brad's life

I'm not sure LiveJournal is violating the COPPA Act, but I'm going to make some changes right now to be very sure it is not.... $11,000 fines per violation suck.

Heh, okay, this is pretty sick and twisted, but playing with all the graph-drawing software lately, and being inspired by the sex chart evan's told me about on IRC, I decided to make a undirected graph of people I know at UW and who's got with who. dotted lines indicated roommate relationships (to hold the graph together, and because it's just interesting.) please note that not all the solid edges constitute a sexual relationship, but merely a "relationship" in some form or another, usually at least kissing.

guess i'm going to bed now. pretty productive day i guess. tomorrow is laundry day. (i've been saying that for awhile, haven't I? :-))

awake. going to go to econ today, surprisingly.

started 3 loads of laundry.... nobody else was down there. have to get it out at 25 after.

10 minutes until i have to go get my laundry out of the dryer. Eli's sleeping and snoring in the beanbag. I got a job offer on the east coast (in Pennsylvania) for this summer, sounds pretty interesting, think I'm going to take it. Never been to the east coast, except for Miami and Orlando, and a few random airports.

how I get distracted, a case study: I'm about to leave to go take a shower, but then I get an email. Damnit .. another one of these LiveJournal "Reply to your post..." messages. These are starting to constitute the majority of my mail. And I really hate having to click on the link to fire up my browser to reply, or pressing "V" in pine and navigating through lynx. Soo... I decided I need to make the server send mail that includes a form inside the email you can fill out.... but what about all the people that can have text-only in their mail? Simple --- I just send the message as multi-part/mixed or multi-part/alternative. Okay, do some research on that. Oh, look, there's a MIME::Lite perl module on CPAN to do this.... kinda. It doesn't quite work how I'd expect. Okay, fuck it, I'll do it myself... let's copy Outlook Express's headers... they work well. Fire up pine, press "H" for full headers mode.... damnit Pine (or UW's IMAP server), the message has already been parsed and fragmented, I can't see the full text of the message body, so I can't tell the Content-Disposition and Content-Type on the individual parts. (but I do see they're using multi-part/alternative... remember that). Okay, let's just sniff my windows ethernet card from linux and see what's OE is sending to my SMTP server.... hm, maybe I should download a new version of Ethereal. Oh damn, this version's configure script is bitching about my out-of-sync glib.h headers and library version. Gotta go fix that. Okay, fixed. Ethereal compiling now. (Shit, wasn't I going to go take a shower?) See? This happens all the time. This is why I can't sleep at night. This is why I always have 30 xterms open. Grrrr. But if anybody out there is a MIME expert, let me know. (and no Eli, I don't want to see you put white and black face paint all over, go mute and start pretending you're touching an invisible wall ... )

continuing my diversion story from before: ethereal still kinda sucks, so I scrapped that. I then remembered Outlook Express has an option to log SMTP/IMAP/NNTP/etc.. (of course they called SMTP logging "Mail loggin", but I knew what they meant.) Anyway, I looked at the log (after digging to find it in: C:\WINDOWS\Profiles\bradfitz\Application Data\Identities\{CB2D3900-B8E0-11D3-9FB4-CBF35F76F04A}\Microsoft\Outlook Express) It was useless. They stripped everything after DATA to the closing period. So I couldn't see OE's MIME text. So then I just setup a new user account on bradfitz.com, send it some "rich text" mail and looked at the mail spool file. Why didn't I do that to begin with? Anyway, I have OE's raw message body text now (that was way too damn tedious). Time to make Perl's MIME::Lite produce that sort of output, or write my own solution (most likely). Maybe I'll take this as a break and go take a shower. (Shutup Dana, I do not stink. :P)

been working on livejournal and how it sends out "a person replied to your journal/comment" mails, making them all pretty and stuff, learning fun details of MIME in the process. i just went and ate w/ scott. i'm off to a movie now with blythe. my stomach is doing weird things.... hope it doesn't explode or anything in the middle of the movie.

eli's boring and pathetic... he just went to bed. i'm reading up on XML-RPC .

What is XML-RPC?

It's a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet. It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. It's designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.

Quite interesting. Somebody browsing LiveJournal complemented me on LiveJournal's templated style system, documenting the LiveJournal protocol, and proposed I look into XML-RPC if I get bored. It does look pretty interesting. Of course, it makes the clients a bit tougher to write, but it looks like there are already implementation for every language an LJ client is written in already, so it may not be an issue. However, the reality of the situation is that I haven't much time, and old clients will always exist, so making two protocols is kinda silly, but maybe for future projects.... or if I hit severe limitations in the current protocol, I could always phase it out.