Just a reminder for those who have recently added me as a friend (thank you!): new content of the type that used to be posted in this journal is under the account magic_spot, syndicated from my blog at http://lyspeth.com/blog. Check my recent entries for the explanation for this if you are curious. I use this account for reading and commenting, and there are extensive archives available, but I no longer post new content to it.

My first post in this journal was on Jan 1, 2001. The last post will be, unfortunately, January 2, 2008, instead of January 1, because today was a busy day and I was making cupcakes and tagine and packing and watching Season 4, Disc 2 of The West Wing.

Per results of my previous poll, you all are quite fond of me -- no one unambiguously plans to stop reading my journal, and most of you who responded want me to continue reading here. I've decided I'll do that, although probably not with as great a frequency. I will be moving my blog to one of the ties for first place, an independent hosted blog on my website. The new address is http://www.lyspeth.com/blog. There is an RSS feed, magic_spot. Add it to your friends list, and it'll be semi-seamless, except for having to enter your comment info on the new site. No, I don't know why you have to enter an email -- something to do with WordPress that I haven't quite figured out. You can enter whatever you want as long as it looks like an email; I don't care.

If there are problems with the blog, or you just want to keep in touch, use the contact info on my journal. And I'll see you all around, but you'll only see my content if you remember to add the feed!

I've been getting more spam comments lately, which is annoying, so I've set my journal to allow comments from registered users only. If you want to comment but don't have an account, you can try OpenID or just email me privately. Since this journal will be going inactive soon, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

Yet another odd statement from LiveJournal, though FINALLY part of an apology:

There were a number of profiles that expressed "interest" in activities that most of us would agree put children at risk...Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of "I like x", “I’m in favor of x" or "I support x". As many profiles are the only public part of a private journal and profiles serve partly as an advertisement for people of like interests, it is important that the content of a profile can be evaluated as if it stands alone. If your profile were to express interest in pedophilia with no other content that describes this interest as in helping survivors or protecting children from it we must read the profile as "I like or I support or I’m in favor of it." For this reason we suspended profiles that meet this criteria.

I think this statement is at best extremely misguided, and shows a total lack of understanding about what a community website is and how it works, which is absolutely unacceptable in anyone working for LiveJournal/6A.

They can't really control how people use their interests lists, for one thing. The community itself is the regulator of what the interests list means by looking at it and deciding what it means. Facebook has a feature called "poking" that makes this aspect of community websites clear. The answer to the FAQ "What is poking someone?" is "It's whatever our users decide it means." That's essentially true of all features on a social network site. What does it mean to be someone's friend on LiveJournal? LiveJournal doesn't say. They determined what it means technically (as did the Facebook staff with poking); it means a person has access to any entries marked with a security level of Friends, and it means that the user's entries show up on your Friends page, unless you set it up so that they don't, and they always show up if your friends page is set to view all friends. But what it actually means to friend a journal varies by person/journal. Might mean you find them interesting, might mean you don't like the person but they have good stuff to say, might mean you read their journal solely to disagree with every entry, might mean you know them in real life, might mean you don't know them in real life but you're really close online. LiveJournal doesn't know, and there's not one answer. The same is true of interests. LiveJournal can say whatever it wants about what interests mean, but it's users who determine what really happens.

Second, it's obvious that people can be interested in things (even very uncontroversial things) yet not like or support those things. I don't know if I've actually listed the interest "tension myositis syndrome" (TMS) on my journal, but it's on my Facebook interests list, and it's a good example. Tension myositis syndrome is a mindbody pain syndrome. It causes physical pain in people (like me) who have too many repressed emotions, in an attempt to keep the emotions repressed. I don't like TMS. It causes a lot of people at lot of pain. I don't support TMS -- I wish it didn't exist. I am certainly not in favor of it; I hope everyone will eventually be free of it. But I'm very interested in it, because by learning about it, I saved myself from a lifetime of physical pain and disability. I want to know more about it and help others who experience it. That constitutes being interested, thus, it's a perfectly good addition to any list labeled "interests". It's therefore pretty obviously true that you should not be obliged, legally or otherwise, to read a list of interests as something that a person likes, supports, or is in favor of.

