Now I know why I loved running — it’s the best weed out there!
Month: January 2004
Well-formed Atom Feeds Only, says Nick
And I agree with him. Nick Bradbury, FeedDemon’s author, makes a great point about Atom feeds vs. RSS feeds in a couple of good posts:
When I started coding FeedDemon, I immediately ran into an ugly problem: a huge number of RSS feeds are invalid. This made it impossible to use an off-the-shelf validating XML parser, since it would choke on so many existing feeds. A number of very popular RSS feeds are shockingly invalid, and I couldn’t expect FeedDemon to compete in the RSS aggregator market if it couldn’t handle them. So, I coded my own XML parser, and made it extremely forgiving of problematic feeds.
Atom, however, is a new format, and there’s a chance we can get it right. Rather than wasting our time working around validation issues, aggregator authors such as myself can spend our time coding the features our users really want.
I agree. There are a pile of RSS debates between W(h)iner and everybody else, and, really, this is our one chance as a community to get the format right from the beginning, and not force readers to have to work around bad feeds.
Just as an aside, here’s my Atom feed. It’s the default MovableType Atom feed (I think), so it may not be valid, but the folks at SixApart are usually pretty good about keeping their stuff valid.
Patent lawyer puts claim to entire Internet
If this isn’t the most asinine lawsuit (and patent), I don’t know what is…
The core of the patent is a so-called method of assigning URLs and email addresses to a specific group. Each member will have a URL in the form “name.subdomain.domain” and an email address in the form “[email protected]”. This, it is claimed in the patent, lives outside the current Internet infrastructure: “The present invention overcomes the limitations of the prior art by providing a method, apparatus and business system that allow a user to quickly communicate online with a member of a particular business, professional or other group regardless of whether the member has an internet presence (e.g. e-mail address or website) and without the user needing to know or find the internet address for the recipient.”
The Color of the Web is #9C9C9C
Overlay 3000 URLs on top of each other, and the general color of the web is a nice gray.
New Images from the Mars Rover
Yoleo sent me these images taken by the Mars rover (click for larger version)
ASCII Movies
If you want to see some pretty cool ASCII/Text animations, bookmark this site, as it’s got a ton of them.
Google adds more features
Google has introduced more features like flight tracking, vehicle ID numbers, UPC codes, Area Codes, and US Postal Service tracking numbers (after adding UPS and FedEx tracking before).
While all these new features are all neat and nifty, I have one question: when is all this going to be integrated seamlessly? It’s nice that they finally have all the features listed on one page, and the system is smart enough that if you type things in right, it will just work, but how do people know it will work?
They’re starting to get news results implemented more into the results, but I’d like to see the image results, news results, USENET, catalog results, froogle, and DMOZ results all in one place. So, if I search for Microsoft, I’d like to see this, this, this, this, this, this, and maybe even this, this, , and maybe even this, all in one neat, clean, fast and graphic-free interface.
Will it ever happen? Probably not. It reality, Google will probably look like this before long.
I bitch too much
Barney told me something the other day that I didn’t really think about: I bitch too much about my life on this blog. Really, I’ve been bitching about my bills, my back, my work, etc… , but I really haven’t been very positive, and I do apologize for that. So I’m going to sum up things without complaining too much. Really.
In all my complaining, you might have thought my back pain was still bad. In reality, my back pain is far better than before my surgery. I’ve been back at work for two weeks now, and obviously have about four zillion projects that need to be taken care of. I started driving a clutch a few days ago, which was a big step (the week before I was driving my sister’s automatic).
I’m able to walk around, stand up, and work fairly well (can’t sit down for too long, per the doctor, though I’m still able to sit very comfortably). All in all, the surgery worked quite well, and I’m very happy to have had it, despite my bills.
My family is doing good. Baby’s growing up too fast, and is just about six months old now, and starting to get a lot more personality. I think she’s mad at me for going back to work as I was home more before. She protested quite a bit when I came home from work for the first time in a while. Hannah just turned four-years-old last week, she’s going on 13 all too fast.
My wife’s doing well. I can’t help much yet around the house, so she’s still having to do most of the housework, but I’m slowly being able to help her a little bit. Tomorrow I start on my exercise regimen — basically just slow steady movements to get strength back to my legs, abdomen, and back. I’m actually quite excited about it.
There, hopefully that wasn’t too much complaining 🙂
That’s a messed up system
A co-worker of mine wanted me to look at her computer as she complained it was running really slow and had a bunch of “illegal stuff” (they were windows Illegal Operation Errors) and had a bunch of porn pop ups.
After running SpyBot and AdAware, I found there were about 450 (no joke) entries found between the two programs. Ran AntiVir XP, found another 90 files infected with about a dozen different trojans. Ran Windows Update (which had downloaded all the critical updates in the background, but nobody bothered to install them) and got everything up to date, and now have an AV program running in the background (she had McAfee, but it was disabled for some reason). She already has a firewall on her dial-up setup (she’s not on broadband — thankfully, or this would be much worse), so I’m leaving that as is. I also told her to not let her friends touch the system, as she claims her boyfriend’s friends were downloading porn or something. Based on the types of dialers and such that were on the system, I told her to keep an eye on her phone bill to make sure these things weren’t “calling home”. It was a mess.
But I have to say, in all my time that I’ve been working on systems, this is the messiest system I’ve ever come across.
Update on 1/14: Oh man is it so messed up.
OK, so I spoke too soon. I thought I had it all cleaned up, and life was good. Ran two different anti-virus programs and three different anti-spyware programs over and over, and the system came out clean. So I plug back in the ‘net connection to install the various MS Office updates. Just for kicks, I ran SpyBot again, and it starts finding more stuff. “Oh crap” I thought. I look at the network activity in the XP Task Manager, and every few seconds, there’d be a large spurt of activity. I throw a packet sniffer onto the system, there’s piles of HTTP requests going out to nasty sites and they’re coming from explorer.exe.
Lovely.
So I open up the previously-emptied MSIE Temporary Internet Files folder, and the thing is loaded with cookies, graphics, and a whole ton of other crap.
From that I can tell, somehow explorer got over-written or hacked to include a virus that “calls home” the minute it finds an Internet connection. It’s a mess, and every time the anti-virus software says it’s cleaned it, it comes back and starts doing stupid crap again.
So what next? A reformat. There’s no personal data left on the system as viruses gutted the My Documents folders for both the users on the system. So this weekend I’ll be doing a low-level format and then use Dell’s recovery disk to reinstall everything.
Man, what a mess.
Some scary e-mail statistics
Not only does a recent study show that up to 40% of legitimate e-mail never gets delivered, but 63% of all e-mail now sent is spam. It’s no wonder Chris thinks RSS is bigger than Jesus. Hell, I had trouble with my UtterlyBoring.com Headline List and AOL blocking e-mails from it. More and more people are reading this site via my RSS feed, and, considering these stats, I’m starting to see why.