But XAML gives me spontaneous erections...

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*scribbles that down for later*

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Let's be honest man... there aren't that many points in time that you AREN'T getting spontaneous erections for you to be able to accurately pinpoint the reasons when you DO.

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yo! i know you! i work over in LiveJournal's syndication support category. I am so not supposed to talk about requests outside Support, but I'm going to in this case.

I'm going to try to get this request taken care of (without the unhelpful response "please suggest this in suggestions") because I personally would be a lot happier if I never saw another Bad Behavior related syn request again. The way that things here work is that I (or someone else who cares enough) have to do some research, and then escalate it to the person who is the liaison betw support and devs. Then I get permission to put it in the Request Tracker system and he assigns it to a dev or writes it himself -- which of course doesn't mean it will happen immediately, but may be likely to mean that it will happen at some time in the near future. We actually knew about the Bad Behavior problem, but we didn't know the cause of it.

I'm moving this weekend, so if I don't get on it within a week and nobody else does either, remind me. Syn is shorthanded right now due to life circumstances of the three or four of us who are most active in working on weird queries like this.

If you feel like writing a patch yourself you're certainly welcome to -- I can put that in RT too and then it's likely to be directly committed. The relevant module is probably the one called synsuck, and it's kinda hacky.

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OMG! Awesome - I had zero idea you worked for LJ! =)

I don't know much of anything about RSS and even less about the LJ codebase, but I'll probably try and take a gander at it and code up a patch regardless. I've got plenty of servers to make RSS requests again, so it shouldn't be too hard to make, say, the Thunderbird aggregator and LJ's both take a stab at a server I can log packets from, and see what the differences look like, and make LJ's code even hackier by doing some ungodly bastard fix to it. Open source for the win!

So where are you moving? Still within Colatown, or long gone already, or just moving away, or...?

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Well, work for is a strong word. We're all volunteers, although sometimes it feels like a job (and I certainly list it on my resume -- it intrigues people). I do support and userdoc. I suppose the reason anyone would do volunteer support is somewhat like the reason people would code open source software. Even the Abuse Team is all volunteer (those people are hardxcore: "quota" of 10 hours a week and essentially volunteering to have users pissed at them).

You can actually run your own build of LJ if you're really interested in doing that: a lot of people do -- apparently it's not hard. There is a dev server but I don't know a lot about getting access to it; there's also a community, lj_dev. I think a lot of the relations with LJ's volunteer dev community as a whole blew up a while back due to really bad behavior by one person who was essential to the community (he pissed off a lot of old school folks and got banned from our IRC network), and then other people left when the 6A thing went down, and so there are very few volunteer devs these days . . . it's more like some support people do it on the side. Also, a lot of the dev work is now being done in house because 6A can pay, and people aren't working at a distance, so it's on whiteboards and not necessarily easily accessible to volunteers.

I've been living in Atlanta for two years now! I was a grad student, but I dropped out, and am working as a web designer, and contemplating whether I want to go back to school for courses in print design, marketing, interaction design, IT admin, or web development, because most people want to hire someone with web design PLUS one of these other skill sets. I was moving within Atlanta -- I have SUCCEEDED in my mission to move.

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researched by me, escalated into "issue investigation" where the support -> dev liaison is going to contact the Bad Behavior developer and ask him how we can modify our user agent string to be acceptable to bad behavior (that's one theory), or whether the byte range is actually bad. Thing is that starting a byte range at 0 is NOT against W3C policy, but it may be a problem with his specific plugin, in which case he needs to fix it to be in compliance with W3C, not us. Until then, the workaround you can use is to turn off bad behavior on the originating site, immediately create the feed, and then turn it right back on. It won't block any further requests from LJ. If you sense that I kind of don't know what I'm talking about, I don't, cause this is kind of bordering on being a Perl question, and I don't speak Perl.

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er... which bit's the Perl? 'cuz Bad Behavior's php. =)

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synsuck is written in perl, and so our RSS GET request format is buried in some library of functions somewhere.

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Ahhhh. Well, I think the LJ devs getting directly in touch with the Bad Behavior guy is probably the best real bet all the way around no matter how you slice it anyway. =)

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Enjoyed your post. As a network tech / martial arts instructor, I thought the references were well placed. I'm also old enough to remember when "PC Load Letter" was a real error message generated by the ubiquitous HP laserjet. But what really amused me (eventually) was that I was performing the exact same procedure with the exact same results. In fact, YOUR POST is the one that clued me in to removing the extraneous spaces. Ironically, I also had the properly formatted ldf, just chose to use the wrong one...

This weekend I'll be attempting to replace a windows 2000 exchange server with SBS 2003. Should be simple given the MS GUI...

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I can only recommend that your remember your breathing. Godspeed, sir, godspeed.

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