionate amount of personal emails from planes. There is nothing else to distract me, so I jot dozens of notes to friends.

Glass

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 07:42:32 -0400

We are a few years from having a generation of teens who are faster keyboardists on multitouch glass than physical keyboards.

Social Music

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:15:13 -0400

Results:

Rodrigo y Gabriela
Two Door Cinema Club
“fun.”
Seal
Ryan Montbleau
Bootie Top 10
Uffie
Colin Hay
The Script

Instapaper Android Bookmarklet

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:59:33 -0400

Instapaper Android Bookmarklet:

I made this page that lets you add an Instapaper Bookmarklet to Android. Using some code gabrielsroka posted in the Android bug on bookmarklets, it outputs a http://javascript(eval()) “link” that Android is ok with you bookmarking.

If I were more on top of my game, I’d make my page easier to use and not require you to edit the URL by hand. Maybe Rev2 if anyone asks for it.

Awkies.

Wanted: Penpals

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:00:00 -0400

All of my personal correspondance since summer 2004

Since the summer is here, I am reinitiating the Greg Marra Summer Penpal Program. If you would like to apply to be a participant of GMSPP 2010, please mail a handwritten letter that enumerates your qualifications and explains why you should be admitted to the program.

There is no limit to the number of participants that can be accepted into GMSPP 2010, but priority will be given to applications received earlier. All applicants will receive a handwritten response from GMSPP informing them of Application Committee’s decision.

My address is on my Facebook profile, and will work until mid-July. Please note that GMSPP is unable to return any documents or video tapes sent in your applications.

Location: Hartford area
it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

iPod Touch Offline Mail Protip

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:40:07 -0400

If you don’t have Internet access and the iOS Mail app hasn’t downloaded the full text of a message, you can go into Settings and change the number of lines in the preview to 5. Mail will show you more of the email that it has already cached, perhaps letting you glean the important information. -Greg

We’ve come a long way

Sat, 29 May 2010 22:18:44 -0400

We’ve come a long way

Ash Cloud Shuts Airports in Parts of Europe

Mon, 17 May 2010 08:00:58 -0400

Ash Cloud Shuts Airports in Parts of Europe:

I do hope the ash has settled down by two weeks from now.

Pangaea - A Real Life Weasley Clock

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:19:24 -0400

This is a demo of the Olin College Marauder’s Map Weasley Clock project I have been working on. A servo indicates where on campus I am based on my last check in on the Olin College Marauder’s Map, an opt-in wifi localization system. It’s all powered by an Arduino with an ArduinoEthernetBoard which talks to a web app to tell it where to point.

The project is codenamed “Pangaea”, and will ultimately integrate into my Google Latitude location to tell if I am at work, at home, or in mortal peril.

For more about Pangaea, visit: inpangaea.appspot.com
For more about Olin’s Marauder’s Map, visit: olinprojects.com/the-marauders-map/

Wifi Commentary. University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:55:30 -0400

Wifi Commentary. University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

Photo

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:30:31 -0400

Up up and away!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:19:54 -0500

Up up and away!

Python libgmail wrong username/password

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:29:53 -0500

I have a script that I wrote in 2008 that uses the libgmail Python library to programmatically download attachments from a gmail account based on the label applied to the message. The script has worked great for the last two years, but did not work when I fired it up this year.

Google has changed the way the GMail login flow works. When I attempted to run the script, I got this message:

libgmail.GmailLoginFailure: ‘Login failed. (Wrong username/password?)’

It appears that libgmail is no longer actively supported. However, a fellow named Anton Solovyev wrote a patch to libgmail that fixes its login flow to work with current gmail (as of February 2010, anyway). That patch is available here:

http://home.comcast.net/~anton.solovyev//hacks/#libgmail

Works like a charm.

CakePHP in a Subdirectory

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 11:47:00 -0500

If you’re installing CakePHP into a subdirectory, you need to set up mod_rewrite to have RewriteBase set correctly to each directory.

For many hosting services (GoDaddy, 1and1), your web server is actually being served from a user directory that already uses mod_rewrite. If you are installing CakePHP into a user directory (http://example.com/~username/cakephp/), or any other URL structure that already utilizes mod_rewrite, you’ll need to add RewriteBase statements to the .htaccess files CakePHP uses (/.htaccess, /app/.htaccess, /app/webroot/.htaccess).

Also, double check you didn’t lose any .htaccess files, especially /.htaccess More info here: http://book.cakephp.org/view/37/Apache-and-mod_rewrite-and-htaccess

CakePHP with xampp on Mac OS

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:39:12 -0500

If you are getting an unstyled no css default page with CakePHP using xampp on Mac OS, you need to modify your apache config to contain an alias pointing to Cake’s webroot directory. This blog post details what to do: http://practicaltechniques.com/2008/04/28/setting-up-cakephp-with-xampp/ In short:

Scroll down to the area where you see the Alias established for phpmyadmin and paste the following replacing ‘yourdomain’ with the root location of your CakePHP install…

Alias /yourdomain (nolinebreak) /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/htdocs/yourdomain/app/webroot

AllowOverride All
Options All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all