The bottom line for me here is that LiveJournal/6A

1) violated their own policy for no clear reason
2) did so in a way that suggests they are most interested when their bottom line has been threatened (suggests only; there is no proof and no way to find out about this)
3) showed that they are tools of their (very conservative) lawyers instead of a company who understands internet speech liability issues and works on behalf of their customers/community members to deal with that complex issue in a way that benefits the community while keeping the business running (see also: Digg and the 09 F9 scandal; Digg eventually listened to their users!)
4) showed that they have no concept of how a community really works by insisting that because they say interests function in a certain way, interests function that way, which is demonstrably false on two counts.

I will be leaving LiveJournal in the near future, and in the meantime, I will not be giving them any more of my money or volunteer time, though until I get another blog set up, I'll probably keep posting here.

LiveJournal/SixApart need to find themselves some lawyers that aren't spineless tools of liability law:

"...we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity...."

Uh...what? Seriously. Start with this post and read around, if you have time. Or if you don't. Since being bought by SA, LJ has pulled a lot of boneheaded shit (ads, sponsored communities, and banning breastfeeding images, for some examples), but this may be the last straw for me; I may actually leave LiveJournal. And since I have over six years of posts in my archive now, and a permanent account on one journal, that's a big deal for me. Practically speaking, I don't expect anything to come of it, for all the reasons well-listed here, but this is about personal issues. I've been trusting quite a lot of personal data to LiveJournal, and supporting them financially, and I simply can't do that if they're going to be, not just corporate sell-outs (which they already are, no different from most community websites, and which I feel more "oh well" about than anything) but stupid corporate sell-outs with not even one whit of a spine, essentially censoring (though it's not censorship) legitimate content rather than bother to distinguish it. (Like the RIAA/MPAA.) I miss the days when Brad was the guy who said what went and what didn't. He was just one guy and he certainly made mistakes, but he wasn't this stupid.

I think it's unlikely that LiveJournal is doing anything illegal here (though it's possible they've violated the ToS by deleting journals without giving any opportunity to the user to remove the content), but to be so boneheadedly wedded to the legal liability issue is bad business, bad social policy, probably against LiveJournal's Social Contract, and just utterly stupid.

I recently added the new toolbar to my LiveJournal pages, the one that tells you, on pages not in the system style, whether you're logged in and offers links to your journal and the update page as well as information and common tasks related to the page you're on. If you're on the journal of someone whom you don't list as a friend, it provides a link with the text "Add them as a friend". This is of course a sensible use of singular "them" -- the user can generally be said to have a gender, but not always (what gender is exampleusername, for example? or a journal maintained by an opposite-sex couple?), and in other cases LiveJournal either may not know the gender (if the user declined to list it) or would have to do a lot of work to reveal it (involving extra database lookups).

As it turns out, though, LiveJournal is not consistent. On the profile (userinfo) page, if you set up the ability to receive texts through LiveJournal, the text following the link allowing others to do so says "his/her cellphone/pager". So, why not go for him/her in the case above? I think it might be equally reasonable, even though it leaves out some marginal cases. And in general I'm not a fan of the slash constuction either -- it's awkward-sounding and awkward-looking.

Really, if it were me* (sadly, it no longer is, hence the counterfactual subjunctive), I would go with "Add this user as a friend". Not much longer, and far less likely to grate on grammarians' ears, though it doesn't follow the general trend that an already-introduced referent should be referred to by a pronoun in a case where the second reference is in close proximity to the first.

And again, I say all this as someone who occasionally prefers the singular they/them, as in the case of "Would everyone please put on his coat!" which always makes me wonder who he is that he needs so much help with his coat!


