The Dark Balloon

A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.

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General announcement two.

James Franco is now on Twitter, so you can stop—you know—thinking you can make the internet a better place because, let’s face it, it’s now THE BEST POSSIBLE INTERNET.

#francophile

[(2011 February 20) • .]

Recent comments (Ethane, General announcement.) • (HAO, Jammies.) • (Tim, Jammies.) • (Prashanth, Wedding.) • (Hao, Hands.).

Recent posts (10/06, The myth and the man.) • (09/13, 2011 Sep 13.) • (08/21, Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.) • (08/21, Failing beautifully.) • (08/18, Shameless.).

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Exit strategy raising AttributeError and Other Nothense.

For those of you not in the know, you can join by following me on Twitter. For those of you in the know, I’ll let you puzzle out this amazing website.

[(2008 June 11) • • • .]

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If it were a cat, it would be urlgogetiturself.

What follows is part of a patch against the twitter.py file from the awesome python-twitter project. You can download the entire patch if you so choose. With it, you can have read from Twitter from Google App Engine. I have not experimented with writing (posting) yet. By default, you get problems using urllib2 on GAE, which I bypass here like a stealthy lightning ninja greased with the body fat of my enemies. It’s part of my Quo Quo status project, which I’ll release soon enough.


+    method = urlfetch.GET
+    data, params, headers = {}, {}, {}
+    if post_data:
+      method = urlfetch.POST
+      data.update(post_data)
+
+    for x in (parameters, self._default_params):
+      if x: params.update(x)
+
+    url = self._BuildUrl(url, extra_params = params)
+    if method == urlfetch.POST:
+      mime = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
+      headers.update({'Content-type': mime})
+
+    # Skip the cache, we're on GAE. This hack by shadytrees.
+    data = urllib.urlencode(data)
+    url_data = urlfetch.fetch(url, payload = data,
+                              method = method,
+                              headers = headers,
+                              ).content
[(2008 May 26, 1!) • • • • .]

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Do not mess with me for I have fury.

By the way, Twitter, I demand you change your logo or pay up for copying my original work.

[(2008 May 20) • .]

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Ornitholumination.

And as Twitter slowly spins to a standstill, you can—if you stand far above the world perched on a ledge built by primitive people long ago—see the lights go from 1000 on to 100 to 10 and then to just 3. Each dimming light waggishly represents a Twitter status pulling script or Wordpress plug-in slowly churning to a timeout and then giving up altogether. Three remain, hesitant but sure: one from a city man who RAID stripes his tweets, one from a jungle dweller pulling from his Varnish cache by accident, and one young lass who found the right DNS server and can still access a remaining Twitter server somebody forgot to turn off as he was leaving the room. And she still tweets all by herself, wondering where everybody else is, and her light shines brightest.

[(2008 May 20) • .]