Archive for January, 2003

The more feeds I add to my feed reader Syn­dirella, the more I for­get read­ing blogs with­out xml feeds. We defi­nately have quite a chal­lenge ahead, orga­niz­ing the increas­ing amount of blog posts in ways mak­ing it easy to select, search and fil­ter accord­ing to out exact inter­ests. Being stressed out by con­stant feed reader alerts, hov­ever, is the prize we have to pay in order to boost the stan­dards of site syn­di­ca­tion. I’ll try to update my new page about the sub­ject with the lit­tle knowl­edge I have, hop­ing to make some blog­gers switch…

Since swith­c­ing to Syn­dirella I’ve wanted to gen­er­ate my blogroll from the OPML file hold­ing my sub­scrip­tions. So now there’s a blogroll on the left of the site, still includ­ing some rather poor blogs added dur­ing my feed craze. I’ve used MSXML to trans­form my XML on the server using XSL and haven’t done per­for­mance test­ing yet. I’m still new to the whole XSL thing and actu­ally I’d rather have tested it out using some of the XML parsers for the Apache server as I’m cur­rently work­ing on a project where this could come in handy. But for now my own hosted Microsoft server had to do. Source code (not too pretty) here. So now I just need Syn­dirella to be able to save my sub­scrip­tion file directly on the net (would solve the prob­lems when using another client on the lap­top) — or maybe I could just get the file from my own com­puter using XML-RPC or some­thing… Well, I don’t know — not sure I’ve under­stood every­thing yet.

Oh, and my for­mer blogroll (for some strange rea­son con­sist­ing exclu­sively of blogs with­out RSS feeds has been removed. If it’s not RSS I don’t need to know… New project: Mak­ing every­one aknowl­edge the impor­tance of feeds. “Feed my RSS addiction”.

Hav­ing to sign up with Yahoo to be able to use the Syn­dirella mail­inglist made me for­get about it. But Brad Choate saved me the trou­ble of mail­ing a wish list; very rel­e­vant wishes indeed…

Protest Posters! — Tell The World You Oppose The War In Iraq — go down­load your copy. Link via BD4D.

I’ve been search­ing the net for soft­ware allow­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion between peo­ple shar­ing the same wi-fi con­nec­tion for a cou­ple of days now. Trepia is close — it’s basi­cally an IM client based on access points. What I really want, though, is these fea­tures built into the OS allow­ing the owner of the access point to broad­cast mes­sagges to the peo­ple using it. Imag­ine being greeted by the owner in a lit­tle win­dow explan­ing how he’d like you to behave, inform­ing you of any lim­i­ta­tions, and maybe list­ing other users of the same net­work. Would make those trips to the park so much more pleas­ant. Of course this could in some way be achieved by set­ting up some sort of logon pro­ce­dure, but actu­ally I would rather not.

I have just cho­sen to dis­trib­ute pollas.dk under a Attribution-ShareAlike license. And you’re absoulutely right, this place isn’t flooded with mate­r­ial worth using. I do, how­ever, like the idea of out­lin­ing the terms of use. These deci­sions make infor­ma­tion shar­ing and con­tent syn­di­ca­tion as well as the use of dif­fer­ent mate­r­ial such as code snip­pets and images (soon to come at pollas.dk hope­fully) a whole lot eas­ier. It also addresses the issue of how to main­tain copy­right when work­ing with dig­i­tal media, an issue I find still more inter­est­ing as new tech­nolo­gies emerge. Choose your own license at Cre­ative Com­mons. Infor­ma­tion wants to be free!

This game — America’s Army — is bound to get hacked or tam­pered with in some way. (link via Boing­Bo­ing) The setup of game vs. war is so obvi­ously weird it’s hard to come up with any decent com­ment rang­ing beyond, well — the obvi­ous. But hey, it’s just a 314MB down­load, and you’re off to war…

Not a sur­prise at all, rather — think­ing of the pre­vi­ous devel­op­ment story for the web — a rea­son to wish for all the 3G porn you can think of: BizRe­port — Will Porn Lead 3G Mobile Tele­phony Take-Off?. Which on the other hand is quite a strange thought…

I’ve been run­ning Syn­dirella for a cou­ple of days now, and to me it seems a great deal bet­ter than Fee­dreader. The dif­fer­ence in nav­i­gat­ing actu­ally comes out to Syndirella’s advan­tage, and the sup­port of the dif­fer­ent for­mats are bet­ter. So is the built-in browser. Unfor­tu­nately, some of the feeds I used to have in Fee­dreader won’t show up in Syn­dirella — on the other hand; these are prob­a­bly the exact ones caus­ing Fee­dreader to stall on updates and use up 250+ MBs of mem­ory… They are both open source and I’m look­ing for­ward to fol­low devel­op­ment. For the time being, I’ll prob­a­bly keep on run­ning them both side by side.

Appa­rantly, the stu­pid­ity never stops. Accord­ing to Aften­posten (link via Slash­Dot), Jon’s legal vic­tory didn’t last long, as Økokrim has decided to appeal. While not a very big sur­prise, it adds to the amount of stu­pid­ity sur­round­ing the busi­ness of major record and movie com­pa­nies, the lat­est being Kim How­ells, the UK’s Cul­ture Min­is­ter, con­demn­ing Rob­bie William’s remark, that “music piracy’s great”. Mr How­ells added that Williams’ com­ments were help­ing “do the work for inter­na­tional gangs involved in drugs and pros­ti­tu­tion who find music piracy an excel­lent way of laun­der­ing prof­its”. Go again … ?!