Monica

I submitted the d'var torah I wrote last year on this week's portion to the Reform Judaism blog and they published it today. I enjoy reading the RJ blog, which is syndicated to LJ here: reform_judaism.

In the last month or so I've seen a large increase in the number of spam comments I get. (That's why I had to set anonymous comments to be screened, though it delays some legitimate comments.) I understand that this has been happening all over LJ. What puzzles me is why a majority of my spam comments have targeted this short, older entry on an obscure topic -- but an entry that is not so complete or keyword-laden to be clearly the definitive web page on the topic or anything like that. I mean, what search produces that page as a top candidate, and why would spammers selling dating services and shoes and Viagra care about those search terms? I just don't get it; what's so special about that one among my 3000+ journal entries?

Neat visualization #1: the scale of the universe, showing how big (and small) things are. Link from filkerdave.

Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth looks like art. Link from browngirl.

Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".

Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends? (At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored helps answer that question. Link from alienor.

Graph paper on demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.

A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.

And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.

Since about 30 seconds after LJ announced the tagging feature I have been wanting boolean search for tags, so that I could find entries tagged A and (B or C) or the like. This has never been possible.

Today in news they announced that you can search for entries with two tags (specifically two) using the following syntax:

http://username.livejournal.com/tag/tag1,tag2?mode=and

(Substitute for username, tag1, and tag2, of course.)

That's great. This will help. But I can't help wondering... why this implementation? I tried it with three tags; it took the first two and ignored the third. I tried mode=or; didn't work. I assume from this interface that they'll be extending this to support the latter; it makes sense to introduce a "mode" argument now and support other options later. But what kind of implementation limits the parameters to two? I'm trying to imagine the design that produced this result and seemed like a good idea to the dev team, and I'm coming up blank. (Yes, I know LJ is open-source so theoretically I could go look. I don't care that much.) Isn't it just as easy to process arg1,arg2,...argn as to parse arg1,arg2?

So yay for the beginnings of expressive tagging, but I do hope more is coming.

15 most strange buildings in the world is bizarre. While it's not the strangest, I am fond of the library that looks like a shelf full of books.

Dani's comfort foods include shepherd's pie, which was not part of my upbringing. I've made the version from Cooking for Engineers a couple times, substituting margarine for the butter because of kashrut and beef for the lamb because of availability, but he says it's not quite right. I asked him to do some searching and he reports that everything that looks right involves milk or cheese, which is of course a problem. Do any of my kosher or lactose-intolerant readers have a favorite recipe?

A friend recently burned DVDs from some treasured old videotapes, but our DVD player won't play them. (The computers will.) Google tells me that this is a common problem, especially with older players. There are the competing standards of DVD+R and DVD-R; the documentation for our player mentions neither by name. (These discs are DVD+R.) This happened once before and I assumed a bad disc; now I suspect the problem is the player. We bought our DVD player, a region-free Sampo, when the first season of The West Wing was released in the UK, which was apparently 2002.

I could get this video adapter for my iBook for $19. There might be other benefits to that too, though streaming Hulu might not be one of them (video seems jumpy). Or it appears that region-free DVDs have come way down in price, so maybe we should replace our player. Maybe with this ($58 and I've heard of the manufacturer) or this ($40, no reviews, and never heard of the maker). These are the results of half an hour of surfing; if anyone reading this has opinions, I'd love to hear 'em.

Recently I've seen a few "bot" LJ accounts go by -- users that seem to subscribe to people at random but don't do anything else (so they're not, say, making harrassing comments), and then the accounts get nuked. The last one I got was Russian, as I gather many are. I don't really care if such accounts show up as subscribers, but I find myself wondering two things: what do they get out of it, and why do some folks get upset enough to get the accounts suspended? What am I missing?

LJ laid off a bunch of people today. It was initially reported as almost everyone in the US office and all the technical staff, but that report turned out to be erroneous and from a questionable source. This post has a pretty good collection of links and other info.

Is LJ going to go poof soon? I don't think so. But it's never a good idea to rely overly much on any one internet service, so it's a good idea to back up your journal regularly if losing its content would upset you. I use LJArchive on Windows, but am paying attention to ljmigrate on the Mac. Neither has all the features I want, but the former is pretty good and the latter is new and still under development, it appears.

Some of the backup tools out there require that you give a third party your password. Please be mindful of the security problem you create by doing so and, at least, change your password afterwards, ok? You're not just exposing your own journal, but also the locked entries of everyone who's given you access.

