I formally object to the inclusion of the "Shannon the Super-dork" picture. I also move to burn all photos from that year of my life :) - Shannon Jiménez
Thanks for sharing Sheila! Lots of great memories come to mind...Jim was a special person. :) So geniuine. And, Shannon...from an aunties point of view you were adorable in that pic. - Skye Miller
He was also liberal, and progressive. Although, not in exactly the same way those terms are used today. But he did fight the established order of his time. - Nathaniel Payne
Except that he wasn't a 'community organizer'. You can, however, say that Paul of Tarsus was one. - Akiva Moskovitz
Jesus brought together a group of people who joined him on a crusade to change the world. If that isn't a community organizer, I don't know what is. Maybe he was mayor. They have more responsibility, you know. - Nathaniel Payne
He sought an earmark for a bridge over the Sea of Galilee, but canceled it when he realized he could just walk right across. - Nathaniel Payne
Christianity didn't start until after Jesus died; he had nothing to do with it. It was Peter and Paul that actually turned it into a religion. Jesus was just a radical Essene Rabbi. - Akiva Moskovitz
Reminds of the movie Hamlet 2 I just saw (my gf says it's funnier if you were in high school drama) - Chris Lamprecht
Akiva's closer to pegging it than the original quote. Jesus didn't handle much of the organization tasks, even for his own circle of disciples. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Mark: So he was good at delegation? Akiva: Who mentioned Christianity? I'm talking about the man and his life, not the later global repercussions. - Kevin Fox
Akiva: that's about as accurate as saying "Judaism didn't start until after Moses died; he had nothing to do with it. It was Joshua and Samuel that actually turned it into a religion. Moses was just a used car salesman without a lot." - Mark Trapp
Oh, well, in that case, that quote is even more wrong. - Akiva Moskovitz
Yeah, this creepy faith-based stuff has been around a long time. ;) - Jay Tannenbaum
From http://www.nycahn.org/communit...: "Community organizing is a long-term approach where the people affected by an issue are supported in identifying problems and taking action to achieve solutions. The organizer challenges those he or she works with to change the way things are—it is a means of achieving social change through collective action by changing the balance of power." Yup, that sounds exactly like Jesus. Just read John 2:13-16. - Rob Reed
Mark Trapp, except that's a hell of a lot more words than I used with a hell of a lot more subtext. It's also wildly inaccurate as Moses did found a religion (although not really by choice) and, as far as I remember, Jesus didn't have any interest in creating a new religion. If I recall correctly, Paul of Tarsus didn't get the ball rolling until some 50 years later. - Akiva Moskovitz
Akiva: You're proving my point. Jesus was trying to foster social change through the grassroots, but wasn't trying to create a religion. The *last* thing I'm trying to say is that community organizers (Obama or others) are trying to proselytize into an organized religion or overthrow the status quo. Rather they're trying to help people at the community level, and that acting to better your community shouldn't be disdained or belittled. Politics is already seen as the vacuum of altruism. - Kevin Fox
I just ate a mango. Where's Sean for our lecture on Judaism? - Jay Tannenbaum
Ghandi was probably a good community organizer, too - Mark Dykeman
Akiva, you're belaboring a woefully ignorant understanding of early Christianity that isn't supported by any documentation we have of that time. St. Paul was converted, as most historians agree, circa AD 36, 3 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. Paul, prior to his conversion, was persecuting those spreading the Gospel (indicating that there were religious missions pre-dating Paul). He immediately worked with James and Peter (Apostles of Christ who knew Him personally) before starting his own mission shortly thereafter. Most of our primary sources from Paul are dated 48-55 AD, 15 years after the crucifixion. - Mark Trapp
Akiva, In fact, the Gospel according to Mark is dated as early as 70 AD, only 40 years after the death of Jesus. In all four gospels, Jesus rejects the covenant God has with Abraham, Isaac, and Israel and supplants it with a new everlasting covenant. Josephus, the only independent historian contemporary of Jesus, confirms that Jesus wasn't a Rabbi, but preaching a new religion. Jesus was, by all accounts, preaching a new covenant, not a modification of the old. You know not what you speak. - Mark Trapp
Mark, I appreciate the information; it's been a long time since I've read up on Early Christianity. However, your final statement was an unnecessary punctuation on an otherwise well-appreciated mini-education on something I have never, ever claimed expertise in. I do appreciate you correcting where I was wrong but there was no need for that closing remark. - Akiva Moskovitz
And Jesus answered and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he said, “Rabbi, what is it?” (Luke 7:40)
A lawyer asked him a question to test him: “Rabbi, what is the greatest commandment in the Torah?” (Matthew 22:35-36)
