the state of the piranha

[piranha]

i've been writing less personal stuff recently, and instead put up more links to things i find interesting. the reason is that i am fairly non-verbal. i am not writing much in general, no stories, only the lamest of email, and yesterday i even took a break from IM -- really not feeling like IMing today either, so i might extend that break.

but i am not feeling bad. this is prime hibernation time for me anyway, and this year it seems stronger than ever, because i have SO MANY IDEAS burbling in my mind. ideas about things to do with fibre, ideas about collage, about ATCs -- i have hardly time to actually make anything, *snicker*, the ideas just keep coming. i am making things, however, though i am starting more than i am finishing at this time.

works in progress:

- medium-size bag, crochet, patons classic wool, peacock/old gold, which is awaiting felting (the bag itself is finished, but i still need to do the straps)

- small bag, crochet, local wool i koolaid-dyed last year, bright orange-red, needs sewing together and lining

- stole, crochet, gedifra new age, formerly weird tan, now dyed a lovely teal, waiting for embellishments

- socks, knit, elann esprit, light blues, (one done, one to go)

- flowers, crochet, perle cotton in various colours (for a "garden" scarf)

- loose vest, knit, gedifra ombretta and elann highland chunky, greys, (just started first front panel; this one is so pleasant to work and the pattern is dead easy (not mine, it's from stahl nr.8))

- the white project: 15x15cm squares with which i practice new stitch pattern, various yarns. at first i was going to make a scarf out of them, now i am thinking afghan. i have about 20 finished squares.

- paramour's desk extension, wood :), almost done, just needs casters and i think i might put an extra shelf in there (the top features front page cartoons from the economist)

- shelving. my room is mostly done, and i am working on the living room. ok, so this is not overly creative. :) but in the process i am thinking about what art to put where.

- spinning. i am still trying to teach myself to use a drop spindle, and i have a lovely variety of fibre with which to do so. i wish i already knew how to because i want to do some really weird yarns that are fluttering through my mind.

- an LJ <-> NNTP gateway. i want this so badly that i am writing design notes for it, even though i probably won't actually program it

- a sort of shrine tentatively titled "hiraeth yn y mor", various media

it is so thrilling for me to make things with my hands that were born in my own mind.

Comments

[vanbeast.livejournal.com]

an LJ <-> NNTP gateway. i want this so badly that i am writing design notes for it, even though i probably won't actually program it

This is something I just don't understand. I've heard a lot of people talk about it, but I just don't get it. Though, I was never a usenet user, so there might just be something about newsreaders that roxxors and I'm not aware of it.

Enlighten me? :)

LJ <-> NNTP gateway

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

the main advantage for me at this time would be to have a "sequencer": to be able to easily mark and return to a thread and read only the articles posted since i last read it. LJ discussions are incredibly difficult to follow because there is no such thing (this is also why they peter out very quickly, and reach relatively little depth).

also, in no particular order: killfiling of idiots/trolls (so i don't have to see anything they write in other people's journals either), better thread navigation, true crossposting, easier search across all gated journals, posting via an editor i love and use for everything else.

Re: LJ <-> NNTP gateway

[vanbeast.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh. All very good (and interesting) points. If such a thing existed, I'd surely give it a try :)

posting via an editor i love and use for everything else

This is already possible without too much hackery. Well, unless you use some whack-ass editor ;) There are a number of command line clients, all of which I would imagine are suited to wedging into such use. If not, it should be easy to modify thusly.

You know, for until the other thing gets done :)

Here's why, for me....

[brooksmoses]

One of the largest annoyances about LJ, for me, is that when a message falls off the first page of my friendslist, I'm unlikely to notice any additional comments added to it (unless they're in direct reply to something I wrote, so I can get email notification). On a newsreader, on the other hand, messages are recorded as "read" or "unread", which means that it's fairly easy to find all the messages that I haven't seen before -- I don't need to look for them, just hit the "go to next unread message" key until there aren't any left.

It sounds like a small thing, but it really makes a difference to the dynamics of the communities -- it makes large multi-person conversations a dominant communication mode, rather than pushing things towards statement-and-response communications.

Also, most newsreaders have a much nicer interface for reading threads with lots of comments; LJ's interface gets really annoying (for me) when it starts compressing threads so that I have to load a whole new page for each thread even if the thread has only two comments in it.

Some thoughts on the lj -to- nntp gateway.

[brooksmoses]

Well, I tend to think that the design of the LJ <-> nntp gateway is at least a fair bit of the difficulty. Particularly the problem of figuring out when there have been new posts on old threads (is there a way to do this without reloading them all? If not, how often do you reload them? Do you use the same delay for all of them, or load newish ones once an hour, and older ones once a day, and still older ones once a week, or somesuch?), and the even more critical one of handling friendslocked stuff.

(I should preface this by nothing that I'm thinking of a small gateway, run on a small private machine and serving one person, or maybe a half-dozen people though they're likely handled completely separately. This affects the reasonable security tradeoffs, I think, and certainly affects the storage decisions, since having a spool per user is reasonable.)

The thing with friendslocked stuff is handling privileges, and weighing the convenience of "I give the gateway server my password, and it keeps it and archives everything that I have access to whenever it chooses" versus the security of the server only having my password stored when I'm actively connected, and archiving nothing.

Given that this is security of other people's data, and they've not necessarily consented to having it stored on intermediate servers, I'd say the latter model is probably the one to aim at, even if it needs to be compromised. But let's see how close we can come.

First, the actual content of "messages": if the gateway knows which article/comment is being requested, then it can go fetch the "message body" with pretty negligible load on the LJ servers (equivalent to reading it in a browser). It may be worth having it cache (in memory, not on disk) whatever other message bodies are on that page, for a few minutes or the life of the user's session, so as not to reload a page 30 times if it has 30 comments on it.

Second, the "header" information. I'm not sure about "real" newsreaders, but the newsreaders that I use tend to cache message headers, and so they don't need to look at all message headers in the newsgroup every time they open a session. Thus, a relatively small number of headers are being accessed at any one time. And, on the other end, if the gateway knows what url it's getting the headers from, it's not a particularly high load to access it. (If the users are not using header-caching newsreaders, it may be necessary to do some sort of secure caching of them on the gateway.)

Finally, all of these have been predicated on "the gateway knows that this article exists and what its url is". That information requires a mild form of webcrawling to gather, and would represent a fairly major LJ-server load to accrue all at once. Thus, it needs to be stored locally -- but this contains a very minimal amount of people's private data; the fact that "pleonastic has a post at [url]" contains nothing about the content of the post, and all but the exact url is also available on LJ's "calendar" page. (This would also store that information about comments, which LJ doesn't publicize, though.) Thus, I don't think this is problematic -- and, if it is decided to be, we could just store separate copies for each LJ user that's using the server, and encrypt them with the LJ-user's password as the key.

There is a question of whether it's appropriate to cache the LJ-user's password and do the journal-crawling slowly while they're offline, rather than doing it only when they're actively online; I merely note that both are potential solutions. One could reasonably argue that having the gateway store my password is no more inappropriate than having my browser store my password -- and, for that matter, my browser doesn't store my password; it stores an authentication cookie, which is what the gateway should arguably be storing if it stores anything.

I think that adds up to a fairly reasonable approach to friendslocked stuff, and also adds up to a fairly reasonable set of pieces to build the whole system out of. Once it got going, you'd probably want to have it crosslinked all over, so that fetching a url for getting headers also dumps it into the cache for getting bodies from, and also feeds it to the crawler module to scan for new comments.

[betanfrill.livejournal.com]

But you're right by the sea?

right by the sea

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

just a few km inland, yes.