Moar rain

[altivo]

All day again, never real hard but never really stopped. Sometimes changing to slushballs or even snow for brief periods, but the ground temperature was too high for it to last. Perpetually leaden skies, to borrow an old descriptive term.

John came and trimmed horse feet for me. Got a mild lecture about Tess' front feet being too dry, which I already knew, but she's better than in previous years at this time. And she's going out several days a week now, which he said will help.

Dumped a copy of the current internet user database from the M$ SQuirreLy server at work so I can try to import it into MySQL. Currently trying to decide how to implement the MSSQL data type "bit" (for yes/no values) in MySQL, which lacks an equivalent type. There are several options, each with pluses and minuses.

Received an invitation to sign up for the beta period of Dreamwidth, a blogging and social site that uses LJ software. After some thought, decided to sign in just in order to protect my name. So far, only two from my FL are over there, so far as I can tell.

Comments

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

There hasn't been enough information on Dreamwidth's site to tell me what makes it different from LJ, other than the fact that it isn't LJ. Unless I'm missing something.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much it. "We use the LJ code, but we're not LJ or run by the jokers who made such a hash of things at LJ."

Fine, but so what? I already have an IJ account which... runs on LJ code and isn't LJ. I know IJ sells paid accounts, or has ads, to pay for things, but I have no idea what Dreamwidth will due for revenue and they will need it. GreatestJournal sounded (too) good until it met reality and lost.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

On the surface there appear to be some substantial differences. The one that matters to a lot of people is that they separated the LJ "friend" concept into two parts. So you can subscribe to read someone's journal without giving them full access to read yours. Granting access to read non-public posts is a separate check box. This has never mattered to me but it bugs the heck out of some folks.

They are promising no outside advertising ever. I'm not sure how they expect to work that, but I'm willing to watch and see. They will have paid accounts of various sorts with different levels of privilege once they get out of beta. I agree that the outside adverts are an irritation and sometimes make LJ unreadable, though with AdBlocker Plus installed I never see them. I believe they are conceding the existence of software like AdBlocker Plus and saying that banner ads and popups are doomed.

They've made major enhancements to the interest list, filtering, and searching. What I find most significant about all this is that it's evidence of an active development team who understand the code. That's something that GreatestJournal never seems to have had, and part of what strangled them.

Could be a dud, could be a promising development. At the moment they talk like a return to the original goals and ideals of LJ before it was so badly damaged by SixApart.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. From what I saw on their website, I kind of expected "It's LiveJournal ... with extra stuff!" like, I dunno, live video chat or something. (That's just my example and speculation; they never said anything like that.) I like the idea of the return to LJ's roots, in an ideal world. But there's a reason LJ doesn't do it that way anymore, and it's not just because the corporate overlords blew it (though they arguably did). Unless the Dreamwidth operators are independently wealthy, money will be an issue eventually. Although maybe they'll have that covered with paid accounts.

I like the idea of the changes you mentioned about filtering and friends lists. I like the idea of development happening, period. That's something that I don't think we can count on at LJ as much as we used to.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

LJ itself does seem to have plenty of paid accounts. The question is, how fast would the number of paid accounts decline if the price for a year increased?

IIRC the DW folks are presently suggesting two levels of paid account (and no "permanent" accounts are mentioned.) These two levels have increasing amounts of extras included, like the usual more icons, can use text messaging, and so forth. Their base prices were slightly higher than LJ, and might go up if costs go up. Presumably they've done some sort of business plan in which they guessed at how many paid subscribers they can get.

As far as advertising goes, I personally don't mind the Google type of ads, the ones that are just text in a column at the side. They might end up trying that in spite of their promise. It's the graphical ads that blink and flash and have animations in them that irritate the hell out of me. Those are horrid for people on slow connections, distracting for everyone, and invariably they are junk. The flashier the ad, the more sure you can be that it's a scam, ripoff, or other somewhat dishonext deal.

[hrrunka]

It's been quite interesting seeing who's hooked into dreamwidth. I've now created a minimal OpenID profile there.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Access granted to altivo over there. :) Not that there's anything in it, but that will probably change.

[hrrunka]

Cheers. :)

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

Dumped a copy of the current internet user database from the M$ SQuirreLy server at work so I can try to import it into MySQL. Currently trying to decide how to implement the MSSQL data type "bit" (for yes/no values) in MySQL, which lacks an equivalent type. There are several options, each with pluses and minuses.

BOOLEAN NOT NULL is probably the right way to go.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree. My books are all written before the boolean type was implemented, apparently, and I had decided to use tinyint and treat zero as false and anything else as true. Apparently that's what boolean does anyway. I suspect it may be what MSSQL does too, since allocating a single bit isn't very practical anyway and doesn't save much these days.

There are several boolean values in each row, so if I were worried about space I could merge them into a set to get actual bits. I suspect the processing overhead for that isn't worth the bother in this particular case.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Ugh. So M$SQuirreL exported the "bit" values as "true" or "false" and MySQL won't interpret those on import as 1 and 0 or anything else useful. I'm going to have to massage the export file to change all of them to ones and zeros, I guess. More irritating are the dates. M$ writes them as MM/DD/YYYY and My wants them as YYYY-MM-DD or else they will just be strings. Do not want.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

I've always hated when people called it 'sequel', but maybe 'squirrely' would be a good idea!
If I absolutely had to pronounce the acronym, I'd say it 'skull'.

