Slumming on lolfbmoments.com:

• "Ladies and Gentlemen... my sister is a whore."
• "Werewolf."
• "Thundercats."
• "Sunglasses."

I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds.

Besides the obvious benefits to this, one great side effect is that you never, ever see the output of applications (e.g., quiz results) or the other useless noise like "so-and-so is now friends with someone else you already know". The only drawback I've found is that you also don't see notifications about photos that your friends have uploaded. (You do see links that they post, however: just not Facebook-hosted photos. It's a bizarre omission.)

Anyway, I just had to explain to someone how to accomplish this feat, which made me realize how completely non-obvious Facebook has made this. Finding these feeds is a complete pain in the ass. They've really gone out of their way to hide the URLs you need to use.

So. You have to subscribe to three or four different feeds.

1. Posts: Find the Posts feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php. On the upper right of the page is a gray box, and at the bottom of that box is a link entitled "My Friends' Links" with the RSS logo next to it. Copy that URL. Subscribe to it in your feed reader. This is the RSS URL for any links and (external) images that your friends post.

2. Notes: Find the Notes feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things that your friends post via the "Notes" app, which is (I guess) the more blog-like way of posting long things to Facebook.

3. Notifications: Find the Notifications feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things like "so-and-so commented on your status". You might not care to subscribe to this one because you can get all of these kind of notifications in email.

4. Status Updates: This is the RSS URL for the "What are you doing?" Twitter-like part of Facebook. This is the one you probably care about, and it is trickier, because Facebook no longer links to the feed URL! Nice one guys. You have to construct this URL by editing one of the above URLs. E.g., take the "Notes" URL and change the part of the URL that says "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Keep the parts of the URL before and after that, including the magic numbers at the end.

There. Wasn't that SIMPLE?

Previously: How to use Livejournal with a feed reader.

I saw that in the latest PS3 OS update, they added Facebook integration. Now, there's one and exactly one thing that could possibly be useful for, right? You've already thought of it in the time it took you to read that sentence. The one useful thing would be to unify your friends lists, so that your PS3 can automatically know which of your Facebook friends are online without you having to search for and then manually enter all of their Playstaion Network IDs.

Guess what, it doesn't do that. All it does is make it so that the PS3 can spam your Facebook Status every time you buy a game, and every time you upload a trophy. Who would ever, ever want it to do either of these things?

I'll bet a "Social Media Consultant" was involved.

Our work here will not be complete until every Wikipedia page contains an "In Anime" sub-section.

• Crucifixion - In Anime.
  
• Asperger syndrome - In Anime.
  
• Previously, previously.
  

Is there a blog that highlights the stupidest Wikipedia events? I subscribe to the RSS feed of the Lamest edit wars article, but I find that insufficient.

Ultra-Orthodox rabbis decry Internet's 'terrible impurity'

Leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis on Friday told their flock to shun the Internet, claiming that even sites meant for the arch-conservative religious community contained "lies and terrible impurity."

Those who enter the world of the Internet "will never return," they warned ominously in a letter published by three ultra-Orthodox newspapers.

"Many Jewish souls have already fallen into its trap."

The 21 rabbis noted that private use of general Internet sites is already strictly prohibited for members of the Haredi community, as the ultra-Orthodox call themselves. "Recently, the so-called Haredi sites have gone overboard," the rabbis said, adding that "they disseminate forbidden slander, gossip, lies, terrible impurity and abominations."

Haredis recently made headlines in Israel as thousands took to the streets to protest against a car park and an industrial company that operate on Saturday, which they consider a grave desecration of the Jewish holy day of rest.

Dear Lazyweb,

I want to put two embedded videos side by side. I want each of them to have a 1 pixel border around the embed box. (E.g.) In Safari and Opera (no idea about IE), you can do:

<EMBED ... STYLE="border:1px solid">

But in Firefox, the border does not show up. One way to accomplish it in all three is this:

<DIV STYLE="border: 1px solid; width:480">
<EMBED ... WIDTH=480 ...></DIV>

which is dumb because you have to specify the width twice, and also because that doesn't let you put the embeds side by side unless you wrap a TABLE cell around each of them.

Any other ideas of how to make this work?

Is it a bug in Firefox that EMBED and OBJECT ignore the CSS "border" attribute?

UPDATE: Problem solved.

I think I've almost managed to get the DNA Lounge popup webcast window to resize the video when you resize the window. (Unsurprisingly, the only way that worked portably was to use tables.) Does it work for you? This seems to resize properly in both Firefox and Safari. It mostly works in Opera: it resizes properly, but there's a scrollbar and the bottom text is off the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure how to fix that.

