Friday, May 20, 2005

Responses to This Mobile Life greasemonkey script

I'm reading the comments and am trying to respond to them in an organized way.

* You are a jerk for revealing the cool secret I discovered! Now they will ruin it for EVERYBODY!
** Sorry. I think they give this stuff away. It's their servers. If they want to, they have that right. Let's give them a chance to be awesome instead of expecting them to be jerks. Take some comfort in the fact that if the links get obfuscated it will affect me (sob), just as it will when someone else beats the obfuscation (yay).
** Tell all your friends you were doing it way back when. Show them file creation dates to prove it. They'll be totally wowed. Don't mention how you didn't share the idea with your community.

* You are a jerk for stealing from public radio.
** It's public radio. They give this away over the airwaves. They give it away over the internet. They want you to listen to it. Feel free to donate directly to the station or to NPR in general. I hope more people listen to this stuff and give them money, but not so much that they can retire in luxury from their job of making cool stuff for me to listen to.


* You are a jerk for using up all the bandwidth of WBEZ.org
** Actually, I only created this script after reading Mark's review of the RadioShark in the last issue of Make. I told him about the trick and told him I'd try to whip up a greasemonkey for it. I then gave him a link to the script and he blogged it on boingboing. So he's a awful nasty man for telling all of you about it. Pledge that you'll never read his awful nasty blog again for what they did to wbez's servers.
** I have also taken a suggestion from the comments and put in the coral cache address. That's so hot, I love it. Wish I'd thought of it in the beginning.
** Turn: I'm saving them bandwidth. If you listen to the same stream twice you download it twice. If you download it once each subsequent listen is FREE to wbez.

* You are a jerk for your crappy blog design.
** I apologize. It's definitely not ready for prime time - but I think it is just the pre tag blogger put in when I pasted the greasemonkey script in. In my defence I think any long line in this particular template with that tag will overlap the sidepanel. Can't be helped unless I take down my flickr panel. That ain't happening.

* Thanks!
** You're welcome! It feels good to be able to give even something tiny back to the internerds who've given me tons of cool stuff. Gift economies rock. Now go do wonderful things.

BTW - this website is no longer active, so you can take the domain name!