Richard Stallman Talk @ University of Minnesota

I just got back from a talk given by Richard Stallman at the University of Minnesota. It was about software freedom. If you’re looking for more information, I would encourage you to check out gnu.org and fsf.org. I’m not going to repeat all the points. I just wanted to note one thing:

I understand his push for “GNU/Linux” a lot more now. It’s one thing to talk about credit–there I disagree, because I don’t want to call it “GNU/Linux/X/GNOME/OpenOffice.org”. However, he made the point that calling the distro “Linux” points all the attention towards Linus, who isn’t pushing software freedom. I hadn’t thought about that before.

On a side note, RMS pronounces it “GNU slash Linux” or “GNU plus Linux”, where I think “GNU Linux” is a totally more reasonable… After all, nobody pronounces the slash in “and/or”.

Facebook Blog Importing

I was rather excited to see that Facebook has a (new?) feature where it can import blog posts (from an RSS feed) as notes. However, it’s been nothing but a pain so far. Somewhere between WordPress’s edit box and Facebook, HTML special characters (e.g. ampersands and ASCII quotes) are being double-escaped. It seems to refuse to import stories at random. Perhaps there is some hidden maximum number in a given period of time?

Also, and this is a bit scary, deleting a note and re-importing it seems to keep comments. Does that mean they’re keeping that data forever even if you hit delete, or is this a symptom of distributed caches not being cleared and resulting in data re-population?

Apparently this post was the last straw. When trying to view my notes, I received a warning that I had written too many and was blocked from writing any more. Given that I hadn’t managed to get any new notes to display on Facebook, this must have been for trying the “Update Now” functionality too much. Annoyingly, the FAQ page linked to from the block message said before I was blocked, I was warned. Of course, this was not the case.

Facebook

Well, it has finally happened. I’ve created a Facebook account. As you can see, this is my first blog post in a couple of years. My plan is to pick up my picture scanning project and try to get everything imported into Facebook. We’ll see how that goes.

gnome-blog and WordPress

gnome-blog, version 0.8 has support for WordPress blogs. However, it seems that selecting wordpress appends “wordpress/xmlrpc.php” to the URL. This results in silent failures if you enter, for example: https://coderich.net I ended up choosing Self-run Other, then entered https://coderich.net/xmlrpc.php as the URL, and everything works. Yay!

Update: Apparently gnome-blog doesn’t set the title properly with BloggerAPI. I switched to MetaWeblog in the options and now it works!