It was quite startling not having the gas petal bounce back to my foot after pressing down on it hard, but I survived because I am familiar enough with my car to know how to put it into neutral. At highway speeds the Prius requires you to hold it to neutral for a full half-second to engage. I was able to stop the car and figure out what happened.

In terms of duplicating the chat experience that already exists via the Facebook website, the XMPP implementation they have set up does a wonderfully adequate job.

The problem is that the XMPP interface to Facebook Chat is really only a gateway. It is similar in concept to how XMPP transports allow you to use closed IM networks via XMPP, except they are exposing a client interface (C2S) instead of a server interface (S2S). While this approach is adequate for simple chat, it means that the only features supported are features that already exist in Facebook chat—which is pretty much bare bones chat.

When I logged into all of my accounts this morning, I was greeted with a message from chat.facebook.com: "You were marked as Online because you signed on with Jabber."

UPDATE: Official Announcement: Facebook Chat Now Available Everywhere

UPDATE: Added some commentary on Integrating with Facebook Chat

via Daring Fireball

IPv6 would effectively make the use of IP masquerading (A form of Network Address Translaton used in practically all residential gateway routers) unnecessary. Unfortunately, the current ubiquity of IP masquerading has caused vendors and ISPs to be suspicious of allowing proper end-to-end connectivity to residential customers. I have even heard that some are even considering using the same IP masquerading mechanism for IPv6—for security reasons!

This would be a very bad thing for the future of the IPv6 internet, so I wanted to elaborate on the motivations people have for doing this and ways that it can be avoided altogether.

In case you are wondering just what m0n0wall is, here is an excerpt from their website:

m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software).

If you need a router and have a spare machine, give m0n0wall a try.

After we settled down on the lawn, I noticed something plastic in the grass. I picked it up and noticed it was a bluetooth headset. Upon further inspection I noticed that it wasn't just any bluetooth headset, it was a Jawbone Prime.

The Jawbone Prime is one of the best bluetooth headsets in the world, and with a retail price of $129.99 it darn well should be. I feel really sorry for whoever lost this thing. There wasn't anyone nearby who could have dropped it where it was, so it must have fallen out of someone's pocket as they were traversing the lawn. Damn shame.

But... I unfortunately brought home something extra—some sort of gastrointestinal illness that I contracted about 12 hours before I left Taiwan. I'm feeling a little better now, but I was absolutely miserable the 12 hours before the flight and the 12 hours during the flight. It was the worst possible time to get sick. I'll spare you the gruesome details and just say that it wasn't pretty.

Anyway, we are both at home and comfortable now. I'll post up some more details over the next week or so.

Heading north on highway 1, I kept an eye out looking for places to stop. One road we went down we notice all of this crap flying in the air. It looked kinda like bugs... or snow.

We kept driving north on 1 and eventually we found a nice cozy beach to watch the meteors. We also found out where all of those firetrucks were headed. Let's just say that meteors weren't the only thing we saw burning up in the atmosphere...

Sophia took these pictures while we were hiking in Steven's Creek County Park this past weekend. We had just got a Nikon D40 DSLR camera and wanted to see what kind of cool pictures we could take—and we ended up finding this zombie squirrel.

Sophia gets the credit of finding the critter and snapping a few pictures of it before it hobbled off looking for more brains.

For some reason or another, the concept of Calendar Servers has captured my imagination over the past year or so. I believe this technology could change how people think of time management, but I think it needs three things before it can get to that point:

1. Ability to invite someone to an event who is using a different calendar server.
2. Ability to view availability of someone who is using a different calendar server. (And, as a corollary, the ability to control who can see your availability)
3. Ability to share calendars and events with people who don't have an account on my calendar server.

The key to make all of this possible is something I call Automatic Federation.

UPDATE: After writing this post, individuals have brought to my attention RFC-2446, RFC-2447, and the iSCHEDULE Technical Committee. At first glance, it looks like this may make the stuff I was proposing here somewhat irrelevant, but some investigation is still warranted. I'm not yet sure how these specs prevent abusive things like spoofing and who is allowed to see free-busy information.

This short article covers the basics of the normal reference-counted Objective-C runtime. Garbage collection can wait for another day.

Lets hope I have better luck than the last time I tried to sell a laptop on eBay.

In what can only be described as a bad omen, eBay actually suspended and blocked my account soon after I first listed this item! It took a few hours to try and work things out, but things seem fine now. But Jesus, what a pain in the ass.

I've never seen such a dramatic collapse of the quality of storytelling in a series. As you may recall, I loved this show... But my, how far it has fallen.