I just read a tiny bit, and it does seem booleans are stored as tinyint. I had no idea. Isn't that kind of a tremendous failing on their part, or is there some argument against boolean datatypes?

DreamWidth doesn't look like anything special.
I'm going to create a wordpress-driven blog on icosidodecahedron.com, and I'll move my public technical ramblings onto that.
I live in a cave, so I've never seen any of these mess-ups the lj team did. (Though I guess the act of selling it to the Russians created the whole russian spammer army.)

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait?
"Before 5.0.3, BIT is a synonym for TINYINT(1)"
Apparently, after that, BIT lets you specify how many bits a field is, with a default of 1 if left blank.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/numeric-type-overview.html

I really have no clue what version you're using, though. With MySql (and PHP), different servers and companies tend to use wildly varying versions. Yahoo uses 4.x, I think.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

These are installations on my own hardware. The Linux version I have on Wolvix is 5.0.51. The OpenVMS version on the Alphas is 5.0.23 I believe. Both appear to have the boolean type and implement it as tinyint.

Since it's impractical to allocate a single bit or bits in anything other than multiples of 8 on most architectures, I have no objection to the tinyint approach. It's the clarification of intent provided by referring to a boolean that matters, rather than the actual number of bits it occupies in the data.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

"Sequel" is a legitimate name of one early implementation, so it does have valid roots.

The data type "boolean" didn't exist in MySQL until sometime after version 4.0.x so my three to four year old books didn't describe it. "Help contents" does give the details in the versions I have installed.

SixApart did a truly royal job of pissing on LiveJournal in their attempt to first commercialize it and then censor the content to avoid offending the advertisers. It was extremely disgusting, and in some respects LJ has never recovered from the paranoia and drama that resulted.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I remember that.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Dumped a copy of the current internet user database from the M$ SQuirreLy server at work so I can try to import it into MySQL. Currently trying to decide how to implement the MSSQL data type "bit" (for yes/no values) in MySQL, which lacks an equivalent type. There are several options, each with pluses and minuses.

Go for PostgreSQL and use the boolean type. ;)

Mmm, Dreamwidth looks interesting as a "backup" just in case now that GreatestJournal's folded. You wouldn't happen to have an invite code you could send me, would you? ^^

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I like PostgreSQL but in this instance, MySQL is a better choice since it is more "mainstream" and implemented on more platforms. It turns out that MySQL does have a boolean type now, I just have older textbooks that predate its introduction.

I just checked on invitations. It appears that at least for the moment, I have none available. I don't know whether they just haven't allotted them during the beta period or if it's because I'm a noob. However, you can probably get an invitation the way I did. Use OpenID under your LJ account to sign in and comment on a Dreamwidth journal. As an OpenID user, you are granted most of the privileges of a free account already. But they send invitations to OpenID users at intervals, so you'll probably receive an invite within a few days.

Go to my Dreamwidth page and make a comment, selecting OpenID for your identity. They'll ask for your LJ URL and an e-mail address. A validation e-mail will be sent to you. Respond to that, and you're in under OpenID. If I understand it correctly, that means you need to be signed into LJ (have a valid cookie for LJ) in order to use Dreamwidth. You can upload icons, create a profile, and all that stuff even as an OpenID user.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I do have an OpenID profile there already, actually, but that's not quite the same - although if I'll get an invite from the site itself as one, that'd be nice, too. *s*

(That being said, your journal there seems to be set to not allow comments from OpenID users.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It was set to the default value, I think. I'd have thought "Allow comments from registered users" would include OpenID users, since they are registered before they can comment. Changed to "everybody" now.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* Anonymous commenting was disabled as well, FWIW, actually - but now it all works. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I just went and granted access to your OpenID account. So you should be able to comment in any case. I'll send them a note to see if I can get you a full invitation.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Thanks! ^_^

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

I'm there! And I applied for a Dreamhack (development account) in order to help out, but may not get round to doing anything with it.

I still don't understand how their "read/be read" friends separation is supposed to be good. I find LJ's friends filters infinitely superior. I don't have just one level of protection for my posts; some things I filter more strictly, for personal content or depending on who's likely to be interested.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Oops, that link should be http://baskerville.dreamwidth.org/ of course of course.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You're there and you're added. (BTW, it's dreamwidth.ORG not .com)

They also have the kind of filtering that LJ offers:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/circle/editfilters.bml

At the moment it only blocks reading access to your entries, allowing you to limit it to a particular group of users. They say there will also be filtering levels you can create for your reading list, but those aren't in place yet.

The split between subscribing and granting access is just an additional, simpler kind of filtering. On LJ, to get the same result, you'd have to add someone as a friend and then block them from reading your stuff with a filter. Since LJ has the built-in expectation that being granted friendship includes reading access, this is sort of an insulting thing to do, I guess. On DW, the two functions are separate from the start so there's no automatic expectation. That's the best I can do to explain it, since I rarely filter any access to my entries anyway and therefore I'm really not qualified to present the views of people who do so.