Friday, MLP

[desh]

The return of Bevis and Butthead?

The discussion in Piranha's journal is my favorite one so far about the implications of the 6A/LJ sale.

Also, what the hell. I haven't done Friday Five in a really long time, so why not now? fridayfive.org seems to be down for good, so might as well use the new one instead.

1. What is the first book you remember reading? First? Wow, that's really tough. I'm not sure. Though a handful of my earliest book memories are Shel Silverstein related.

2. What is your favorite book? Non-fiction: Hyperspace. (2nd place: GEB.) Fiction: Snow Crash. (2nd place: The Mezzanine, though some would argue about whether it's fiction. If you don't count that, then The Hound of the Baskervilles, maybe?)

3. Who is your favorite author? I said Neal Stephenson for awhile, until I realized that I don't like a lot of his stuff. And I couldn't even get through Cryptonomicon. So now I guess I have to say Nicholson Baker, though I haven't tried more than a couple of his books either.

4. Pick up the nearest book (magazine or any available printed material will do). Turn to page 24 (or the closest to it). Go to the 7th line. What is it? "may be either NULL or NOT NULL. In this instance you can determine if a null is"

5. If you could be any character in literature, who would you be? I'm never good with these. I like being me! But how about someone from Flatland? (A circle, of course.)

Comments

Hey, do you remember

[bumonyou.livejournal.com]

that time that seth and uri and mike (?) and I made you watch beavis and butthead do america in the theatres? that was terrible of us. What would the equivalent of that be now that we are nearly in our mid-twenties?

Re: Hey, do you remember

[desh]

Yeah! You suck. That was the first time I ever went over your house, too. Amazing that I ever went back. Maybe it was because your sister was cool, even if you weren't?

Equivalent? None, because I now drive myself everywhere, so I can't be forced to stay anywhere against my will. Perhaps taking me to a crappy party and then slashing my tires?

Re: Hey, do you remember

[bumonyou.livejournal.com]

cool=attractive, and dont think I dont know that that's what you were thinking either. I've got your number down buddy!

and hah! I might have to do that? no, I dont think I would. You still have the little honda that could?

Re: Hey, do you remember

[desh]

Yeah, still have the little Honda that could. 6 and a half years now. That's longer than (almost) all the relationships that all of my friends have ever had. I've decided I have to throw quite the going-away party when the sad time inevitably comes...

[conana.livejournal.com]

I was going to respond to the 'distributed' part of the lj/6a thread. But I'm lazy, so the short version goes here. The fact that it should be distributed has always been my biggest issue with lj. On reflection, I am not convinced that anything that I care about on lj could not be accomplished by the combination of usenet, gpg, and foaf. It would probably be easier than writing decent search tools or user agent for lj, also.

[desh]

There's been a lot of talk about distributed comment authentication over all (participating) LiveJournal-code sites, and perhaps beyond. It's non-trivial to implement, though, and in LJ land, that means it takes years. (They've always been good at giving lip service to development volunteers, but over the past 2-3 years, they don't actually review or take many user-submitted patches and enhancements. The bugzilla system is definitely used, but definitely underutilized. So 90+% of dev comes from in-house, which slows them down a bit.)

But now that Brad doesn't have to manage LiveJournal full time; and now that LJ is affiliated with 6A, who does cross-site authentication about as well as anyone these days (which isn't saying much); I bet it will happen within the next year.

You should watch [Bad username or site: lj_dev / @ livejournal.com]. And there's other neat stuff already out there, such as end-user clients and [Bad username or site: lj_nifty / @ livejournal.com]. You should look around some.

[conana.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've been not-reading lj_dev, but I just put it back on my list. It's not making me like lj more, though. I just read the thread on screen-scraping, and the monopoly-on-interface policy really sucks. I understand the desire to discourage bulk archiving of other people's journal's, but this is a form of the ban-the-tech|ban-the-behavior problem that is so familiar from RIAA/MPAA/DRM discussions. I'm pretty sure that decent end-user clients are thus officially prohibited, and I was really hoping that a client was going to come along to make comment-tracking feasable, now that I read too many journals.

[desh]

Not quite sure what you mean by monopoly-on-interface, but LJ is usually really good at providing machine-readable data. See http://www.livejournal.com/bots/ and http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.protocol.html. Screenscraping really is a huge resource hog, so they provide that stuff instead, and they're usually very good at adding new protocols and machine-readable data if you can demonstrate a need. There are lots of cool end-user clients. See http://www.livejournal.com/download/ for full-featured stuff and read back in [Bad username or site: lj_nifty / @ livejournal.com] for the random things. (Journal archivers, for example.)

As for comment tracking, you can turn on comment notification e-mails. (Sent for comments to your journal, to your posts in communities, and in reply to your comments elsewhere.) Also see http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml, though that only tracks comments you make and that are made in your journal.