disobey.com

I'm wondering if there's a new trick out there for verifying email addresses, and/or adding them to spam mailing lists. In going through my list of accounts on various servers around the Net, to weed the chafe from the wheat, I signed into Topica.

Topica is an email list directory, much like Yahoo Groups! Yahoo! Groups allows you to customize your account to say that no one may add you to another mailing list without your approval. I'm not sure if Topica has a similar precaution as, after I logged in today, I discovered I was on far more than the four lists I recognized (EGR, Finkydoodle, joho, and eeggs.com).

I'm pretty positive I didn't sign up "California Premier Attorneys 1", "Corporate Counsel 1", "Enlarge Today", "Great Offers", "Miscellany", "new", "Open Letter", "Web Services", or "WI_Pulse_20020311". Even more interesting are that all of those lists have zero messages sent (or archived).

Are they waiting for me to say "well, who the frel are these people?" and unsubscribe? The act of unsubscribing, presumably, would send them an announcement that "morbus@disobey.com" has been removed, thus confirming my existence.

I'm gonna be Dave Winer for Halloween.

Dave asks: Why be Semantic when you can be Romantic? Well, buddy ol' pal, the pornoWeb already exists. The Semantic Web is all about making computers aroused, not humans. When computers are aroused, they're much happier pleasing the idiot desires of us fleshlings. So, really, the Semantic Web is about survival and prevention - I'd much rather have happy, complacent computers than angry robots plotting to overthrow the human regime.

As per my previous entry concerning blogging through iCal, I've gotten a decent amount of emails on it. One from Timothy Appnel suggests using a Movable Type plugin to encode the characters necessary for iCal. Of course! So, I ran over to Brad Choate's MT Hacks page, picked up MTRegEx and, as you can see with the newest template code and calendar, now have encoded characters (in testing with redmonk, we've encoded commas, semi-colons, and quotes... there's probably more though - it just feels more exciting to experiment at this point, then read some dusty old specification).

The URLs that Apple uses on their calendar library all come with webcal:// for a protocol. If you're using Internet Explorer, simply click, and that calendar will be imported. However, that doesn't work very well with my preferred browser (Mozilla) - there's actually no visual indication that anything has happened. Thus, it's probably better, cross-browser wise (iCab, OmniWeb, Chimera, etc.) to use just http:// and have people cut and paste into iCal. Finally, Apple is using a content-type of text/plain for their calendars, so you won't need to change anything on your webserver to properly serve the files (assuming, of course, that your webserver defaults to text/plain for files it doesn't have a mapping for). Update: Apparently, if you set up the webcal:// protocol within the Internet Explorer preferences, that also sets it for the whole OS - after doing so and restarting Mozilla, webcal:// worked as intended.

Surprisingly enough, if your vCalendar file has Mac linefeeds, then it's going to break iCal. redmonk has already filed a bug on it, but I wrote him a quick mac2unix script hosted on disobey.com (see, he uses Frontier for his backend, which always sends Mac linefeeds). To use the script, just pass your URL to my URL, like this. Incidentally, that link will give you his calendar for subscribing. Neater: Mike Krus of NewsIsFree.com is now providing Slashdot in vCalendar format. Yes!

To create clickable URLs (one of the things that I felt would stop blogs over iCal from being as great as they could be), an anonymous user writes: In the iCal help file it explains how to add clickable URLs to events: "To include a clickable URL in the subject for an event, type the URL between angle brackets. For example, <http://www.apple.com>". I've since fixed my MT template and you can see the changes on the calendar. Sadly, this only seems to work in the DESCRIPTION, and not the SUMMARY. Update: This does work in SUMMARY, but only if the URL is the only thing there - if you include your entry title or what have you, then it's not gonna fly. I'm not a fan of that idea, so I've not done this to my templates.

To customize the title of your calendar, and how it displays in iCal, modify the X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT: value - mine has been set for "Disobey Nonsense Network". I've also added a DESCRIPTION (different from SUMMARY). Things I'd like to see: how to do comments in vCalendar (so that I can point people looking at the template to these blog entries), and a Movable Type plugin that takes all the links in a post and turns them into footnotes, like so:

this is a url [1] that you should really visit!
.
.
.
[1] http://www.url.com/you/should/visit.html

Comment through email or on the O'Reilly weblogs.