What does it do in IE? Does the video resize, and is there a green box around it?

Previously.

Dear Lazyweb,

When you go to the DNA Lounge Webcasts page and click on the "Video Webcast" link, it pops up a chromeless window with the Justin.TV Flash embed in it.

I'd like to make it so that when you resize that window, the embed resizes with it.

This is what I tried. It works great in Safari, but in Firefox, the embed is always 100% wide and 1 pixel tall; and in Opera, it's always 100% wide but about 200 pixels tall.

Ideas?

Citation needed:

Previously.

Since Livejournal's ability to keep their various services actually running has gotten so much worse this year, I've started divesting myself of reliance on them. Last month, LJ went a full five days without updating RSS feeds, so now I no longer use LJ as my feed aggregator (I'm using NetNewsWire now; it's ok). And last week, LJ was totally down for 4+ hours, meaning that I couldn't use my LJ OpenID token to log in to other sites, so now I'm running my own OpenID provider too (phpMyID, it's really easy).

My question is, what do I use to replace LJ's Jabber server? (Other than Google Chat, obviously.) I'd like my Jabber ID to be "jwz@jwz.org" instead of "jwz@livejournal.com", and I suspect the only way to accomplish that is to run my own Jabber server. Said server would only ever have one person connected to it and would peer with the rest of the network. I tried installing Djabberd, but there is basically nothing in the way of documentation or examples, so I couldn't get it to do anything.

(I imagine the lack of reliability that seems to be Livejournal's new way of doing things -- plus the fact that the site feels like a ghost town now -- will eventually cause me to move this blog to somewhere else. I'm not sure where, though. All the options are bad. Run it on your own site: get no comments but lots of spam. Just use Facebook: effectively limited to friends-only posts. Bleh.)

So, Peter Seibel interviewed me for his book. Then Joel Spolsky wrote this weird article about me based on that interview where he called me a "Duct Tape programmer". Peter asked me what I thought about it. I responded:

It's such a strange article, in that it's mostly favorable to my point of view but with such a breathless amazement to it, like he's just discovered an actual unicorn or something. "Look, everybody! Here's a hacker who actually accomplished things and yet he doesn't fetishize the latest fads that I and all of my friends make our living writing about!" There's this tone to the thing like he just can't imagine that someone like me can exist. He's impressed but he doesn't really believe in it, this mythological creature he's discovered. And of course the whole "duct tape" thing is vaguely insulting, and a perfect example of what we call "damning with faint praise".

So I guess to the extent that he puts me up on a pedestal for merely being practical, that's a pretty sad indictment of the state of the industry.

In a lot of the commentary surrounding his article elsewhere, I saw all the usual chestnuts being trotted out by people misunderstanding the context of our discussions: A) the incredible time pressure we were under and B) that it was 1994. People always want to get in fights over the specifics like "what's wrong with templates?" without realizing the historical context. Guess what, you young punks, templates didn't work in 1994. They also like to throw stones at Mozilla, and how much 4.0 sucked and how mozilla.org decided they needed to rewrite it all in 1999, so that jwz code must not have been any good, right? The peanut gallery always fails to understand that I was talking about an entirely different code base that pretty much ceased to exist by early 1996, thanks to the (at the time completely unwarranted) Collabra rewrite, and that has never been seen by the outside world.

Around 1998 I pushed for Netscape to open source both the 3.0 and 4.0 code bases, since the 3.0 code base was the one that included a mail reader that actually worked, but they wouldn't let me do it.

Peter wrote his own response to Joel's article that goes into more detail with some more excerpts from the book.

I really enjoyed reading Peter's book, by the way. (The parts that I'm not in, I mean.) You should buy it.

Dear Lazyweb (and brad),

How do I get an RSS feed of my LJ friends that includes friends-only posts?

This method does not include friends-only posts, even when you add &checkcookies=1. The &filter parameter doesn't appear to do anything, either.

There doesn't appear to be any way in the LJ protocol to do this either. I'm about to resort to screen-scraping the HTML.

Update: alierak has the goods: First do this thing, then run his script to generate the feed locally. Yes, this is stupidly complicated and kludgy, but it's working for me.

The problem with having switched to NetNewsWire is that suddenly my feeds were all white-on-black instead of green-on-black as they were supposed to be. So I fixed that. Unzip jwz.nnwstyle and double-click it.