If LJ were to go poof, I'd be looking to set up on one of the similar sites that uses the same underlying code. The very most important feature of LJ to me is threaded comments, and for all that this seems basic to me, most of the blogging sites out there don't do it. I have an account at InsaneJournal that I set up during the last big kerfluffle (same user name); the "asylum" theme might keep me from moving in there (would I want colleagues or family members to see that?), but it's a fallback at least. If you have an account at IJ, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know (or add me and then I'll see you).

So, IMO, it's not time for panic but it's always time to be prudent.

Today's mail brought fruitcake goodies from browngirl, who is way too good to me. Photos of the lovely decorations will be posted after Shabbat.

Today for lunch I went with a group to Little Tokyo Bistro, which has replaced Sushi Two on the South Side. The sushi was fresh and tasty and the portions generous. Ir is the way of local sushi places for portions to start large and shrink over time; I hope that doesn't happen too quickly here. (I don't know how long they've been there, since I get up that way much less frequently since we moved farther away.)

Of the eight of us seven ordered sushi, but we still had our meals in a reasonable amount of time. (I only saw one sushi chef.) The staff members were pleasant.

There was music (American, not Japanese) and it was a little too loud, but they turned it down when we asked them to. There was also a TV showing CNN in my field of vision, which turned out to be distracting, but I didn't ask them to turn it off. (I find that TV draws my eye even if I don't care, and doubly so when there is text. CNN always has a text crawl...) So if you want atmosphere this might not be the place for you, but if you want good sushi, check it out.

A discussion in another journal has caused me to realize that what seems an innocuous action to me might be objectionable to others. So, disclosure and an invitation to discuss, if you care to:

I sometimes use a sort of "web bug" in my posts so I can collect limited access data (which data LJ does not provide). I did this initially out of simple curiosity, but soon realized that I could use it to find out (without asking) which of my posts get read more (or less). While I write primarily for myself, it's worth knowing if there are certain classes of posts that my readers tend to ignore. Secondarily, this also gives me some idea of where my "secondary" (non-LJ-subscriber) readers might be coming from, which is casually interesting.

To me this seems akin to someone who hosts his own blog reviewing the server logs. To others, I'm learning, this is akin to "spying". While lj-toys does try to report which LJ users are reading what, it's far from reliable. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm not really looking at that; I've got much better things to do than to peruse logs so I can say "aha! so-and-so claims to be my friend but never reads me!".

At the bottom of this post is a one-pixel image file. (If I could use something more blatant, I would.) If you're using Firefox and the AdBlock extension, you can block that image and lj-toys will never see hits from you. If you're using some other browser, I'm afraid I don't know how you can disable it.

If you feel that what I'm doing is objectionable, I would like to understand where you're coming from (here or privately, as you like).

I learned today that there is a full-service gas station on my way to/from work. I didn't know we had any of those locally. It's been years (probably decades); what is the conventional tip?

As I pulled up to an intersction (all-way stop), someone from the cross street was backing through the intersection. After backing into the space in front of my car, he immediately popped into drive and went through the intersection. Whose turn was that, the cross-street or mine? :-)

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Why does Hebrew have two words for "open" that differ only (apparently) in what objects they take? It's peh-kuf-chet when talking about eyes and ears, and peh-taf-chet for anything else.

For about the last nine months, LiveJournal has served pages rather slowly for me on my home network (two machines, two operating systems, four browsers). This has not been a problem with any othner sites, and a friend with the same ISP reported no problems when I asked him to try LJ. It's worked fine at the few wireless hotspots I've taken the laptop to. LJ said they had no clue. (In case you're wondering, to compensate I launch all links from my friends page into new tabs. I am the queen of parallel processing.)

Tonight, all of a sudden, the site is fast, after being basically hung this morning. (I'd restarted the browser and none of the tabs would load. Tonight most were corrupted in some way, but reloads worked.) Ironically, the only slow page I've seen tonight is the posting page.

I am absolutely, positively, not looking this gift horse in the mouth. But I'm curious about what changed. I wasn't able to debug it before, so I doubt I can analyze it now. I hope the new behavior sticks around.

Edited to add: I just discovered, by accident, that the "style=mine" directive now works for journals, not just individual posts. Wow! Occasionally I come across a journal that I'd like to read, but I don't want to subscribe yet (maybe I'm checking it out) and the colors and fonts make my eyeballs bleed. No more!

