Remembering the RSS Wars
I was clearing out old saved web pages when I found an amusing weblog post from the syndication wars. Here's Robert Sayre back in 2006:
I just left a response on Mihai Parparita's blog, hitting back at Mark Pilgrim, after he decided say that I am full of ---- about everything. Well, that's not very nice, but I've certainly said and written some not-very-nice things myself. It's refreshing to hear it out in the open, instead of backchannel conversations.
I'm so tired of all this crap, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Where do the problems come from? Are the people involved intrinsically bad? I don't think so, at least I hope I'm not intrinsically bad, and I don't think anyone else is either. In fact, most of the usual suspects are really productive people. Dare Obasanjo, Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Dave Winer, Tim Bray, Joe Gregorio, Rogers Cadenhead, etc, etc. These are all people that tend to, in other areas, get ---- done without much controversy, but can turn into the most obstinate jerks on a syndication mailling list. You wouldn't believe the ---- people say behind each other's back, either. It's much worse than what you encounter on the unpleasant mailing lists.
Why is it that they are drawn to this cesspool we're calling a conversation? I think it's a combination of two things: one is that the subject is mostly semantics. This allows for lots of conversation, and not much technical testing. In most open source projects, there are usually some reasonable metrics to test a proposed solution. The second problem is that software companies are guilty of first-order abuse of the term "community." There is no community.
Hacking on Wordpress last Thursday, I was surprised at how much fun I was having. I haven't had fun working on anything remotely related to syndication in a long time, other than working on Mozilla. You know, that's what I'm going to do from now on. Have fun.
When I rediscovered this post, I was excited to make Sayre's list of jerks, since I didn't figure I would rate a mention back then. All my efforts were not in vain.
Sayre went on to work for Mozilla and is still there today, so I guess it really was more fun than fighting over RSS like the Sharks and Jets. I think that after 10 years, the continuously burning RSS flamewar has finally burned itself out. These days, if you want to design a web format with people who are full of ---- about everything and could possibly be intrinsically bad, the place to be is HTML 5.
Auto-Tune the News: The Early Years
Eight years ago, Evan Gregory of the Gregory Brothers, the mad geniuses behind the Auto-Tune the News YouTube videos, gave the commencement speech at Swarthmore College for the class of 2001.
The speech, which ended up on NPR, is partially delivered in pirate.
Fixing 'Bad Request' Errors When Viewing YouTube Videos
I've been encountering a problem with YouTube lately in Mozilla Firefox that makes the site inaccessible and displays white space instead of embedded YouTube videos. When I visited the home page, Firefox reported the following "Bad Request" error: "Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Size of a request header field exceeds server limit." The error was triggered by the cookie header VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE.
I thought this was YouTube's problem, but when I investigated, I found out that the problem can occur when Firefox's cookies database has become corrupted.
To fix the problem, I opened the folder that contains my Firefox user data, closed the browser and deleted the file cookies.sqlite. When I restarted Firefox, it created a new database to hold them.
The cookies database usually can be found on Windows XP in the folder C:\Documents and Settings
Deleting the file cookies.sqlite wipes out your browser cookies and stored auto-login passwords.
Thailand Temple Lets Tourists Pet Tigers
Anna Wencl, a blogger visiting Thailand, writes about going to the Tiger Temple, a tourist attraction in Kanchanaburi that lets visitors get their picture taken with tigers:
We'd heard good things about it ... but those must have been dated. The temple was supposedly run by monks who took care of tigers, but now the tigers are taken care of by younger employees who seem think it's okay to kick them and drag them by their tails to get them to do what they like. Many people have speculated that the tigers are drugged ... and I have to say, they may be right on this one. They ran us around to 5 or 6 tigers to take pictures with them and although they pawed or rolled over a few time, they didn't really do much.
The writing's unclear on what taking pictures "with them" means, but a photo shows Wencl posing beside a tiger that's secured only by a chain around its neck.
I recently chaperoned a field trip to the St. Augustine Wild Preserve, a private refuge that had around a dozen full-grown tigers. They were secured in cages that included a smaller cage so a handler could enter safely to feed them. Every cage had two external locks.
During feeding time the reason for the security was evident. One tiger, agitated by the presence of a male handler near the food, rose up on his hind legs and rattled the links of the cage. The tigers needed to show males who's the boss when they had food to protect, while female handlers didn't elicit the same reaction. The speed, strength and size of these animals is impressive. Although I'm a liberal, I must acknowledge that the only thing keeping us atop the food chain is our right to keep and bear arms.
I don't know a lot about tigers, but the 40 middle school students I shepherded through the facility left with as many limbs as they brought on the trip.
The Tiger Temple's web site denies that the animals have been sedated, claiming that they "have been hand-reared with compassion by the monks and have had interaction since they were young cubs. So they have imprinted on humans and have accepted us part of their lives."
If you're being allowed as close to tigers as Wencl is in that photo, I don't see how that's possible unless the animals have been heavily and inhumanely drugged. It seems extremely reckless to allow tourists to interact with them like that. There are more than 7,000 photos on Flickr taken at the temple, many showing people interacting with the animals like it was a petting zoo.
A report by the animal welfare charity Care for the Wild International accuses the temple of illegal tiger trafficking, systematic physical abuse of the tigers and "high-risk interactions" between tigers and tourists.
