[This is the third post about Accessing Facebook in Vietnam] 

Lately, ISPs in Vietnam has begun randomly blocking Facebook again after a period of openness.  When it's blocked, even accessing Facebook via their Lisp4 server (or using the Saigonist DNS server) doesn't work.

But there are a number of apps, both web-based and desktop apps, which integrate with Facebook to different extents.  These apps, once you login to them with your Facebook account, can basically get your Facebook updates for you without requiring access to Facebook.

One such app is Seesmic, which has both a web and a desktop client.  Seesmic connects to a numer of social networks and I use it for reading my Twitter feed, with a custom hack to fix a serious problem with disappearing Tweets.  But once you login to Seesmic and connect it to your Facebook account, you can see your Facebook feed as well as messages.  That's enough for most people, most of the time.

Other desktop apps that can connect to Facebook are Bubbles and Hootsuite, but I wasn't able to get Hootsuite to connect to my Facebook account.

Another less convenient way is to use Opera's online demo of their Opera Mini browser.  It's a Java app and you use it like you're using a phone, but it will connect to Facebook for you (unless your browser doesn't let Java make network connections).

When I saw that Diesel released a desktop app called Excellbook as part of a marketing campaign called Be Stupid At Work, I was hoping it would also work in bypassing the Facebook block.  It's an Adobe AIR app, which requires installing Adobe AIR, and is generally a piece of crap.  Even if you can get it to connect, it will require a connection to Facebook still and so it's not so useful.  Nice idea, terrible execution and yet another example of a bad Adobe AIR app.

Since I mostly use Hootsuite and Seesmic for reading my Twitter timeline (the other big reader, TweetDeck, won't connect to both Twitter and Facebook in either it's Chrome app or desktop versions), I've updated h8sq: the 4sq killer to work on those clients.

This also includes performance enhancements for the Twitter.com version.

Furthermore, if you open your Chrome Developer JavaScript console, you will see log messages for each hated on FourSquare tweet like so:

"hated on tomosaigon" 

:)

Do you find Hootsuite's "Promoted Tweets" distracting?  I've also hacked together an ad blocker for Hootsuite.  Rather, it should be called an ad blacker, as it blacks out the ad but still makes it clear who is spamming you, and you can still read the full ad by mousing over it.

Install h8sq for Chrome

Install hootfree hootsuite ad blacker for Chrome

Every few months, I've had remote OpenBSD servers die mysteriously, without any visible console messages, and still responding to pings, although higher level networking (http, ssh) are unresponsive. The crontab I setup to dump output from top (or systat) also stops. But before the kernel failure load was low and swap was unused.

After rebooting and checking dmesg, I see before the most recent reboot:

uvm_mapent_alloc: out of static map entries

Doing some research, it seems like it could be a problem with kmem_map fragmentation, possibly from long-running processes (like apache, which is being used more heavily now). The problem appears to have been fixed in recent releases of OpenBSD which dynamically increase kmem, but upgrading the server right now isn't feasible.

So the solution is to compile a custom kernel with an increased MAX_KMAPENT added to GENERIC config:

Drupal 6 allows you to either display the comment form below saved comments or on a separate page. There's surprisingly no way to configure the form to appear above the comments. It's hard-coded at the bottom of comment_render to either append the form, or not at all.

There's a micro-module aptly titled 'Comment form above comments' which does the job but does so using string replaces on resulting html so it's not the ideal or elegant solution.

It turns out to be simple to get the same effect in code.

First, we need to "configure" the form to appear on a separate page, but only because we're going to manually show it. You can ensure this configuration with the line:

variable_set('comment_form_location_'.$node->type, COMMENT_FORM_SEPARATE_PAGE);

You could even variable_get and re-variable_set after printing the form if you really wanted to.

Next, output the following where you want to display comments, whether in a PHP code block or node template:

$edit = array('nid' => $node->nid);
print comment_form_box($edit) . comment_render($node);

Another recent discovery was that the comment form is hard-coded to redirect to /node after submitting. This hack, as a module, will get you back to the page you submitted from:

function noredirect_comment_form_submit(&$form, &$form_state) {
    $form_state['redirect'] = ltrim($form['#action'], '/');
}

function noredirect_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id) {
    if ($form_id == 'comment_form') {
       $form['#action'] = request_uri();
        $form['#submit'][] = 'noredirect_comment_form_submit';
    }
}