What a strange machine man is. You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out come sighs, laughter, and dreams.
Nikos Kazantzakis

I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.
- Heinz Pagels, physicist and quantum researcher (as quoted in The Age of Spiritual Machines)

As time goes on, I hope to put more of my thoughts into enough of an order to put them in words here.

It gets even worse once the white-space is accounted for, with two thirds of the screen real-estate dedicated to advertising.

(found via Neil Gaiman’s blog, he found it at El Reg)

Lots of sabots in the works. First and foremost the RSS from The Weather Network is no good (incorrect/invalid/inconsistent date formats, some other brokenness). Twitterfeed offers two ways to detect a new posting – the GUID, or the pubDate. As mentioned, the pubDates used in the feed are just plain wrong, so no help there. The GUID for each post, also not helpful – it’s the static link to the current weather page; long-term forecast is indicated by ref=day1, ref=day2, etc in the URL – so that doesn’t change, even when the content does.

I have meant for a long time to fix it (before today, the last post form Twitterfeed was July 18), but aside from a few quick hacks, never completed it. Lately, the explosion in Kingstonians using Twitter has inspired me to fix it, especially the new followers @KingstonWeather has gained.

After some trial-and-error, I ended up building a php script to write an entirely new RSS feed, based on the one provided by The Weather Network – this one is valid, has proper (unique) IDs for the posts, and appears to work in Twitterfeed.

NASA – Phoenix Images

For more on the Phoenix project, check out NASA’s mission page, or MarsPhoenix’s Twitter feed.

Slideshow at Photobucket »

Very nice set.

The original class did most of what I needed, but I made some minor changes. I’ve emailed the original contributor to offer my changes back, but until I hear back, I’ve posted my modified version here:

SimpleOpenID class

Comments/feedback always welcome.

I did notice a strange behaviour in OpenID; I’m not yet certain if I missed it in the spec or if it’s left to one’s judgement (note to self: read the spec again)… Anyway, here’s what happens:

- Say I sign up with “roosenmaallen.com”. This site delegates to my ClaimID page, so the openid.identity response is http://openid.claimid.com/silvermoon82, and this is what I actually use to identify the user.
To my thinking, I should be able to log in using “roosenmaallen.com” (since that delegates to my ClaimID), or claimid.com/silvermoon82, or openid.claimid.com/silvermoon82. These URLs all end up at the same identity, so they should be equivalent — and that’s how I implemented it on Rosebleed.

I’ve noticed other OpenID-enabled sites handle this differently. On the OpenID Directory for instance, I first signed up as “claimid.com/silvermoon82″. I’ve gotten in the habit of logging in using roosenmaallen.com; but when I try that at OpenID Directory, I get an error message that my email address is already registered to my ClaimID URL.

So, barring finding that the spec keeps “equivalent” OpenID URLs separate, I think I’m in the right here; always open to feedback though.

Update [2008-03-19]: I’ve checked the spec, and as it turns out, I’m actually in the wrong:

So, to use www.example.com as their Identifier, but have Consumers actually verify http://exampleuser.livejournal.com/ with the Identity Provider located at http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml, they’d add the following tags to the HEAD section of the HTML document returned when fetching their Identifier URL.

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml”>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://exampleuser.livejournal.com/”>

Now, when a Consumer sees that, it’ll talk to http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml and ask if the End User is exampleuser.livejournal.com, never mentioning www.example.com anywhere on the wire.

The main advantage of this is that an End User can keep their Identifier over many years, even as services come and go; they’ll just keep changing who they delegate to.

Good luck in the Outer Planes, Gary.