Or maybe that should be the other way around? Anyway, the point is that MySpace recently made some changes that broke the site when used behind a default Privoxy install. After removing all the rules from the site, and then adding them each in one by one until the site broke again, I think it’s because of the session-cookies-only directive. I don’t know why that should matter to anything, but I think MySpace is doing some cookie trickery that’s foiled by removing the expiration from cookies. Anyway, throw this at the bottom of your user.action file:

For me a perfect Samba share lets me log in as my account on the machine. Here’s how to set that up on Ubuntu Feisty:

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and turn on user accounts:

Now you just have to add a “Samba user”. My theory is that if it’s the same username as a system account, all actions that the Samba daemon takes are done under that user account. The password can be different, though, which is nice. This way you can transfer a file over to your home directory without modifying permissions, and the file will be owned by you once it’s there.

That’s it!

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

This post is just to make myself feel better.

Personally, I can’t tell 128k AAC files apart from the originals. I had a hunch that most other people can’t either, but I decided to write up an informal listening test to find out. To make sure I got a lot of responses, I put it up on Digg . Well, hundreds of gigs of transfer and ten of thousands of votes later the results are in: turns out most people can’t tell.

This was an interesting experiment for me. Not so much because of the music results. I know that 128k AAC is pretty good, and I knew that before. It’s interesting to see an application that I built weather a number one spot in the Digg top 10. Rails managed to serve up hundreds of page requests a second without a hiccup. Of course, it was a very simple app. There weren’t many database calls and I wasn’t serving up any images, but it was also hosted on my home box and remained as speedy as ever the entire time. Amazon’s great S3 service was also a joy to use and obviously took the brunt of the onslaught.

Even so, I think that’s the last time I’ll do anything like that. I had no idea the kind of bandwidth Digg users could suck down if given half the chance!

Here’s a little spam tip guys: when the ENTIRE TEXT of a message is a link, it’s spam. And when a profile signs up and immediately requests to be friends with 4000 accounts, it’s a spam bot. I realize that you guys are busy trying to turn all the ColdFusion that Tom wrote back in his mom’s basement into .NET, but can you at least try to remove the obvious stuff? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it used to be fun to go to the spam bot pages and see all the kids desperate enough to believe that the hot, half-naked chick they’ve never seen before wants to be their friend, but it’s starting to wear a little thin.