If you aren’t a friend or family, some 400 of those won’t be initially visible to you. If you are a Flickr user already, leave a message here and I’ll add you as a friend. If not, either leave your email and I’ll send you a password to get in, or sign up for Flickr and leave your screenname.

I’ve also put together about 30 photo sets that should be interesting to browse.

For example, yesterday I ordered:

Shipping estimate for these items: February 21, 2005- February 21, 2005
Delivery estimate: February 24, 2005- February 28, 2005

“Colgate Phos-Flur Anti-Cavity Fluoride Rinse, Cool Mint – 16 oz”
Health and Beauty; $9.99

And yet it shipped today, February 14th, a full week before it was scheduled to ship.

I understand that the free shipping probably cuts significantly into Amazon’s bottom line (and therefore they’ll do a lot to get you to pay for shipping), but can they at least not lie about the ship date by a week!?

Update: The other items I ordered (3 books) were shipped the day after (Feb 15th). All arrived on Friday, February 18, almost a full week before the predicted arrival time.

The system is not without flaws, namely

• During periods of heavy load, I’ve seen random error messages that have prevented me from getting on the internet for as long as 30 minutes.
• The system is inconvenient, as 2 minutes is a long time to do the scan.

• Computers that shouldn’t have any vulnerabilities that it scans for (ie, Macs, Linux/BSD boxes, etc) still have to go through the same time consuming procedure.

Some ways of bypassing the login mechanism:

• Keep your computer on 24/7

• Buy a PowerMac and put it to sleep — this is a mode where the computer uses very little power (~10 watts) to only allow the computer to wake up quickly to a full powered on state. A nice side effect is that it keeps network connections open, which saves you from having to login again.

So I hacked up a solution in the form of a php file:

<pre><?
$f = escapeshellcmd($_GET["q"]);
$g = shell_exec('curl -s http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user='
. $f . ' | sed -e "s/<rss version="0.91">/'
. '<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/'
. '02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="'
. 'http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/">/"'
. ' | sed -e "s/</rss>/</rdf:RDF>/"');
echo $g;
?></pre>

And then I just call the script by subscribing to http://path.to/script/?q=username. It’s ugly, but functional.

A copy is also available for download.

The change that fixed it (in unified diff format):

--- textile2-new.php.old        Tue Jun  8 23:36:12 2004
+++ textile2-new.php    Sun Jul 11 15:19:04 2004
@@ -2805,7 +2805,7 @@
         }
       }
     }
-    return @getimagesize($file);
+    return;
   } // function image_size

   /**

Read on for a more detailed discussion.

Here’s a copy of the old code:

  function image_size($file) {
    $Have_ImageSize = function_exists('getimagesize');
    if ($Have_ImageSize) {
      if (file_exists($file)) {
        return @getimagesize($file);
      } else {
        if ($docroot = ($this->docroot() ? $this->docroot() : $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'])) {
          $fullpath = $docroot . preg_replace('|^/*(.*)$|', '/$1', $file);
          if (file_exists($fullpath)) {
            return @getimagesize($fullpath);
          }
        }
      }
    }
    return @getimagesize($file);
  } // function image_size

Notice how getimagesize is called even if it doesn’t exists? Well that’s poor form, but the @ in front of getimagesize hides all error messages. Convenient.

But the problem came down to this, my host appears to silently fail if getimagesize is called with a remote URL. So all my posts that linked to pictures on remote sites weren’t working.

The new code block fixes this by ensuring that file_exists is called before any getimagesize call.

If it were up to me, I’d choose Asynchronous Instant Messaging. (Or if you are Nick, maybe Asynchronous Instantaneous Messaging).

Recipients:

• Mary J.
• Matt K.
• Jenn N.
• Noah K.-O.

• Tomas M.

Leave a message and I’ll hook you up.

Update: So far, I’ve given accounts to:

• Dave S.
• Blayne F.
• Chris S.
• Mike F.
• Dan G.

• Jenny

Send all the spam you want to brad.froehle@gmail.com. Ok, well don’t really send all the spam and crap like that to it please.

In fact, I’ll still prefer froe0071 [at] umn [dot] edu.