From no Gmail and Orkut two days ago to being in both.. Why ? I don't know. I am still futzing around Orkut (never been in one of this type of community sites before). Many many thanks to Adrian for his Gmail invite. You rock and I owe you :) I didn't need it in the end, the friend I mentioned earlier sent his invite as he saw my mail.
I see some familiar places in Orkut (perlmonks is represented, hahaha and I recognize some of the faces there).. "I hate Java" is amusing. Looks like there is plenty to watch here..A bit surprised at the amount of information that Orkut wants to know on registration, but I guess that's quite normal.
A drastic step forward for me though.. this Orkut business. I've tried reasonably hard to keep my online persona completely separate from my real name, work and so on. It seems a bit awkward now to let that veil of secrecy go..
PS: omg, chaoticset, you look nothing like how I imagined you. I was gaping when I saw your profile pic in a posting.
Was it the parallel-universe facial hair that creeped you out, or the generally unruly hair?
Re:Insult To Inquiry
tinman on 2004-06-22T08:33:59
Well, I wasn't creeped out at all! I am so sorry that it sounded like an insult, it wasn't intended that way at all. It's just that I had this mental picture of a person (for some weird reason, even I can't explain why, exactly) with a narrower face and longer hair... That's all. Yes, the existence of facial hair did add to the surprise a bit
:) This sounds very very weird till I tell you that when I saw Matt (Sergeant) and Davorg's pics (before Orkut, though), I wasn't surprised at all.. It's just one of my idiosyncracies to imagine the face behind the psedonym, and not even the face but umm, general characteristics of the face
:) Re:Insult To Inquiry
chaoticset on 2004-06-22T12:51:52
None taken -- just curious what kind of impression I had provided. I understand that I look like an escaped convict and all.I am so sorry that it sounded like an insult, it wasn't intended that way at all.:)
Re:Orkut and Privacy
tinman on 2004-06-22T08:53:25
Hmm, ok. Thanks for confirming this for me. I didn't see how they could reasonably validate most of it.. and I left out answering some questions.
Of course, the part about the name was easily guessable after I saw chromatic there
:) If you want a paranoia theory about all of this, look no further than here. (Yes,yes, this is like saying GMail is creepy.. but being in datawarehousing myself, I know how unobvious some patterns are till you run them against a large dataset) I saw posts saying that Orkut doesn't encourage scraping and someone (Corion of Perlmonks, maybe) said it might be possible to just do the old "write a proxy in perl" thing.
Re:Orkut and Privacy
pjf on 2004-06-23T00:00:27
I saw posts saying that Orkut doesn't encourage scraping and someone (Corion of Perlmonks, maybe) said it might be possible to just do the old "write a proxy in perl" thing.I would upgrade from 'might be possible' to 'gloriously possible'. The pages in Orkut are well-structured, and users are uniquely and consistantly identified by a numeric user-id.
Writing a proxy for any sort of connection is easy, however when working with Perl and HTTP connections it's very easy, due to the existence of the fine HTTP::Proxy module. HTTP::Proxy also allows you to add custom filters.
The big advantage of using a proxy is that it harvests the information you're after as part of your regular web-browsing, and if done correctly such harvesting should be completely transparent to the end-system.
However, doing so probably breaks the orkut terms of service, which forbid using any device to 'retrieve or index any portion of the orkut.com service'. Of course, it's impossible to actually use orkut without breaking the terms of service. My computer, web-browser, and upstream proxy are all devices that are being used to retrieve and index portions of the orkut.com service.
