matt.wronka.org

In a departure from my previous posts which railed against "bloggers" (a.k.a 'those people'), I'll write about something more substantial yet entirely void of content.

As anyone who has ever been to RPI knows, RPI people need something to complain about. They can't live without this. If the world were too perfect, they'd complain about that. Fortunately the world isn't. Furthermore, the administration, out of their love of their students both past and present no doubt, constantly act in a way that supports their students in this regard.

Recently, they have decided to do so by removing "Free E-mail for Life" for alumni. Now, I've tried signing up for this service several times before graduating. The first was when I got the e-mail when I was part of the class of '02. It said it couldn't find me, and that they'd look and get back. No problem I figured, as I was really part of '03 or '04 and wasn't going to graduate in '02. I never heard back.

The next time I tried, the server had been hacked and nothing worked. Every time since then has resulted in the same results as the first time, including just a few months ago. I've never been able to get my account.

Apparently other people haven't had the same problem that I had. They routinely use their account instead of their ISP account or what not. It makes sense,as this provides people a way of contacting them at a known address. It also provides the school a means of contacting their alumni. Apparently RPI doesn't care though, and despite the promise of 'Free E-mail for Life' is now charging for this (this was initially announced for the class of '04, and in the last several months has made its way to the alumni who are outraged).

I don't really have much else to say on the matter. There are still publications that tout this free e-mail for life, apparently one is still in the display case in the DCC. The class web-sites for RPI classes that recently celebrated their 50th reunion also state this.

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6359754/>
A four year-old service dog dials 911 after her owner falls out of her wheel chair.
Saves the day.

<http://www.algore04.com/news/gnn/EpAlEukuZEoWoQliyA.shtml>

Transcript of a speach given by Al Gore at Georgetown. As described by the subject, he gives a talk about some of the shortcomings of the GWB administration, most specifically about the threats of terrorism on America and the war in Iraq.

Dr. Katz is hella funny.

But anyway, Jon Katz, former author of trollbait and Geek Culture articles on /., recently appeared in the Princeton Packet. Apparently he fashions himself a modern Thoreau.

He wrote about web logs.

For those who haven't noticed, I advertise an Atom feed for my web log. It just seemed more standardized than a half-dozen RSS standards, not to mention the political nightmare surrounding RSS I don't have the time to become involved with.

But that's not what I'm complaining about today. Sites that don't correctly state when their items were published--BBC, Heise, I'm looking at you two in particular. Of course, this may have something again to do with the whole RSS nightmare. Can't we all just use Atom <http://www.atomenabled.org/> and get along?

The only interesting thing about livejournal is that it generates a FOAF file for all its users. My <foaf:knows /> section just trippled in size. That's actually pretty scary. Most of the people are <rel:lostContactWith /> and the others are mostly <rel:hasMet /> so it's not too bad I guess.

The problem is that every single livejournal FOAF file I've seen doesn't have a <foaf:name /> element (nor do they have <foaf:given /> or <foaf:family />)--only <foaf:nick />. One of the assumptions of Cork [http://foaf.matt.wronka.org/] was that every user would have a <foaf:name />--which in Cork also includes the <foaf:nick />.

So Cork needed a few changes in places to work nicely [nodeIDs broke for lj users and lj users didn't show up because of their lack of names--both fixed].

Livejournal still sucks more than other blog systems, in my opinion. Mostly because of the users, again. What's the point of having a syndication feed if everything's private? I suppose I can see the benefits of a 'friend only blog', and that would make sense if you could somehow work with people not in the system, but you can't. Maybe I just don't like leaving stuff on someone else's server like that, and then forcing people to register (speaking of which, Cork now has a guest user, user:guest password:guest). I'd probably feel less angst if I knew more about how their system worked, but the last time I tried to learn it wouldn't let me (and it had a horrible navigational interface). So I still say it sucks.

I'm primarilly wondering how much control you have over the FOAF file, if whether you can add people that aren't livejournal users, for instance. Someone can tell me I guess, if you can.