If this is the sort of service the new Russian owners are serving up, I say keep it coming. :-)

Not long after LJ introduced security filters, people started asking for the ability to see all entries posted to a particular filter. I'm really surprised they didn't see that coming at the time. I mean, how else can you rationally audit your own security settings and answer questions like "when did I actually use this?".

Well, they finally did it, at least for paid members. (I don't know when or if this will roll out to everyone else.) The magic URL is:

http://journalname.livejournal.com/security/level
(replace level with: public, friends, private, or group:groupname)

Details here.

passionateusers has an interesting post about effects of Twitter. Twitter is ...a web site? an RSS feed? something else?... that encourages users to answer the question "what are you doing right now?". Gah. I can't imagine being interested in following that. It's got to be a hundred times worse than the LJ users who post one-liners a dozen times a day -- "now I'm leaving for work", "ugh, bad traffic", "eww, that sandwich has seen better days", and so on. Obviously, given its popularity, Twitter has something to offer, so maybe I'm just not seeing the good side, but I am not motivated to either read or supply that kind of content. As the Creating Passionate Users post says, I don't want to know that much about someone, even someone close.

Anyway, Creating Passionate Users talks about other down-sides, most notably creating the illusion of social interaction without, you know, that part about people. There are already many trackbacks and comments, which I haven't had time to peruse yet, but I recommend the article.

Twitter isn't a new concept, of course; it's just taking an older one and pushing on it. One thing that Twitter, blogs/LJ, web fora, newsgroups, and even email have in common is that they can create social divides. I see this with some of the LJ users I know: you'll be at a party or other social gathering and a subset of people will start talking about what so-and-so posted, or won't share news because it's already been posted to LJ. We saw this with mailing lists and newsgroups too, but the LJ case is more insidious because it's not all one big feed. If I'm on, say, the SCA kingdom mailing list, I might or might not have read the post you're talking about but I saw it go by. If we're both on LJ, however, that doesn't mean you and I read the same journals -- but the "on LJ so already knows this" bit gets flipped anyway.

I try not to let my online assumptions bleed into my real-life interactions too much. If I've read something interesting that I want to talk about, I'll describe it unless it's obvious that I don't need to. ("Hey, did you see that XKCD from last week about remembering names? Oh, it was funny -- [insert summary here]. It reminded me of...") And most of the people I spend time with are good about this too, but it requires conscious attention, which makes it somewhat vulnerable. We're bound to slip up sometimes even if we do pay attention; it's certain that the people who don't pay attention will.

Back when I first got online (ARPAnet and Usenet/UUCP), the email divide was between the haves and have-nots. Today the online divide is largely between the will and will-nots -- but we have to remember that there are will-nots, and that it's not one big switch -- you can be a user of email but not LJ, LJ but not IM, IM but not Twitter, (LJ but not that journal), and so on.

Creating Passionate Users talks about the effects of a particular tool (Twitter) on the individual. That's one dimension. We also need to pay attention to the effects we have on each other because of our tool use.

Now, to be fair, it's not really just about online content versus not, either. Fundamentally, this is an issue of manners; the people who dominate party conversations with talk of their particular hobby/community/etc and assume you know and care are committing the same transgression. But the net does seem to have an amplifying effect, and it's worth paying attention to that.

[Sorry for any duplication. Will delete if this makes it through.]

Ok, this is interesting. I can't truly complete the experiment until I get home, but in pursuit of more data...

This is actually the second recent posting outage for some LJ users; there was one a week earlier, which I discovered when I came back from Shavu'ot and tried to post. The web interface seemed to be broken so I tried posting by email (from my shell account, which is not hosted in my home); the email bounced. I'm pretty sure I filed a support request; if I did, it went unanswered.

When the current problem started last Thursday, I again tried posting by email and it again failed. Then I saw advice from LJ support saying to post by email, so I tried again, it bounced again, and I filed the first of what would eventually be three related bug reports. The first two went unanswered; the third one generated a request for more information. (Progress!) Also yesterday, I learned by exploring the support queue (where you get better information than the status page if you don't mind some digging) that the problem might be related to IP address. I can't access the web site from work (my only network presence other than home), but I can send email.

My short email post from work got through; so did one from an email mirror site that's served by the same ISP as my home. (Different IP address, obviously, but same region of the topography as my hindered home address.) It might be that all short email gets through just like short posts via the web interface do, so now it's time to try a longer email post. If this were sent from my shell account it would presumably bounce (based on past behavior); I wonder what will happen if I send it from my email mirror and from work.