Yesterday I added a couple of features to RSS Bandit. The one I am happiest with is that hitting the space bar now jumps you to the next unread item. This is such a neat feature, thanks to Joe Beda for repeatedly asking me to add it. I'll upload the latest installer when I get to work which means it'll be a day or two before it is updated on GotDotNet. For those who missed it last week RSSBandit is available for download here.

As an old hand at K5 I am unsurprised that there is a K5 story moderation meta-article that got out of voting. What surprises me is that we there was a time K5 got them once every 3 months and this one took longer than usual to show up. Either K5 has hit its growth peak or the last tweaks to the story moderation system were very good. On an unrelated note I am quite unhappy that K5 has no records of my stories or my comments that go back past a year. This bothers me a lot because I used to like being able to Google for old diaries and posts or point people at my old diaries. There were one or two that I'd like to keep for posterity, I better grab them from the Google Cache before they expire.

Comments below on comments by Clemens Vasters on the XML Infoset and a response by James Strachan.

MSDN is going to give people the impression that I do no work except write articles. I currently have 3 articles ( one, two, three) described as being written by me and published in January. Of course, closer investigation shows the latter two are reprints of my XML.com articles and not new work. I really want to write about something besides XML in the next few months or I'll go bonkers.

Thoughts on the Über-browser, referrer log abuse, Keith Ballinger's quote "XSD is the type system handed down from God", a link to yet another Apple Switch Ad parody and a brief update on RSS Bandit.

Poll: What were you doing when the Columbia crashed?

Enjoy

Sam Ruby's blogger meetup in the Belly of the Beast happened yesterday. There were about 22 people there (for a full list of attendees go here) and it was a major geek out session. A lot of people fired up laptops half way through with lots of IBM Thinkpads being represented (Sam, Don, and Miguel had one) while I had my Tablet PC but forgot my pen at home so I couldn't show off the cool handwriting recognition.

Links to pics and my memories of random snatches of conversation below.

Poll: Best parts of last night's State of the Union address?

I hate being trolled but I saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone today. Some Java zealot has been posting a series entitled "101 Ways Java is Better Than .NET" in his blog. His posts are not as useful as I expected given that I'm always looking for decent criticism of the stuff I work on but unfortunately it seemed like for every good point he raised, he'd raise five or six bogus ones. Others have already pointed out how bogus his mostly uninformed claims are. However he makes a claim about XML in the .NET Framework ( point 79) which I can't help responding to.

I'll respond to point 79 partially by answering Joe Gregorio's question.

A couple of the us MSFT folks with blogs met for dinner at Spazzo last night. Chris Hollander has pictures in his blog. There was actually next to no talk about blogging and just a lot of talking shop about work and technology.

Irritations with the W3C website, some thoughts on XHTML brought on by reading Mark Pilgrim's recent post, thoughts on building layers of abstraction, and an update on the status of RSS Bandit.

Inspired by Sam Ruby's provision of an RSS feed for the RSS-deprived Keith Ballinger I decided to quit procrastinating and do the same for Tantek who happens to be the B0rg HTML working group rep. Unlike Sam I haven't decided to provide his feed directly by converting his blog to an RSS feed every hour or so then hosting the feed on my website. Instead I've provided a stylesheet (with sample output) which Tantek or someone else can use to generate RSS from his blog and then host online or use with a news aggregator as needed.

Yesterday I bumped into a few people who would make fine guests on the Jerry Springer show, this morning I worked on an installer for RSS Bandit, and found the "best URL ever" in a Daily ShowMoment of Zen kind of way. Details about these and more below.

Poll: What would you rate the new Incredible Hulk trailer out of five?

Sometimes watching the people at the W3C do their thing can be so damn dismaying. Roy Fieldings recent founder of the REST religious movement decided that he was tired of people pointing out the ambiguities bordering on metaphysics in some of the W3C & IETF specs and basically resorted to putdowns and throwing flames. Thankfully Tim Berners-Lee came in preaching reason and pointed out the inappropriateness of his behavior. Basically it seems the URI issue being debated is turning into a Semantic Web folks (people like Joshua and Sandro) versus the HTTP Web folks like Roy. Funny enough, I completely agree with the Semantic Web folks and disagree with Roy even though I still think the Semantic Web is an infeasible pipedream. I am such a mess of contradictions. :)

More below on single sign on, features vs. functionality and Mark Pilgrim's recent XML.com article.

By the way, Andy Conrad [my co-author on an upcoming piece in Dr. Dobbs Journal and all around badass] has started a Radio weblog. More thoughts on interesting conversations with Andy below.

Poll: Best John Cusack movie?

Cringely has a particularly ridiculous article this week involving operating systems being built on Linux. It always surprises me that someone as technically ignorant as Cringely is supposedly a voice of the industry. I keep suspecting that the columns are really written by interns and the nom the plume is no longer maintained by Marc Stephens. Then again maybe his writing has always been crap.

More below on Sam Ruby's blogger meetup, the Black Holocaust, confused marketing messages, and stumbling on a very well written description of the pros and cons of developing with the Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework.

Poll: Sex in the Workplace?

Yesterday: An afternoon of coding, a night of drinking tequila and dancing.

This morning: Good music, a good buzz, and good code.