Great speech but I wish he didn't do it in a football stadium. Only helps to perpetuate the notion among the swing voters that he is somehow "different" and is just a rockstar personality. - David
He's such a great speaker, and has great stories to tell. The crowd was cheering more than it ever would for the Broncos. - Jeremy Campbell via twhirl
David, it didn't seem to hurt Kennedy at the convention in 1960 when he gave his "New Frontier" speech. :-) - Karim
I really don't get the big deal over the venue. Guess what, a Presidential candidate is *bigger* than a rock star. Um, hello, leader of the free world? And how many *millions* watch on TV? So, what's the big to-do over having more people see him speak in person? Sounds like a backhand elitist comment. - AJ Kohn
I rather have americans engaged in a presidential campaign b/c his decisions impact the future of our country not the Jonas Brothers. ashame to see Americans criticized for caring - Ruth Ferguson
Everyone is missing the point of why he wanted to do it in a venue like that. He didn't want to limit it to the delegates and a few lucky supporters. He wanted to open it up to as many people as possible because WE'RE the ones who've made his campaign possible. It wasn't to be a rockstar. Whether he did it face to face with 85 thousand or 2 million via a television screen, IT DOESN'T MATTER. - ::Kristen::
I love the description of seeing New York from an airplane and feeling a surge of joy. Que lindo! - Jeannie Choi via Bookmarklet
"Sometime over the course of a person’s first year in New York, there usually comes that moment. It can happen in the first days or weeks, or after 10 months. It can happen repeatedly, or without people noticing, at least not at first.
Newcomers suddenly realize either that the city is not working for them or that they are inexorably becoming part of it, or both. They find themselves walking and talking faster.
The subway begins to make sense. Patience is whittled away; sarcasm often ensues. New friends are made, routines established, and city life begins to feel like second nature. In other words, newcomers find themselves becoming New Yorkers." - Dan Hsiao
I really like the intro to the article (above). Ah... NY, how i <3 thee... - Dan Hsiao
You should get there first and check in. - Braden Kowitz
I'm suspicious. Why is he using your email address? Unless they're just sending it to the address they already have on file (not realizing it's a different Kevin Fox). You should call and make sure they have the "right" Hyatt rewards number (yours). - Cyrus Lendvay
He's using kevin.fox@gmail.com, an email I don't use, but which I have. Sometimes it's a hotel, sometimes a UPS package, sometimes a conference registration. I don't think it's nefarious, just that he probably has a similar email address but forgets... - Kevin Fox
Maybe he couldn't get kevin.fox@gmail.com and so went for something very close (kevin.foxx maybe) and always forgets? - Benjamin Golub
you should hire a local to leave him a bag of $#it at the front desk. - Dustin
Ben: That's what I suspect. Dustin: Why? I don't harbor him any ill will. I just want him to know he's using my email address by mistake. - Kevin Fox
Better, you should leave him flowers with a note letting him know he's using the wrong email address. - Cyrus Lendvay
I'm sorry, I guess I'm just a little too fresh off of my recent Ebay scam where I was ousted $800 and a lens. - Dustin
Is his address in some of these reservations? At worst you could send SnailMail[tm], an ancient communication type which uses a very inefficient, but generally reliable transport mechanism. If the message is of considerable size, just be sure it's using the African Swallow transport rather than the European. - George Saj
This is happening to me too! There's another Jeanette who continually uses my email address for online purchases. I get her order confirmations all the time. Boy does she buy some crazy stuff... - Jeanette Martinez
This is happening to me too! There's another Kevin Fox who has taken control of my gmail account, and is sending me flowers at every hotel I visit. - Amit Patel
I got an email receipt for another Keith P. the other day for a book on eugenics and nazis and stuff. Oy. - Keith Pelczarski
+1 as well. My notes were from his circle of friends, and I even found the guy due to another address. When his friends still did it a year later, I created filters to reply back to them all with the same note then delete it from gmail. It's gotta be a little confusing to the sender to get it right back... with FW: on it. - Jason Silverstein
