about:livemark-failed … ‘Pulsed gravitational wave …’ … Or, „die Badewanne“ 17th of May, 2006 ANTE·MERIDIEM 09:49
Yay, a bug report that’s vaguely complicated. My sister tells me that when she loads this site in Firefox, and subscribes to the site using the orange icon below and to the right of her window, the relevant entry in her Bookmarks only ever says “Livemark field failed to load.”
I can reproduce this locally, so I Google™d for the URI associated with the failure message. The results are mostly in languages that aren’t English (or Swahili, or Latin, or the very limited number of other languages that one writes using ASCII), so I thought at first it might be a problem with supplying Firefox with non-ASCII characters in the UTF-8. That wasn’t it, I could go to http://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang.japan , which yesterday had posts with subjects in Japanese on the front page, and the RSS subscription worked, while the Atom subscription gave the error message.
So it’s evidently a problem with Firefox parsing Atom 1.0. (Since they
claimed Atom compliance when they released the software, and since Atom 1.0
wasn’t available back then, I’m reluctant to assert they’re incompatible
with Atom in general.) To work around that, I’ve made an RSS feed of the
actual content available, and I’ve verified that it works with Firefox;
you’ll need to click on the orange icon like this: 
in the lower corner of your screen,
and select “Subscribe to ‘RSS (full content, for Firefox Live Bookmarks, no
comments)’”. The comments aren’t available; I don’t imagine very many other
people are interested in such a feed anyway.
In languages-I-don’t-speak news, I got a pointer Monday from my colleague Youssef on how /q/ is pronounced in practice in Arabic; it’s not the energetic way I was doing it, more a gentle tap that can be easily made in conversation without thirty seconds’ preparation. Which is nice. Franco-Moroccan that he is, he had never heard of Araq, the distilled Arabic alcohol that’s named after sweat (charming marketing, no?) and is mostly produced in the Levant.
Patent application of the day: this describes
1. A full body teleportation system consisting of: generating a pulsed gravitational wave which propagates through a magnetic vortex wormhole generator; and generating a wormhole with the magnetic vortex generator whereby the pulsed gravitational wave traverses through the wormhole and enters into hyperspace where the wave is enormously magnified due to the lower speed of light in that dimension.I suspect somehow he’ll be asked to demonstrate a working implementation and will fail.
Word of the day: der Zuber, Zuber is a fairly rare German word for a tub; the DEW doesn’t link it to the latter, nor does the OED link the latter to it.
You mean to say that the existing comment feed doesn’t work to that end? Or that it being Atom and not RSS is a problem?
Comments are currently disabled.
As for a comment feed, one might find it useful to know if thre are replies to one’s comments. At the current pony-level, this user has to check by hand.