And behold, a [rich] man came up to him and said, “Rabbi, what good thing must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16)
And someone in the crowd said to him, “Rabbi, order my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” (Luke 12:13)
And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Rabbi, rebuke your disciples.” (Luke 19:39)
Some of the Sadducees came up to him…and they asked him, saying, “Rabbi….” (Luke 20:27-28) - Jay Tannenbaum
Akiva, you made a completely inaccurate claim about Christianity with a level of conviction conveying a statement of fact, then pressed the issue when I pointed out that it was inaccurate. As I know you can appreciate, as I've seen you mention it before on FriendFeed, misrepresentations of one's religious beliefs only serves to frustrate those who believe and alienate those who don't. - Mark Trapp
Akiva, going back to my original comment: obviously it's offensive to you to have someone just come in and say Moses didn't really have anything to do with Judaism and was of a completely different profession. It's just as offensive to hear from someone, as you're now saying, who isn't well versed in the literature make a statement of fact that is completely contradictory to everything a Christian knows and believes. - Mark Trapp
I think a rabbi in those days (and these days) was a learned man, a teacher -- as the text itself reflects. He was certainly both. - Jay Tannenbaum
Jay: in most other English translations, it's translated as "teacher," not Rabbi, as it would be an equivocation to assume Jesus was of the Rabbinical tradition. Just because Rabbi literally means teacher doesn't infer that teacher means Rabbi. I don't really get it. Do you see any of the Christians here waxing intellectual about Judaism? How do you not see this as offensive? - Mark Trapp
Didn't Jesus' "community" willingly give him up to the Romans? - Sprague D
Oh, and honestly: what does whether or not Jesus started the religion have to do with Kevin's point? I don't get how that was considered a method of refutation to what Kevin is suggesting. - Mark Trapp
Mark: As you can see from my comment. I think we agree. No waxing. Jesus is all yours. Sorry. - Jay Tannenbaum
Mark, calm down. I was simply wrong about something and was gracious when corrected. If you're offended, that's your problem. I write and speak with conviction. That's just how I am. If there was any conviction in my tone here, it's because I thought I was right about something. I wasn't. I'm fine with that. No need to continue to be an ass about it especially when I've already expressed appreciation for having been corrected. - Akiva Moskovitz
@Mark: It's all a moot point, anyway, as Jesus wasn't running for President. He might make a good president, but I don't think even the most fervent Obama supporters claim he has the power to work miracles (which might give Jesus the edge over your typical community organizer). - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Okay, 'ass' is too strong of a word. You're not being an ass. Overly defensive and offended, perhaps. But you're not being an ass. I apologize for that. - Akiva Moskovitz
Mark, I think a lot of people would've been asking if America was ready for a Muslim president, by virtue of him coming from Galilee. Even if it pre-dated Islam by 600 years. Akiva, I think you hit two hot points for me, and I went off, for which I apologize. The first of course is the misrepresentation of Christianity, but the second is the tendency in social media for people to say things strongly and forcefully first, then do a "mea culpa, I didn't really know" when corrected. That's just the way a lot of people are: usually I take it in stride, but the two combined really hit a nerve. It's not really personal, I like you, so again I apologize for going at you like such. - Mark Trapp
If Jesus was a community organizer, he didn't do a very good job of it. His community didn't seem to take kindly to what he was trying to do (which is mostly teaching). - Glen Campbell
Seriously, Ghandi... community organizer... good example, right? - Mark Dykeman
@Rizzin - it seems Jesus was close to being a political ruler. That one of the reasons why he was crucified. - Joel
Most coveted job title on Earth right now, huh? So, now you're on the squad, what's the minimum bribe to get you gushing forth to the guys on the merits of being able to tag our own (or each others) posts? - Slippy Lane
Congratulations!! Smart move by FriendFeed. :) - felix
greeaat news for all involved. congrsts. - Alex Gawley
Congrats Ben! I could see that coming at some point - Dobromir Hadzhiev
Congratulations! I knew it was coming when I noticed you'd been making changes and even had a FF email address... and there was no denial: http://beta.friendfeed.com/e/5... - Tony Ruscoe
This is recognition for his great work! Congrats! - Winston Teo
No. Last time they got in because there was a vulnerability in Dreamhost's user panel and passwords were kept in cleartext. After that I changed all my passwords and only use encrypted methods for access. My best guesses are that they either installed a backdoor last time that I didn't see/disable, or Dreamhost hasn't updated their openssh keys after all openssh keys were found to be vulnerable. - Kevin Fox
Kevin, have you considered a VPS? They're a little bit pricier, but you get a whole lot more control. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
