It seems that many, if not most, Facebook users do not like the changes made to the system, namely, the addition of the “News Feed” and “Mini News Feed” that quickly allow one to see all the updates that another Facebook user has done. In effect, these new additions make it easy to “track” what another user has been up to, since the events are tagged with a timestamp and provide all the details.

Since the changes were put into effect, scarcely a day ago, a bevy of groups voicing their opposition to the new features have sprung up on Facebook. Many of them are united by the fact that the news feeds crowd their starting page now, and cause information overload – something I criticized as well. However, most of them decry these new features as being huge breaches of privacy and point to how they make stalking much easier.
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Logged into Facebook today (who doesn’t?), and was surprised to see the new interface, added just in time for the new school year and thus just before increased usage of the service will start. Added were two features – firstly, a “News Feed” that displays when you first login, instead of the old notification page that most people just clicked through. Besides displaying the usual notifications (new friend confirmations, upcoming birthdays), which have been relocated to a sidebar, it displays an RSS-style feed of all things that have changed or been updated with your friends.
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After setting up a PC with Ubuntu for my Mom to use, I decided to add a few things to the Windows XP system that’s also occasionally used by Mom and Dad. Since I was aiming to make things easier to use, in order to encourage my Mom to use the computer more, I took a cue from Apple, and started looking for a program that would emulate the Apple “Dock” that’s so often showcased at their stores. I had previously seen Glen using a program like this, so I knew they existed – while I didn’t have a need for it at the time, I’ve begun to think different (excuse the blatant Apple slogan rip off) when it comes to usability – not everyone is like me.

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Yesterday, I decided to setup an old computer for my Mom to use, who, like 80% of Canadians, only really used the Internet for browsing and e-mail. The PC previously had Win98SE installed on it, but that just wasn’t going to fly, so I decided to give Ubuntu a try, and see what all the hype was about, and get some experience with an OS other than Windows. Ubuntu seemed to also be the perfect fit for what my Mom would want – basically just web-browsing and e-mail, and Ubuntu would easily be able to deliver that in a secure environment.

However, I ran into some difficulties during installation that turned out to be result of some faulty hardware, which eventually turned out to be likely a problem with the motherboard – and ended up costing me an afternoon of headaches.
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For most of us who are accustomed to using computers and their interfaces, the use of the mouse (or other pointing device; for the sake of brevity I’ll call them all “mice” for this entry) is nothing short of second nature. Indeed, for many actions required in a modern user interface (UI), a mouse is required, or at the very least, it makes performing the task much quicker. For the most part, the mouse is quite intuitive to learn and use; move it in a direction, and the on-screen pointer moves similarly. The concept of the single-click vs. the double click may also seem simple as well, but for newcomers, things can often be confusing; this gets even more complicated when websites change how the double-click functions on their site, and can even confuse experienced users.
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Having been home for a few days, I can say that I love my parents’ new place – I haven’t even been home for that long, but I’m already dreading going back to school! 😉

I’m liking the new house a lot, as there’s a lot more room and the layout is just less cramped – though maybe that’s just because I’ve been living in Kingston student housing for the entire summer. 😉 Location is pretty good as well, as most of the services are close enough for a bearable bus ride or just a bike ride. Continued

I’ve been using Akismet to control comment spam and so far, it’s performance has been excellent – out of close to 300 comments, it didn’t report a single false positive and only let through one or two cleverly-crafted comments. However, for some reason, in the past day it’s started letting through comments that are clearly spam, and I’ve had to manually label them as such and then delete them.

I wonder if this is related to the recent update to the system (as it’s a centralized service), or something else. The update seemed to be only related to improving the statistics tracking of the service, and not something related to the spam-detection algorithm. I’ve tried disabling/enabling the plugin, so we’ll see if that helps – has anyone else been having these problems?

After some travelling, I finally got back home to Edmonton, my parents’ new location. Travelling was a bit of a pain, as I had to catch the 2 AM bus from Kingston to Pearson Intl. Airport, to arrive at around 5:30 AM to catch my 7:15 AM flight to Edmonton. I didn’t get much sleep that day (got up around 7:30 AM), and only got about four hrs of sleep – two on the bus, and two on the plane.

But, I witnessed a sunrise for the first time in years while waiting in the airport terminal! I wish I could’ve taken a picture, but didn’t want to look suspicious or anything in these post-9/11 times… (I was really just too tired to care at the time) Continued

I’m almost done work for this summer, where I worked at Queen’s University for the Electrical Engineering Department under an NSERC grant. The professor I worked for, Dr. Geoffrey Chan, was a great prof. to work under, and so were the people in the lab. I learned a lot, mainly in how to implement signal processing concepts in Matlab, and it was nice to see stuff I’d learnt in class actually getting put to use.

My research area was mainly in Speech Quality Assessment, which deals with the design of an algorithm that can determine how a human would interpret the quality of a speech signal file that has been degraded somehow. Look for an upcoming entry describing this more in detail. Continued

Hot on the heels of their API release, Facebook has just added “Notes” to their service. It’s a basic blogging/journal entry platform, allowing users to write entries about anything they wish. (Most entries will probably boil down to the mundane) It seems like Facebook is responding to users’ suggestions, and adding the features they want in an effort to better keep them happily on the service, rather than forcing users to rely on another service’s blogging tools to share their thoughts.
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