The tigers are led on a short leash from their cages to the Canyon by Temple staff. There, they are chained on fixed 3m - 5m chains, and heavy concrete bowls are against or set close to the tiger's body to oblige the animal to adopt a good pose for the tourists and maintain it. Tigers are dragged into position by their tail and even punched or beaten to adopt particular postures that appeal to the tourists.
Temple staff stay close to the animals at all times to maintain control by use of tiger urine squirted from a bottle into the animal's face. In the wild, tigers use urine as a territorial or aggressive signal: sprayed at close quarters it would represent an extremely aggressive gesture from a dominant animal.
A photo published by the group shows a small child sitting on the stomach of a full-grown tiger.
Credit: The picture of Anna Wencl at Tiger Temple is made available under a Creative Commons license.
Teach Myself Novel Writing in 125 Days
After one month, I've written 27,000 words of my novel. I have another nine chapters to write, though the story keeps growing longer than the outline I mapped out. My current pace of 794 words a day would reach 100,000 in 125 days.
If I were to end the book abruptly -- "and then the meteor struck and they all lived happily ever after in the tragically few hours left to them." -- I would have completed a novella, which by convention ranges in length from 17,500 to 40,000 words. So at a minimum, I can now call myself a novellaist.
If I had stopped the book between 7,500 and 17,500 words, I would have written a novelette and could thus be described as a novelettist. This title is far cooler because it sounds like librettist, a person who writes librettos.
When I started I was obsessed with word count, because I wasn't sure I could carry a story over enough words to constitute an entire novel. My impression from limited research is that a thriller should be at least 60,000 words and no more than 100,000 if you're a first-time author.
As time passes, I'm focusing less on the word count and just trying to tell the story I plotted out in full.
Writing a novel for the first time has been entertaining, though it's already making me a weirder person. Two weeks ago, I went out to eat with some relatives right after finishing a particularly distraught scene in the book involving two of the main characters. I was poor company during the meal because I'd become distraught as well. I was so attached to the characters that I didn't want anything bad to happen to them.
I got over that pretty fast. Now I'm as merciless with my fictitious creations as a kid with anger issues playing The Sims.
Anderson Cooper: 'I Don't Know Anything About Sports'
As the media grappled with Sarah Palin's explanation that she quit the Alaska governor's office because she's not a quitter, CNN host Anderson Cooper had a hilarious exchange with Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton. Stapleton tried to use Palin's analogy that in basketball, a good point guard passes the ball and runs off the court in the middle of the game, never to return. The analogy was completely lost on Cooper, for reasons he makes apparent:
Anderson Cooper: You say this is leadership, but how is leading not leading? You're saying she's leading by not leading. She's quitting her job as a leader to do, what, I don't know -- speeches, television show, whatever she chooses to do -- but I mean you can't really call that political leadership.
Meg Stapleton: Sure. Do you say then that a point guard charging down a basketball court is not leading when he passes the ball or she passes the ball?
Cooper: Honestly, I know nothing about basketball. All I know about is politics. Stapleton: Well, let me tell you. When someone is driving down a basketball court -- which is her analogy and I think it speaks well to where she is, and that is I can't affect change right now because of the political climate there -- I'm going to pass the ball. I'm going around it and we still all have the same common hoop, but I'm going around the block and I'm passing the ball at this time because its best for Alaska. Cooper: I'm sorry. I don't know who the hoop is. I don't know who the ball is. I'm confused by the analogy, but I'll let it go, because I don't know anything about sports.
The video's worth watching just to see Cooper's facial expressions around the 4:40 mark as he's exposed to basketball. In fairness to Cooper, he lives in New York City, which doesn't have a professional basketball team, so it would be hard for him to follow the sport.
Watching the Watchers Makes Use of Creative Commons
I've completed the second phase of the Watching the Watchers relaunch, which I began in late May. The site has become a digest of interesting news and commentary from sites that permit redistribution. As you can see, the traffic graph's become a lot more fun to look at lately.
The site now includes stories that were published under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse. If you're unfamiliar with Creative Commons, it's a popular way to allow your copyrighted work -- whether it's text, photos, audio or video -- to be reused by others under terms that you select. On the RSS Advisory Board, we use the license to share the RSS specification, RSS best practices profile and other documentation we author. Some people have used our license to create foreign-language translations of those documents.
Here's a sampling of stories I've republished on Watching the Watchers that came in over the commons:
- End Public Radio Fund Drives
- SEC Must Constrain Abusive Short Selling
- Tweet Could Land Guatemalan in Jail
- A Salute to the Iranian People
I wrote a Java application that looks for weblog content shared under Creative Commons and a PHP web application that lets me manually review stories for potential republication. So far, the richest source of reusable content is coming from WordPress blogs because they include content:encoded, an RSS element explicitly defined as the full text of a weblog entry. WordPress does not use the Creative Commons RSS namespace in its feeds, so my Java application loads the web page associated with a blog entry and looks for HTML markup that identifies a license. Here's an example of that markup:
The contents of this website are licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License</a>.
As I was reviewing stories that came in, I decided to expand the focus of the site beyond liberal news and commentary and make it non-partisan. If I find something compelling that's worth sharing with a wider audience, I don't want to leave it out because it expresses a conservative or libertarian viewpoint or isn't political at all.
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