Here's the original article on the story - it's based on an animal model so probably a long time before we might see anything for humans: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.... - Sally Church
Oddly, in the same journal there was another one on topical application of a black raspberry based gel to treat pre-malignant oral lesions in humans for chemoprevention: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.... - Sally Church
No, they are different. Black raspberries <> blackberries. @felix, did you have it fresh? I believe they are most often made into preserves, etc. - torque
"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
"In speech after speech, the Democrats pointed to Senator Barack Obama’s plan to put 1 million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on American roads by 2015—and to rebuild the American auto industry in the process—as the cornerstone of his plan for energy independence." - Karen Padham Taylor via Bookmarklet
Like to plug-in hybrids, dislike to direct Governmental manipulation of auto industry. Give me a tax credit if you like, but a president can't and shouldn't rebuild any industry. - David Knight
The subsidy going to a half-solution like plugin hybrids could fund a grad student's work for a few months. Research is the only option to get an alternative energy source that is cheaper than coal. - Ivan Kirigin
plug-in hybrids... designed to compromise here and there just for sake of oil industry NOT dying in very short time... - silpol
Short terms solutions DO have a place (esp. if you want to get elected), but I agree I'd love to see the gov't get more into the R&D business. It may not be entirely logical or cost effective but the push to Mars excites me for this reason (and you know, all the dorky sci-fi reasons) - David Knight
@David Knight - re: govt manipulation: agreed on principle, but what about in the case where an industry is stonewalling out of greed and plain stubbornness? Don't the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? I'm buying a car right now and I'm shocked that 11 years later after my previous purchase, cars are _still_ getting the same mileage (other than select few hybrids)! That is just disgusting. - Steve
Hybrid sales and production are rising and hopefully the costs will be coming down (maybe are already?) Demand and profits are hard for companies to ignore, and if they do then the shareholders will eventually take care of that. I have no problems with legislating MPG requirements, but manipulation coming from the Executive branch (as the quote seems to indicate) seems very wrong. - David Knight
If lots of people had been buying cars based on fuel efficiency, carmakers would be competing to get better fuel efficiency. If people instead buy cars based on how many cupholders and DVD players they have, carmakers will compete to get more cupholders and DVD players. - Amit Patel
morons. hybrids are not America's future. they are Japan's past - Noah David Simon
I see your point, no technology more popular in another country could ever be useful here and with the stagnant state of technology in general we'll certainly never see any useful advancements in our lifetimes. Thank you for showing me the light!!! I'll head over to the car lot and order my Flintstones car tomorrow. - David Knight
funny but America made a huge gamble by not investing in hybrids, but in full electric cars instead. We need to stop kicking ourselves for not making that compromise. We did the right thing. - Noah David Simon
"While acknowledging there are unique problems with determining the reasonable needs of children of high-earning families, the court said trial judges should nevertheless avoid overindulgence -- citing the doctrine of In re Patterson, 920 P.2d 450 (Kan. App. 1996), that "no child, no matter how wealthy the parents, needs to be provided [with] more than three ponies."" - Tudor Bosman via Bookmarklet
"Jean set their clothing needs at $27,000 a year, since the children needed new outfits every time they saw their father and one of them demanded a new purse every time she left the house." - Alex Mendes da Costa
"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
Your welcome Paul, you guys inspire the heck out me...American techie dream in real time...neat! - Susan Beebe
my flickr upload appeared much faster just now... are you guys using XMPP for flickr? - Travis Parsons
and written in .py :)- but if we throttle "generate_sup_update(db, 120)" and "SUP feed:
{"since_time": "2008-08-12T01:44:49Z", "period": 120," [[..|..]]" , so if we take "120" and make it lets say "30", wont this make the load even more to both sides ? - Peter Dawson
It's nice to see FF innovating things... its what I miss about livejournal back when it was just danga interactive. - Dave Dash
