I decided to give tumblogging a try. I’m hoping that ease of use and lowered expectations will get me to post more often, and I’m liking it so far. It covers the large middle ground between blogging and twittering. I can put up something interesting without feeling like I need to construct a coherent post around it, and I don’t feel like I’m pestering people with twitters (not to mention that it allows for richer media types).
I realize I could just do the same thing on this blog if I wanted to, but there’s something about the minimalist formatting and ease-of-use that just seems to work. So I’ll continue to post longer pieces here (I’ve got a number that I need to just sit down and write), and I’ll keep posting inane comments to Twitter, but I imagine that the majority of interesting things I find will end up on my tumblelog.
// ==UserScript==
// @name Social Graphs Must Die
// @namespace Footle
// @description Redact all mentions of "social graphs";
// ==/UserScript==
document.body.innerHTML=document.body.innerHTML.replace(/(social\s+graph(s?))/ig,"<span style='background:#000;color:#000'>$1</span>");
Actually closing a tab (that wasn’t opened by Javascript) in Firefox 2 isn’t possible AFAICT, but this is more fun anyway.
After hearing a couplecomplaints from friends about the amount of spam they’re getting, I decided to take a quick look to see where I stood. At the risk of setting myself up, I should say that I get no spam (channeling John C. Dvorak). Or at least very little–maybe one every other day gets through to my inbox.
I think the trick is just to have multiple levels of filtering. I use a Gmail address for most online transactions (for online transactions that I really don’t care about–if I’m doing a one-time registration just to get a trial key, for example–I use my Yahoo address, which is nothing but a spam bucket). My Gmail address gets forwarded to my personal email address (@footle.org), which has SpamAssassin running on the server. If it makes it past SA to Mail.app, it gets inspected by SpamSieve, an awesome Bayesian spam filter for OS X mail clients.
Anyway, my stats for the last 24 hours:
Server-level filters (spam caught):
SpamAssassin: 281
Gmail: 32
Client-level filter (spam caught):
SpamSieve: 17
Spam getting to my inbox: 0
Non-spam messages: 52
False positives: 1 (just Flavorpill, so not a big deal)
(Wow…330 pieces of spam in a single day. That seems way worse than when I last checked.)
Bonjour-enabled Git. (Although Coda tells me that Dave F. at Powerset already approached him with this idea. Neither of us have time to work on it.)
I started using Git recently and although it’s a bit confounding at times, I love how cheap and easy branching is, and that you can commit incremental changes to your local repository, then later commit them in batch to subversion. Git allows for distributed development, but unless you’re on the same server as other developers, or you go through the trouble of mounting their repository over the network, you can’t check out their repository. Seems like it shouldn’t be too difficult to give Git Bonjour powers.
We recently released a very slick Firefox extension at Wesabe. It was written by my colleague Tim Mason, but I helped figure out one small piece of it—namely, how to do binary multipart POSTs in Javascript—and since it involved many hours of hair-pulling for both of us, I thought I’d share the knowledge. (Tim says I should note that “this probably only works in Firefox version 2.0 and greater and that it uses Mozilla specific calls that are only allowed for privileged javascript—basically only for extensions.”)
One of the cool features of the plugin is the ability to take a snapshot of a full browser page and either save the snapshot to disk or upload it to Wesabe (so you can, for example, save the receipt for a web purchase along with that transaction in your account). The snapshot is uploaded to Wesabe via a standard multipart POST, the same way that a file is uploaded via a web form.
Tim was having trouble getting the POST to work with binary data at first, and he had other things to finish, so he wanted to just base-64-encode it and be done with it. I was reluctant to do that, as the size of the upload would be significantly larger (about 137% of the original). Also, Rails didn’t automatically decode base-64-encoded file attachments. But Tim had other bugs to fix, so I submitted a patch to Rails to do the base-64 decoding. I was pretty proud of this patch until it was pointed out to me that RFC 2616 specifically disallows the use of Content-Transfer-Encoding in HTTP. Doh. They also realized that it is a colossal waste of bandwidth.
Since Tim was cramming to meet a hard(-ish) deadline set for the release of the plugin, I offered to lend my eyeballs to the binary post problem. This could be a very long story, but I’ll just get to the point: you can read binary data in to a Javascript string and dump it right out to a file just fine, but if you try to do any concatenation with that string, Javascript ends up munging it mercilessly. I’m not sure whether it is trying to interpret it as UTF8 or if it terminates it as soon as it hits a null byte (which is what seemed to be happening), but regardless, doing "some string" + binaryData + "another string", as is necessary when putting together a mutipart post, just does not work.
The answer required employing Rube Goldbergian system of input and output streams. The seed of the solution was found on this post, although that didn’t explain how to mix in all of the strings needed for the post and MIME envelope. So here it is, in all it’s goriness:
Update: Spaces removed from multipart boundary per Gijsbert’s suggestion in the comments (thanks!).