Clean-ups to my kludgy CSS would be appreciated. Making the header names and values line up in two columns was hard, given that the subject is a different font size. The "left:4.5em" versus "6em" is clearly wrong, and I couldn't figure out how to make it work using just H1 in template.html instead of <span class="newsItemH1">.

Dear Lazyweb, what should I use to read RSS feeds?

Given that almost all of my friends have given up on using Livejournal for actual blogging, the only thing I really use it for these days (besides hosting my own posts) is as an RSS aggregator for the 200+ feeds I subscribe to.

Lately Livejournal seems utterly incapable of keeping their feed poller running. Last week, no feeds updated for more than 5 days, and now it's happening again: it's been more than 12 hours since any feed has updated.

I wish I could just use Mail.app as my feed reader, but it doesn't work for shit. It re-posts un-changed entries all the time.

I gather a lot of people use Google Reader, but for previously discussed reasons, I refuse to log in to any Google account. So forget that.

Are there any free OSX desktop apps for this that don't suck? Or other free web sites that don't suck?

Update: Almost everybody is recommending NetNewsWire. It seems ok so far. This may end up being the final nail in the coffin of LiveJournal for me.

Last year Peter Seibel spent a couple of days interviewing me about the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and this turned into a chapter in his new book, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. It was a fun interview, since we talked about a bunch of non-Netscape-related hacking, and nobody ever asks about that any more.

I haven't read the rest of the book yet, but it's a safe bet that the other folks were more coherent than I was. The other interviewees are Brad Fitzpatrick, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich, Joshua Bloch, Joe Armstrong, Simon Peyton Jones, Peter Norvig, Guy Steele, Dan Ingalls, L Peter Deutsch, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen, Bernie Cosell, and Donald Knuth.

(If you're wondering what I'm doing in the same book as Knuth, try thinking of me as the comic relief.)

Dear Lazyweb,

Any opinions on whether justin.tv or ustream.tv has the higher quality video? Or is that a stupid question, since they both use the video broadcasting stuff built into the Flash plugin and are therefore identical?

I'm currently using justin.tv for the DNA webcasts, but I was wondering whether ustream.tv would result in marginally-less-crappy quality.

(I have heard rumors of Windows-only software that results in higher quality Flash video streaming. Obviously this is of no use to me. It has to be MacOS 10.5, Intel, and no, I'm not running Windows on my Mac.)

Yelp reviewer Chris T. from Gilroy really wants you to know that he is NOT GAY. TOTALLY NOT GAY.

Chris T.'s Review of DNA Lounge

Went on Saturday night for a straight friend's birthday for the Bootie SF event here. $6 before 10PM, $12 after 10PM. We paid $12.

No one sent me the memo that even though this club is in SOMA, it's pretty much half gay (thought all those venues were reserved for The Castro). So we ended up seeing half naked gay guys with no shirts on making out with each other and licking each others nipples on the dance floor. Hopefully I don't have too many nightmares from this night or have this night contribute to any future psychotherapist bills.

But yeah, had 1 unisex bathroom upstairs, and a guy and girl bathroom downstairs. 1 bar downstairs, 2 bars upstairs. All bars were cash only I believe.

And I thought it was kinda funny that my friend's reserved table section upstairs was located next to a bunch of 6' tall gay bald white biker guys.

Music for the night consisted of 80s music, mash-up, electro, and a live band.

Not really my type of crowd, but was an interesting experience.

Too bad I didn't get to taste the hype of that Crepe place (food truck) across the street from here that everyone kept talking about (Crepes A Go Go).

This place is also located within walking distance to Holy Cow, Slim's, Club Icon, Mist (formerly Loft 11), and some other spots.

Thought it was funny that when I was smoking outside I saw one of my friend's gay guy friends get carried out the club by the bouncers for being too damn drunk.

People thought this was: Useful (2) Cool (1)

Previously.

symbolics.com, the first domain name ever registered, has been bought by a "real estate and domain investment company."

Sometimes you learn really despicable things by subscribing to wikipedia changelogs.

Google has deleted DNA Lounge from Street View. This happened a few months ago, and was not corrected by yesterday's Street View update. Ever since Street View launched, you've been able to see DNA Lounge in it (evidence from more than two years ago!) but now, all of Eleventh Street between Bryant and Mission is missing from Street View. And hey, why bother to drive the entire length of Sixteenth Street? That's not a significant part of town either, right?

But the truly baffling part is: why would they bother to delete old imagery instead of just updating it as newer stuff comes in? That's completely retarded.

WTF, Google.