just curious, how to read SUP? pronounce sap or soup or syoop? - huixing
'sup, like the shortened version of "what's up?" - Tudor Bosman
So, where's the "omg it's not XML you idiots" backlash? - ⓞnor
Atom streams look more effective performance-wise and just a little bit harder to implement on both sides. See SixApart's: http://updates.sixapart.com/ - Alex Kapranoff
More than a little bit harder! Dealing with never-ending XML streams is a massive pain (see: XMPP), and keeping connections open is trouble. Also, the sixapart updates stream is a firehose that gives you all of the content being posted, you have no opportunity to filter out only those feeds you care about. The FF design is pretty much totally more awesome. - ⓞnor
work with feedburner to give you a ping every time one of the feeds changes and you can replace 5h with 'whenever it occurs' ;) - Nicole Simon
I can't wait for a DUDE or YO companion protocol. - abacab
Nice idea, one thing to include would be the information if a resource (feed) has been deleted, whereby one can build a mirroring system over RSS. - Christian Sonntag
Christian: no need; "deleted" is a special case of "updated". If a feed is listed as modified in SUP, the feed consumer will try to refetch the feed, and notice that it no longer exists. - Tudor Bosman
"FriendFeed Inc. is enhancing its service in order to fulfill a critical requirement on the Internet today: immediacy. The highly publicized startup is weeks away from boosting the frequency of its updates from social networks" - Louis Gray via Bookmarklet
What does SUP (Simple Update Protocol) do exactly, it's more than a http header last-modified check? - Philipp Lenssen
I'm interested in learning the details, too. my guess is some type of callback scheme that was discussed on ff a while back when ff was (gently) called out for polling flickr millions of times/day. - David Vasileff
also perhaps batching multiple feed requests into a single call - David Vasileff
That's it ... no more hikes in the afternoon! (Sharing .... ) - Charlie Anzman
theory 1: a single "meta feed" which you can poll to get a list of other feeds that have changed recently. (would it cover all feeds on the service, or would FF somehow supply a list of all the feeds they're interested in?) theory 2: a callback/ping/PIMP notification when a feed or feeds change (HTTP? XMPP?). theory 3: a formalization of the "public feed" concept, where you roll every (public) update on the service into a single (rapidly rolling!) feed which FF polls and gets updates for. - ⓞnor
Someone has to talk to someone to indicate a change occurred, so you can't skip that step, be it push or pull. So my guess is it's a way to get a larger aggregated chunk of what has changed and an idea of the size of the change. What might work is a bulk push of what has changed and then a pull of the changes at FF's leisure. - todd
Providing facts is just cheating. Now there's no room for rampant speculation :-) Add a sequence number and you could know if you missed an update which would indicate polling needed to occur or perhaps a download of the old change notices. - todd
great stuff. imho, when adopted, SUP will be - to the organic growth of services updates - like traffic lights to crowded intersections. or like how gps navigation is to asking people for directions :P - Dani Radu
Sounds like it's a protocol that others will need to implement and support so friendfeed can process feeds more efficiently. alot of the issues could be fixed if if-modified-since was used and rss feeds were treated more like a web service rather then a static html page, most are generated from a db real-time anyway. Read RFC 977, NNTP fixed this issue by setting up an easy way to poll what's new back in the 80's. - Shawn McCollum
WOWOWOWOW...this technology is huge! Disruptive and fantastic!! If I had VC level cash, I'd throw it at FF brainiacs and be rich... this idea is unbelievably SMART! - Susan Beebe
Shawn, we actually already use If-Modified-Since and many sites do properly support it. The key difference with SUP is that it allows feed consumers to monitor many thousands of URLs with a single GET, which is not possible using If-Modified-Since. - Paul Buchheit
If anything, it shares a few similarities with Sitemaps (which enable webmasters to notify search engines of modified URLs, etc.) Great work on SUP! - Aviv
This is one of those simple ideas that one wonders why no one thought of before. It's a good proposal and a required one in the rapidly growing aggregation/Lifestreaming world. I am sure the proposal will be widely and quickly SUPported. Well done folks. - Vinay | विनय