i wonder if it's at all linked to the wordpress hackings with links getting appended to the bottom of pages. - Dustin
This one was different than last time. They edited my .htaccess file so certain urls would redirect to other urls (sapping pagerank). VERY strangely, at the same time they cleaned up some spam files they put in before, probably thinking they were less likely to get caught if they moved to the cleaner system. - Kevin Fox
Mike Sego had reasonably good experiences with 1and1 - Sanjeev Singh
damn. that's scary. is there a way to prevent this on our own? I wonder if I set the wrong change mode (CHMOD) settings. - Dustin
Dustin, the modified files were all 644, with me being the owner. Talk about 'the call is coming from *inside* the house'... - Kevin Fox
'the call is coming from *inside* the house' - yes, these were my thoughts exactly. Someone is backdooring the whole thing which is making me finally think about closing my 4 year relationship with Dreamhost. - Dustin
Matt, I think your commitment to being out front and transparent with users is awesome. You are a busy guy, but we on the outside appreciate you taking the time to address stuff in a clear way that doesn't reek of PR disinfectants. - Sacca
I think when Gmail was first introduced there was a simlar disclaimer-like line in terms mentioning that Google reserved itself a right to screen all emails to and fro the user registered with it. There were even an article or two crying foul on Gmail censorship. See how we all got used to it now and never even remember :) - Hayk Hakobyan
Thanks, Sacca. It's weird because I consciously don't want to be a Google fanboy, but Chrome just rocks so hard that it's difficult to stay neutral. It's just really exciting to share one of Google's greatest long-time secrets with the world today. - Matt Cutts
“I've been trying out the iphone app, PhotoSwap, and enjoying it thoroughly. The best photo so far, a handwritten note that reads: "Strange Coincidence -> Castor & Pollack"”
Second bests include: a conversation consisting of shots of shoes, one conversation swapping photos of food in the fridge, and another with strange book covers. - sara
As discussed with Robin, a fellow PhotoSwapper, a brilliant part of this app is that there is no trace or record of your conversation saved by the app. This is a feature that I haven't seen at all in this era where memory is cheap, and if it can be stored/archived it is. - sara
It was great while it lasted. Recently all of my carefully chosen shots have been rewarded with pictures of feet, blurs, or frat boys with beercans. - Robin Barooah
Sad-- I was quite attached to it, I haven't played with it for a couple of days . . . but it was pretty great while it lasted. - sara
Even with no persistent record of your conversations, they could still have moderation (or just track the length of conversations to indicate happiness), and then group together people who photo-converse well. - Casey Muller
Yeah - JLP and I were contemplating that - just rank people by number of replies and associate them together. - Robin Barooah
"No I'm not, it's just a pure average of the rankings. You can pretty easily sort by just Alexa or Compete if those rankings feel more authoritative to you.
The accuracy is very questionable, it's all just for fun anyway :-)" - Casey Muller
"Think of it this way: When you go to the movies, you don’t go around to each theater to see which movies are playing and when; it would take all of your time and effort running around from theater to theater. Instead, you check the kiosk out front.
Your blog publishing system provides a RSS kiosk, or ping feed, to let FriendFeed (and potential RSS readers) know when and what has been updated since its last visit. Friendfeed doesn’t have to go theater to theater to see which movie is playing. It also checks all RSSs in a domain at once, eliminating the need to download each one separately. Polling is less frequent, but more accurate. By cutting out a lot of wasted data transfer, it reduces the load and gets the relevant information directly." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
So we need an index for the RSS feeds. Who's gonna post the index of indexes? - Bill Sodeman
I clicked on Paul's link to the code, but it was hard to read because the whitespace was collapsed. Looking at the source it seems that they're nesting the code within tables within <pre> tags. Since <pre> can't contain tables, my browser is ignoring the <pre>s. Why would they do that instead of just putting style="collapse-whitespace:pre" on the table? - Gabe Schaffer
No, Paul, I have a modern browser: IE 6.0sp2. - Gabe Schaffer
I don't know if I'd call IE 6 a "modern browser", considering it was initially released over 7 years ago... in any case you can view the source in plain text here: http://simpleupdateprotocol.go... - Simon Willison
I wouldn't call IE6 a modern browser either, but 14% of the traffic to code.google.com still comes from it, so it does need to be supported -- I'll open a ticket to investigate the issue (I don't have access to Windows right now to confirm). Though @Gabe, since you're a technically inclined person, I'm curious why you are running IE6 rather than FF3 or IE7. - DeWitt Clinton