*Don't bother telling me you think this should be "If it were I". Either is fine; it depends on what kind of phrase I'm eliding.

The best reason for conversation view in Gmail: not having sort through or read all 26 of the stupid comments that your post in a community you don't have on your friends page got. "That's not a spelling error, that's a typo." "No, it is a spelling error." "No, it's not." ... "Well, your icons make me sick." "Well, yours make me sick."

I also just discovered that you can (with effort) delete an individual message from a conversation. Yay! Now if they would just take a page out of Mutt's book and allow you to edit messages or delete their attachments...

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that people on LiveJournal act like they're in high school, and then I remember that most of them are. (The demographic bump is later in high school than it used to be, but still there.)

I finally got my journal to embed into my web site again. I'm not sure anybody reads it that way, but I'm quite pleased, because it's just been a blank page for about six months. My web host merged with another company, which doesn't seem to have LWP in their standard include directories, and some other finicky things were also wrong. The placement of LWP seems pretty dumb since it is a common module used in Perl web programming. I might have to look for a better host at some point, but since I just paid for next year, it'll be a while.

In other news, I'm hoping to hand in my thesis on Monday. I can't believe how close I am.

Well, I made an embedded style for my journal inside my website (http://www.lyspeth.com/magicspot/writings/journal/) but I don't seem to be able to figure out how to apply one style to the embedded journal and one style to the journal as it stands.

I should be able to set my style here to Generator with my Magic Spot theme, like I had it before, and then specify that I want to use a new style that I created (s2 id 12267) when I embed it. In fact, that's what I thought I was doing. I went to the styles page, made a new layout layer, and made a style that uses that layout layer. I didn't ever set my style to be that at the Customize page, but when I went back there, it was set that way anyway.

It's working on the test server (i.e., I can look at my journal in the style I made, and look at it regularly in Component), and so I have no idea what I did wrong. Argh.

Update: Nevermind. I'm not sure what was wrong, but apparently I fixed it. I think I just got a weird combination of old CGI script and new style. So it works now! Yay! I'm cool. And dorky.

This is kind of a strange place to post this, because "I" (this user) doesn't help out with LiveJournal. But I, the person who uses this journal, do help out.

I enjoy helping out with LiveJournal, for all the reasons you might expect me or anyone else to like it. I like editing documentation, and I like to give back to a community I enjoy and benefit from. I like many of the other people who help out.

Do you want to help out with LiveJournal? I'll tell you what you need to have to do that. You need patience. More than anything else. You also need skill, but mostly you need patience. If you believe in sinister elitist conspiracies, or democratic decision-making, go into politics. People might listen to you, and maybe you'll accomplish something, because your views won't be at such odds with the reality.

LiveJournal volunteers are not evil elitists. They are human beings and users like you who have the time and patience to work on a system that is vastly underserved in every area and on which change is slow and often frustrating. If you do work, you may not see it take effect for months, and often it ultimately occurs after someone else's suggestion rather than yours. The decision processes are not democratic, they're oligarchic, and ultimately autocratic. You can have as much space to talk as you want, as long as you're being polite, but if you're not one of the people who makes the decisions, you're just not, and the people who are may make decisions you don't like.

What should you do? Well, if you have patience, you can ignore it, and you can remember what brought you to volunteering in the first place. Are you able to make LiveJournal better, even if you can't make it exactly how you want it? If so (and it's almost certainly possible), focus on that. Do what you can. That's all any of us can do. If you stick around, stay polite, and do what you can, you might eventually become one of the people who makes the decisions, if that's what you want. If it's not, at least you're accomplishing something, and you can always decline an offer of more power.

If you don't have patience, you'll probably burn out some day because you're spending so much time being angry that your changes aren't taking effect, or that a policy was implmented that you don't like. Maybe you'll say something rude and storm off in a huff. I've seen it, and I think it's sad, because LiveJournal loses some of its really good volunteers that way, people whose contributions I respect. The one thing I can say in favor of those who storm off in a huff is that at least they don't stick around to be snippy in comment every time anyone disagrees with them.

