Now that you mention it, yes, on our Virgin internet connection, our router does occasionally drop off the net for no reason.

And we knew already that you get slowed down when using bit torrent. But net neutrality is not bollocks. If I write a web app or set up a blog, I don't want to be in the "bus lane"

And if they signed up for phorm, can we find out if we were snooped on? If so, should we be doing anything?

Virgin really don't deserve our repeat business. Or yours.

Yesterday afternoon I had to stay in the flat to let in BT. They came, realised that there was very little in the way of wiring in the flat, spent a while putting wires in. They left, not with a phone and internet working, but with a socket on the wall. Just a socket. I could tell you if it works if I had a handset, but I don't. Apparently the rest comes in the mail. I don't know if a handset is included. Bah, no evening internet. Yet.

Meanwhile, the central heating blokes came and installed a working timeclock. Central heating FTW!

In the evening, met up with work colleagues to eat Nepalese and drink beer and wine. I am still full. They are fans of a book called Roger's Profanisaurus and try to drop phrases like "top deck" and "Dutch blindfold" into innocent conversations.

In other news, have mail from myspace:

You have not logged into MySpace since January 1, 2007. That makes us sad!

You're also holding a very valuable piece of MySpace real estate, which is the
username/URL you chose. That makes MySpace users sad! Why? Because you've got
a URL someone may want, and you're not really using it!

Since it doesn't look like you're an active user on this account, we will be
resetting your username/URL so that someone else can use it.

Well, I was only on myspace for about 30 seconds before I realized how rubbish it was (Geocities all over again), so they can cry me a river and go jump into it.


Tonight is packing night, deciding what to take back to London.

So I've been thinking about how to make the internet at large more like LJ. You know, control your own content, while keeping the good bits- friend and FOAF capabilities. Break out of the walled garden and all that.
Anyone can blog on their own site with wordpress or the like, or on a hosted service, but what LJ has is friends lists. It's a good selling point, which would be worth prying out of their control.

This is an attempt at a protocol, with no implementation imposed. My recent experience with web programming has informed it, but any successful protocol will have multiple implementations in multiple languages. Also I'll keep it very simple – no web services or soap, just XML over http.

( Read more... )

...is a worthy goal. Given that LJ's unique selling point is the friends lists, friends-locked posts and all that stuff, The Xhtml Friends Network looks like an interesting stab at the problem.

But how would I go about, given someone's name/url, find out who their FOAFs are? How would I retrieve posts that are locked to friends only, given that I am on a friends list? This would need authentication, yes? Would it be centralised?

Wait, it doesn't do any of that at all? Rats. And I have to go back and edit all old posts when I change friend status? The information isn't stored in one place? Oh well, is anyone else taking another stab at it?