Most of my clients are still running IE6, so I know that when something works on my machine, it will work on theirs too. Besides, I haven't really found a feature in IE7 or FF that is worth upgrading for. And honestly, I would consider it a bug for a browser to render a block element like a table inside a pre (which only allows certain inline content), particularly on a page that specifies XHTML Strict. I expect the browser to either ignore the pre (like IE6) or ignore the table. - Gabe Schaffer
Cool, thanks for the feedback Gabe. I opened a ticket here: http://code.google.com/p/suppo.... Please feel free to add more detail to that ticket and star it so you can follow the progress. Cheers! - DeWitt Clinton
Thanks Paul. It's definitely an issue that needs to be dealt with. - Daniel Shaw
Since I can find colliding user IDs easily with MD5, is there any risk of a DoS attack? - Steve Weis
I'm not sure what you're asking Steve. Each site generates their own SUP-IDs, so they would be DOSing themselves. - Paul Buchheit
ok plea to all bloggers- please stop using "modest proposal"- you're referencing Swift who was writing satire, about killing Irish babies to prevent/deal with famine. Almost all blogs with this play on the phrase "modest proposal" are not being satirical... so it's a reference without meaning.. I get confused easily, granted. And, not just this post, but there have been others... OK english major out. Thnx. - anna
Paul, maybe I'm misunderstanding the protocol, but I can pick a name that intentionally collides with someone else's SUP-ID. Is there any expectation of collision resistance? - Steve Weis
Steve, The service assigns SUP-IDs. It is in the service's interest to minimize collisions between the SUP-IDs it assigns. - Gary Burd
Steve, each SUP feed has its own SUP-ID space, so you really can't cause problems with other people's feeds. If that's not what you mean, please provide an example of what you have in mind. - Paul Buchheit
@Gabe Raymond's proposal sounds sincere, so it's not really playing off of Swift's joke. Sigh. I guess nobody reads Swift anymore. He was funny! - anna
Steve, IF the service assigns SUP-IDs as md5(username), then yes, you could theoretically get a username that collides with another. But: usernames are usually short, and so you probably won't be able to find a collision with just a few (tens of) characters. Also, as Gary and Paul said, the provider assigns SUP-IDs, and it's in their interest to assign them in a collision-free manner; at the very least, they can hash a secret salt value together with the username. - Tudor Bosman
I've noticed that there is definitely some confusion around SUP. People have said comments like "I'll add it to my blog soon", but I don't think they understand that doing so could actually send MORE traffic to their personal site than they were getting before (from FriendFeed). I think it might help to clarify that this is really useful for large providers like YouTube, blogger.com, Twitter, etc. Personal WordPress installs won't likely benefit. Please correct me if I'm wrong :) - Patrick Lightbody
Patrick, for personal WordPress installs, it would be better to use a shared SUP feed. I'll probably write one when I get a chance. - Paul Buchheit
SUP is also good for providers that aren't big yet but expect to get big, like OurDoings. - Bruce Lewis via fftogo
Until SUP is widely adopted, one feature I'd like to see is "refresh my feeds" button that instructs the backend to refresh the feeds I own right away. - Misha Dynin
"Now Bridges, a four-time Oscar nominee, is rooting through a giant stack of cardboard boxes in his garage. After a while, he clutches something and pulls it out.
"Ahhh," he says. "Here it is."It's the Sweater. As in, the beige and brown zigzag cable-knit sweater that the Dude wears through much of Lebowski. For a die-hard fan, it's like seeing Harrison Ford dig out Indiana Jones' fedora." - bob via Bookmarklet
"For example, if a site such as FriendFeed switched from polling feeds every 30 minutes to polling every 300 minutes (5 hours), and also monitored the appropriate SUP feed every 3 minutes, the total amount of feed polling would be reduced by about 90%, and new updates would typically appear 10 times as fast." - Paul Buchheit
That's a very interesting idea! I think that for the case of push-generated feeds it will show nice improvements over the current polling approach (which is definitely not scalable). I am wondering if there would be a way to employ the same idea for poll-generated feeds (feeds that are retrieved on request only) though. - Alex Popescu
That's correct Alex. SUP works very well for most common feeds, but it's not ideal for more dynamic feeds such as a search (e.g. http://friendfeed.com/search?q... ). However, the vast majority of the feeds consumed by FriendFeed and others map into the SUP model very easily. SUP does not solve all problems, but it provides a very simple solution that should work for 90% of feed publishers. - Paul Buchheit
Alex, a conditional GET applies only to a single URL. SUP allows feed consumers to simultaneously monitor many thousands of feeds with a single GET. - Paul Buchheit
I've told you I might not be fully functional :-). You're right SUP is a container for updated feeds. Should I post any other questions directly to the room? - Alex Popescu
Paul this SUP technology is HOT!! I am totally awed by this disruptive innovative idea.... very impressive and incredibly brilliant!! wow!! - Susan Beebe
