Yabfog

Ah... feels so good to scratch that itch. Python, nntp, twitter, xmpp.

Looks like Twitter will not be bringing back track.

After a fairly testy exchange at BearHugCamp this morning among Steve Gillmor, Dustin Sallings (twitterspy and IdentiSpy bot creator), a few audience members and the guys at Twitter, Alex Payne actually gave a very clear statement about the lengths to which Twitter was willing to go to aide developers in building upon and extending Twitter.

If you need to poll the API more frequently that the API limits allow, email Alex and chances are very good that you can be accommodated. Ditto regarding something Alex referred to as a "research project" involving a data-mining feed -- presumably, this is like a customized (or perhaps random) fraction of the full public timeline firehose.

As for the full public timeline firehose via XMPP: "That would require a business discussion."

My Twitter bot works just fine for me, but Dustin is actually trying to provide a service to people other than himself, so he needs more cooperation from Twitter. Based on what Alex said, it seems that Dustin and others who are working on various bots to bring back the "track" feature via IM should be able to do so.

As for the "official" return of "track" and IM -- don't hold your breath.

I twittered about an amazing playlist (or iMix, if you will) of Frank Zappa tunes that Nick Bradbury published, but it appears that iTunes has deleted the iMix because Zappa is no longer on iTunes. But it's an amazing playlist, so here it is:

1. Peaches In Regalia, Hot Rats (1969)
2. Camarillo Brillo, Over-Nite Sensation (1973)
3. My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama, Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970)
4. Maggio, The Man From Utopia (1983)
5. St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast, Apostrophe' (1974)
6. Echidna's Arf (Of You), Roxy And Elsewhere (1974)
7. Mother People, We're Only In It For The Money (1968)
8. Cocaine Decisions, The Man From Utopia (1983)
9. Five-Five-Five, Shut Up N' Play Yer Guitar (Disc 1) (1981)
10. Can't Afford No Shoes, One Size Fits All (1975)
11. G - Spot Tornado, Jazz From Hell (1986)
12. Dumb All Over, You Are What You Is (1981)
13. Teen-Age Prostitute, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch (1982)
14. Sleep Dirt, Sleep Dirt (1979)
15. Tell Me You Love Me, Chunga's Revenge (1970)
16. Pygmy Twylyte, Roxy And Elsewhere (1974)
17. Baby Snakes, Baby Snakes (1983)
18. Electric Aunt Jemima, Uncle Meat (1969)
19. Po-Jama People, One Size Fits All (1975)

Enjoy!

I just saw some weird traffic on this blog. Last week, I was testing a plugin when it went a little haywire and automatically created a bunch of posts (based on my NewsGator clippings, including a lot of law related and gadget related topics -- things I read about but don't write about). And then because I have Alex King's twitter tools installed, each of those new posts was propagated to twitter, too.

Now, I thought that this little stunt probably would have pissed people off. Instead (maybe), I saw a huge spike in traffic to this blog -- more than three times the usual traffic.

I'm assuming that these "visitors" were just bots that were monitoring the twitter public timeline, but the referrer logs don't back that up (although that doesn't necessarily mean anything).

Brian Breslin, of Twitbin, left a comment saying that Twitbin fixed the security flaw I previously pointed out. Cooool!

UPDATE: FIXED. See the comments below.

A couple weeks ago, I installed twitbin, a Firefox extension that loads twitter in a sidebar. But, I just happened to be checking my browser cookies, and I noticed that my twitter username and PASSWORD were stored in my browser cookies in plaintext! This is not even a session cookie -- it is persistent, with a one-year expiration.

Are you kidding me?! Twitbin -- uninstalled.

"[I]t is never appropriate for cookies to contain plaintext user names and passwords." [The World Wide Web Security FAQ]