the power of 0ne

John Robb points to a rather scary article by William S. Lind.

Wow, this site is #7 on google when searching for "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&;ie=ISO-8859-1&q=microwave%20weapon%20government">microwave weapon government" due to this post, hopefully surfers will follow the links to John Robb's very informative article on homemade microwave weapons.

Practice report from the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Kimi Raikonnen is #1, woohoo! After such a dismal start to the season, things are finaly starting to look up for Mclaren!

Has anyone solved the Technocrati ping problem in "Radio" yet? So that we don't have to enter http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping into the URLs to Ping box every time?

If not I'm pretty sure I could write a simple tool to do this.

I know Steve did some research on this, but i'm not sure how far along he got...

Steve explains the problem with my "Radio" to "Manila" Tool, it's the permalinks.

One possible solution to the .html problem would be to use Manila's static rendering feature.

Now the problem with the msgnum is going to be a bit trickier, the msgnum is generated by Manila and cannot be changed be changed after the message has been created, the msgnum is the primary key.

The safest way I can think of to address the problem would be to add "padding" messages to the Manila site and then flag the padding messages as deleted.

A more dangerouns method would involve trying to set the "nextMsgNum" manually. Unfortunately I don't think there is any way to access this setting via xml-rpc.

I found it! We can authorize a Radio comments manager via the usernum of the Radio user, first a little background on how radio works:

Radio stores all user information on the Community Server, for most Radio users, that community server is radio.xmlstoragesystem.com but it doesn't really matter which community server you use as they all work the same way!

Now Radio uses xml-rpc to maintain your weblog, it renders the files locally and then upstreams them to the commnity server. The community server has several xml-rpc handlers that allow you to do this, here's a list:

1. deleteMultipleFiles
2. getMyDirectory
3. getServerCapabilities
4. mailPasswordToUser
5. ping
6. registerUser
7. requestNotification
8. rssPleaseNotify
9. saveMultipleFiles
10. validateUser

Hey! Look at that last one: validateUser, wonder how that works? Turns out that it's blissfully simple, pass your usernum and password and it returns true or false. Voila! A perfect way for the Manila comment server to validate the owner of the comments.

Don't believe me? Run this in Radio script, inserting your usernum and password of course:

You should get a popup window indicating true if you entereded a valid usernum / password combo!

It seems there is a problem with my Radio to Manila tool, i'm not sure that I grasp excatly what the problem isyet  but it's causing some problems for Steve.

Steve: Can you elaborate on the problem a bit? You said that the Manila msg numbers have to match the Radio post numbers. Why is this exactly? What functionality is no longer working, or not transferring to the Manila site?

More on comments in Manila from Steve, but this time from the point of view of a Radio users. He wants to give Radio editors a way to edit the comments stored on the Radio Comments Server. As he mentioned there are a whole bunch of technical reasons that make this quite difficult (read his post for specifics).

The problem is that the Manila site hosting the comments has no idea who the hosting weblog belongs to, all it has is the Radio usernum of the hosting site. All the comments for a specific weblog are stored in a sub-table of #newsite.radioHosting.[usernum]. So even though Manila doesn't know who owns the comments, it does know their Radio usernum.

Hey wait a second! Userland also has a database of usernums and passwords that are used when updating your Weblog! What if we could link the comments to this database? Then I could log into the Manila comment system with my usernum instead of my normal email address and Manila could give me access to edit the comments for my site! That way I don't even have to mess with the existing discussion group code, all that would be needed is add some new code for radio hosting!