(I've seen those people too, and they don't make sense to me. If you hate it, save everybody involved, including yourself, some aggro, and leave. Because unlike the United States of America, you won't get a chance to elect new representatives if you don't like it.)

That's my manifesto on the subject. I hope and believe that I'd have the same thing to say if I were still a privless volunteer, because I don't recall any illusions that I was the agent of any significant decision. I've always tried to make my contribution and be happy if it was accepted, and not be upset if it wasn't. And I still think that. If my preferences are overruled from above, then they're overruled and I'll do my best with what I've got. That's the way to operate that's ultimately most fruitful for both volunteers and LiveJournal: patience.

Three tools that have made my life easier lately:

LogJam's ability to download an entire journal and then present entries that have a certain term in them. It's obviously useful in general (don't you wish your LiveJournal client did that?) but specifically, it helped me easily find the day that I'd written about faxing the Edinburgh Acommodations Office, thereby allowing me to easily reference the date in my email confirming whether the fax went through. (I meant to send the email ages ago, a few days after the fax, but I forgot.)

The RSS feed aggregator Straw, which allows me to read RSS feeds on my desktop. I also use LiveJournal itself as an RSS aggregator, on my other account, and I like it. But the paradigm of the friends page is that things go in chronological order. It would work fine if I checked my RSS feeds page religiously, but I keep tend to forget to go to it for days at a time, because it's separate from my regular friends page. The main advantage of the desktop RSS aggregator is that it separates items by feed, so I can ignore high-volume feeds like BBC news and catch up quickly with low-volume feeds like personal blogs and comics. Also, I'm getting close to hitting my LJ RSS point limit, in part because I created the account mydd_com, of which I'm the only reader. I've gotten a bit addicted.

There are a few things that I don't like about Straw. For one, it has shitty tab navigation, which I've already filed a bug about, and in general the interface is awkward. No offense to all the open-source programmers who work hard out there -- I appreciate them infinitely. But do they actually do usability testing on their projects? It's sort of like the symptom of crappy-websites-for-web companies, like this. I'm not a designer or a usability expert, but I know what's nice and what sucks when I'm using your program and looking at your page. Make your project easy to use! Please! I'll test it for you for free, I promise. I would love, actually, to do user-level usability testing on open-source stuff. Maybe I should volunteer myself to various people.

The other thing I was going to complain specifically about -- everything opening in a new window -- I've just fixed by editing the global GNOME handler to use galeon -n (use existing instance of Galeon, open in new tab) instead of plain Galeon. I suppose some people wouldn't like the default Galeon to be open in new tab, but to me, as an obsessive user of tabbed browsing, I'd prefer it as the default. Who wants a bazillion articles floating on their desktop? Not me. But I'm what they call a power user, anyway. If you don't know what tabbed browsing is, sorry. I can't find any intros, although I did find two fascinating articles, one by the guy who implemented tabbed browsing in Mozilla, and another by a guy who has some interesting ideas about what it should mean and do.

After that digression, the third thing: the security application Gringotts. It's basically just a file editor with some nice security features built in. I've been trying to improve my account security for various accounts lately, because for someone who knows a fair bit about good security, my security isn't that great. No, I won't tell you what problems I have with my security; I'm too smart for that. :-) The tradeoff I'm currently playing with is whether I would rather store the information with a fewer, harder-to-break points of failure (Gringotts), or continue to have less secure passwords. The best solution, of course, is to obsessively create and memorize good passwords. But that's too much for me at this point, and there is always the chance of forgetting it even if you try hard to memorize it.


