As best as I can tell, this (and a bunch of the other new Draft features) were done by Blogger East in the Cambridge office. Looking forward to sitting next to them come August. - Mihai Parparita
Cambridge is soon to be overflowing with awesome. :) - Erica Baker
Mihai, tell them to add a comment spam filter. Even something basic like blocking a certain user ID or a comment that is posted over and over again. Two days ago, I had to delete 130 identical spam comments. I don't like moderating comments because it diminishes the value of a "live" blog. - Ionut
Yeah, I agree with Ionut. Anything to help with comment spam control would be great. Every now and then some spammer likes to go and flood every post on my blog with comments containing nothing but linked keywords (usually in Chinese or Italian). I don't know whether to be pleased by the fact that rel=nofollow makes this mostly pointless, or even more annoyed that the spammers continue with this behavior in spite of that fact. - Laurence Gonsalves
Saw this when the guy left a comment on one of my items. I guess "block" is an OK way to deal with this sort of thing for now. - Mihai Parparita
Proactively blocked. This is already the second one - the first was an English mortgage-ad or so, posted to a German discussion. So not subtle. - sebmos
But what about the slipperyslopeness of this? Maybe I'm just being too hippy'ish here, but if everyone did that, there'd be no comments. It's basically, a "No, you first." "No, you!" standoff. It's admittedly a tough balance with Friendfeed (and beyond), eh? 1) Show the user specifically what they request. 2) Show the user what they actually want. 3) Show the user stuff that will help enrich the community (e.g. surface less-popular stuff). Tough to manage all three! - Adam Lasnik
My use case is that I'm subscribed to (for example) Jeremy Zawodny's blog in Reader, and I already see/read his posts there. I only want to see his posts here if they have comments, otherwise it's just wasted space. - Mihai Parparita
I think there are plenty of people who will "go first", either because they just like more volume, or because they feel closer to the feed in question (they know the poster in real life, or care more about the topic, or whatever). I think the only real balance is with UI simplicity, I don't think there's any need to force-feed people anything they don't want just to jumpstart comments. Super-Hide could easily be a giant dialog box (I also want "eliminate all FOAF last.fm entries", for example). - ⓞnor
I do this in Friendfork (http://friendfork.appspot.com) for Reader shared items (it actually creates duplicates for both likes and comments right now, but I'm going to change it to comments only). I want to do this for blog posts too, but I need to either implement feed discovery myself (not sure how well that will work with appengine timeouts) or have the FF api return feed urls in addition to html urls. - Ben Darnell
The "My Library" feature of Google Book Search is sort of nice (insofar as you can search over all your books). Might make a good FriendFeed source too, insofar as it has an RSS output. - Mihai Parparita
I like LibraryThing for this (which is already a FF source). - Erica Baker
wow, I didn't even know about this "My Library" thing. Used all sorts of 3rd-party apps. Unfortunately, it's pretty English-language and American centric. - Ihar Mahaniok
I would like to see Google Books' My Library feature added as a service in FriendFeed. - Voyagerfan5761
When Gmail was first released, someone wrote a script to guess invite codes, which were composed of a large random number + an HMAC. Needless to say, it didn't work :) - Paul Buchheit
not sure though what's the sense in obscuring these URLs in the first place. :) - Ihar Mahaniok
I have thought the same things as Ihar. Why obscure shared item URLs? Aren't they meant to be shared? google.com/reader/shared/username, anybody? - Voyagerfan5761
Hah! Louis I actually did try that when I first launched RSSmeme. After running my script for like 5 minutes and finding absolutely nothing I gave up. It's just too big and it's seeded with false accounts (who have nothing shared and numbers for names). - Benjamin Golub
I was going to complain about the lack of color (in a $3.6 billion probe) but a commenter indicated that color is usually after the fact anyway (and is overdone?). - Mihai Parparita
Sort of. Each camera (narrow-angle, wide-angle) has a set of filter wheels in front of a (carefully calibrated) CCD array. To take an "as if you were there" color picture, they take three separate pictures, once with each of a red, green, and blue filter. Spending three images on one target and using those particular filters isn't very scientifically valuable, so they really only do that for press photos, and in the extended mission mostly they don't do it at all. - ⓞnor
Note that they have two dozen filters, designed for all kinds of scientific imaging; the red/green/blue ones are just three of them. So even if they take one image with different filters, the best science will probably not come from using visual red/green/blue filters. But you can take the result of three non-RGB filters and display them with RGB pixels for a "false color" image. - ⓞnor
any idea how quickly can they switch between filters? and how quickly they can take/transmit pictures? what kind of bandwidth do they have? - it seems like, unless its quite restricted, you could just snap away like mad - like how people take digital pictures now vs how they used to use film cameras - bob
High-gain antenna bandwidth is around 250 kbps, subject to conditions (weather at Earthside receivers, occultation by Saturn or the Sun, spacecraft orientation, etc). The solid state data recorders can store around 300KB. I don't know how long it takes to change filter wheels, but exposures can be as long as several minutes. There are lots of scientists who want to look at lots of things, often with many exposures over time, and the cameras can only point one place at a time. - ⓞnor
Remember, Cassini was built in the '90s, and it was built very conservatively. Using solid state recorders instead of a tape drive was considered a major leap and quite scary (would radiation destroy the data?). In many ways, Cassini is the end of the line for basic design principles that started with the Voyagers, and because of the expense, the mission planners were extremely risk averse. So, compared to modern consumer electronics, it's quite primitive. - ⓞnor