paul, I found and read the ff blog post, and I understand the meta-feed approach. Interesting but I think sup-id storage adds a bit of complexity. Even though the sup-id keeps the size of the feed down, full uri would be better. I think the concern about exposing usernames is a little overdone, I mean it's not going to really stop someone who wants the usernames from getting them. - Shawn McCollum
Love it. We've used a different approach to interface with "friendly" crawlers, one that is based on the ability to fetch older items in the feeds by request. But it requires a public "recent" feed, and does not work solve the private URLs issue. This is so much better. We'll be experimenting with SUP and would love to help it mature into a well defined spec. - Yaniv Golan
"We just launched a new set of customizable FriendFeed widgets for spicing up your blog or web site. There are several ways to embed FriendFeed, and you can pick as many of them as you want." - Paul Buchheit
Thanks for more options but still JS only. :( The likelihood of any site I don't maintain allowing me to use JS is slim to non. Please add 1 flash widget? Pretty please? With sugar on top? - Erica Baker
FWIW, in http://pastebin.ca/1186734 I've put my FriendFeed badge setup. Stolen elsewhere, I forgot where, thanks to the original author. Hope it helps. - Cesar Cardoso
For those that are using the feed widget, note that you can change num=x in case the defaults of 1,5, or 10 aren't what you want. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
me again - it seems not to be picking up my default CSS values like the other widgets - it still insists on showing up as a white background black text. See http://pflix.com for example. - Mark Bean
Mark, the white is div class = friendfeed widget and needs to have the background overridden, it's set to white (obviously). The classes in the nested divs below it should inherit the new BG color. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
"And frankly, people here seem to be happier with a little bit of middle management. Not middle management that's going to overrule the decisions they make on their own. Not symbolic middle management that only makes people feel important. But middle management that creates useful channels of communication. If my job is getting obstacles out of the way so my employees can get their work done, these managers exist so that, when an employee has a local problem, there's someone there, in the office next door, whom they can talk to." - Dan Hsiao
I'm definitely not a fan of having processes/bureaucracy for the sake of having processes/bureaucracy, but I'm also not a fan of NOT having processes/bureaucracy for the sake of not having processes/bureaucracy. - Dan Hsiao
January 2003, iChat for me, AIM for her. iChat was kind enough to log it all. - Kevin Fox
I think Rob has some of our first emails...always fun to reminisce. Good luck with your upcoming wedding you two! - Clare Dibble
It took me a bit of searching, but I did find them. I also found our original profiles. I can definitely see why I was attracted to Clare. She was, and still is, exactly what I was looking for. May your wedding be great, and your marriage even greater. Clare and I have found marriage to be more fun than we had ever imagined. - Robert Felty
Thank you both very much! Besides reminiscing, reading our very first email has cleared up one long term augment. Kevin often blames me for his sleep habits. He goes to bed with me around 1 or 2 then gets up around 7ish and doesn't get enough sleep. However in our first ever IM conversation he says: "I often get by on 4-6 hours sleep, though my ideal schedule is probably sleeping from 1-2am to 7-8am." :b ;) - Rachel L Fisher
I just re-read in one of Clare's very first e-mails that she worked as a filing clerk in a law office, which she mentioned last week. When she said it last week, it seemed like completely new information to me. - Robert Felty
Oh the things we learn, and re-learn about our relationships as time goes on. :) - Rachel L Fisher
I have hard copies of my first emails with Paul, but I wish there was someway I can pull up the emails themselves. Alas, this was way before Gmail and Hotmail has long since deleted my account. So lame! - April Buchheit
"When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
I'm glad the NYT shed some light on this very important issue. The paradox of clean energy in this country is that we can build as many solar and wind farms as possible but the places where you would build them often have the worst infrastructure. Updating the grid is an expensive and timely endeavor, but obviously necessary. - grant