In other news, I'll soon have a functioning website independent of Owlnet. My current choices are Godaddy.com for domain registration, and eSphinx.net for hosting. Nothing is set up right now (still waiting on account creation at the host), but no doubt I'll have something to say about their quality later on. I'm likely to embed this journal in my page there, even though the domain is named after my main journal (polyhymnia.com is already taken, by a music company, appropriately) so I may decide to pay for this account as well, depending on the method I want to use.

So I spent tonight basically immersed in Perl documentation, the source to the sclj client that's written in Perl, and the LJ developer documentation. I'm trying to write a client-like thing that basically goes and requests the getevents data for a day and then extracts the itemids and uses them to write out URLs for the equivalent talkread pages. Later the URLs will get used by wget to fetch the pages from the livejournal server and put them on my hard drive, where I can do analysis on them.

I already figured out how to get just posts, but this is the only way I know of to get comments, too, and I really need them. The ljcharm client was and will be very helpful for getting just the events. At the end it was at least logging in, but the getevents stuff wasn't working. Which is okay. I'll fix it later, and now I at least know I'll be able to get everything easily and efficiently in the end, so when I have a meeting with Dr. Englebretson tomorrow I can tell him that!

I was slightly caffeinated and felt very much like a comp major. Dan was immensely helpful to me. He is my hero. :-)

I have an informal interview tomorrow for a student writer and web developer job at IT. I probably won't know immediately if I get it, but I really hope I do. It's practically perfect for me; all the computery stuff I love to do.

This post is a link-fest. Blatantly. :) I really should use LogJam to write posts like this, because it has a "make link" function.

Whee, bedtime.

1) Another metamarketing email:

Today small business owners and ordinary people like you and me can use the web to achieve complete financial freedom with very little money and work. How you ask? By learning the most profitable marketing technique ever created - it's called bulk email, or SPAM.

If you've ever recieved an email advertisement, then you know what bulk email is. I bet you can't click on
DELETE fast enough for most of those ads, right? You might not want their product, but remember that thousands of other folks probably do. Bulk email is a percentage game - every bulk emailer who contacts you makes a six figure income on the Internet. I guarantee it. Now let's go back to Math 101 and review some numbers ...

If you sell on eBay, you pay anywhere from a few dollars to over a hundred dollars just to post one auction. How many people see your ad? Maybe a couple thousand or even ten or twenty thousand over a period of days. Using bulk email, YOU CAN SEND YOUR AD TO MORE THAN A MILLION PEOPLE A DAY at virtually no cost. Whether your send 100,000 emails or 100 million emails, the price is the same. ZERO!

These amuse me a lot, because they advertise spam through spam.

They also show you that the only real way never to get any spam is to educate every single email user so that they respond to it by paying the spammers. As if that's ever going to happen. :P

2) Someone wrote into The Vine saying that she was having trouble with a boss visiting her public online diary, and didn't want her to visit. Sars, being the clever person that she is, pointed out that you can't really do much about that when it's public.

Someone else wrote in to suggest that she try a blogging site that allows access control, specifically mentioning LiveJournal, which is cool.

I should be studying, but I've been working on my public style instead. I probably will study for a bit before we go out for celebrating Sunil's birthday though.

I'm at work, mostly working, but vaguely playing with the lj_win32 client, since I've never had a chance to use a windows LJ client before. (Shows how much I use my windows partition anymore - I think my sony is going on 29 days without rebooting now. With Dave's virtual machine running win2k, it's even less likely, since I can just scp things over to him and he can run them.)

I just got to the guy who says "It just kinda floats down the road," and I swear he sounds like the perfect textbook example of someone from the upper Midwest. No diphthong at all on the Os. Unfortunately the spectogram's not especially clear, so it's not obvious why it sounds so funny.

hear it
see the spectogram

Yes, I'm way too amused by this. But if I weren't, I'd have gone crazy by now, because that's all this work is. Spectograms, linear predictive coding frequency response, wav files, more spectograms.

So...yeah. Back to work. No lunch break for me, since I've been goofing off and I'm not hungry anyway.