Everyone knows that Apple's free calendar application, iCal has been released. One of the niftiest features is subscriptions: you can subscribe to someone else's calendar, much like you can subscribe to a mailing list or someone's RSS feed. Welp, good friend redmonk referred me to a spiffy idea proposed by Jim Roepcke:

I want to make a ... page that generates an iCal file so people can subscribe to the blog in iCal... It would be a nice groupware feature, wouldn't it?

Welp, I've quickly generated one using the template features of MovableType, my blogging software of choice. You can see the template code I used, as well as subscribe to the calendar.

There are a couple of things not-so-perfect (and any ignorance of my own is due to not reading the vCalendar spec, instead merely mimicking a sample calendar I created for this purpose. For one, timezones must be correctly set (my template defaults to US/Eastern, since I'm over in New Hampshire). Then, certain characters, like commas and colons (and probably others) need to be escaped with a backslash, else iCal will stop reading the event at the point of unescaped character. In Movable Type, you can sorta accomplish this by using <MTEntryTitle dirify="">, which will turn your event name into something like "ical_and_blogging", which isn't ideal. Finally, and perhaps most annoying: URLs aren't clickable, so I can't easily jump off to read the complete entry.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's take on this - be sure to drop an email to morbus@disobey.com with any comments, implementations, or clarifications. Alternatively, you can also leave comments over at the O'Reilly Weblogs. I'll keep my notes updated as I explore further too.

Update: I've continued exploring here.

I just realized the ever-vigilant winerlog blogged my mention of "Hitler" for a code name of Winer's RSS 2.0, transcribed here from IRC:

[09:53] <Morbus> I say "proposed" rather innocently - its more "shoved down everyone's throat by nazi dictator".
[09:53] <Morbus> but that's a lot of words to type.
[09:53] <Morbus> we should code name rss 2.0 "hitler".
[09:53] <Morbus> that'd be fun.

Here's the catch though: I said that on September 6th. In searching for that mention, I found someone else had said something similar on August 22nd, which means I'm not the only Jewgregator. Cool.

The discovery of a third satellite of Earth has been reported by BBC news and Ananova. Alternatively, it might just be a bit of discarded rocket casing. In any case, the amateur astronomer who found it, Bill Yeung, will probably get a lot of attention for this: a geocities.com homepage which appears to belong to him has been shut down for being beyond its transfer limit. Whether it's a newly captured asteroid, or just a bit of space debris, I'll be keeping track of the story on my own J002E2 page.

For some reason, Kevin's Dinner with Dave Winer does not surprise me one bit. Funniest Winerism for me: "How dare you! Who the hell are you to question me about security?!" Some day, I hope to eat dinner with Dave Winer - perhaps I'll raise his blood pressure so high that he'll have a heart attack (do iPods come in funereal colors?).

Ouch, that was harsh. I should probably delete that. Nah, I'll just backpedal: I don't wish death on anyone, but I'd certainly like to see Winer disappear from the "scene". The immense community- agreed progress that'd occur would be much more heartening than this craptacular RSS 2.0 mess. Goddammit, I've stopped caring - good thing iCal came along (more on that later).

I wasn't paying much attention this morning, and accidentally brushed my teeth with Arm & Hammer's PM, a nighttime paste. I wonder if I've voided my warranty. For more Morbus brushing fun, discover how messy I am.

So, I just downloaded iCal 1.0 from Apple. My initial impression is that I'm not so sure I want to make it part of my daily life - it's not something that can be minimized to a small part of my desktop (like Pando Calendar). With that in mind, importing user-updated calendars is kinda neat, even though it only works in IE (and not Mozilla). I'm still wondering what kind of movie "Stealing Harward" (sic) is though (import the "Movies Release Date" calendar, and check out September 13th). Not too much of a fan of the GUI between different views - the Post-It notes on week's and day's is much prettier than the faded notes on Month views, and switching between the views (for instance, to read the full note from Month view) seems slow. And so it goes.

What's even worse is this make the fatal mistake of assuming I'm only going to use this between 9 in the morning, and 7 at night. I hate when people make assumptions for the user - for this simple reason, I can't switch to Day view and see the listing of shows past the kiddie's bedtime from Apple's own "Premieres Eastern" calendar. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

UPDATE: As a zillion people have informed me, to change the 9 to 7 thing, look under "Preferences". Silly goose. Still doesn't solve all my problems, but hey, it's 1.0.