Yesterday my level of XSLT geekery ratcheted up a notch. I was updating a schedule within a spreadsheet and had to update all the dates in a column by 4 months and 20 days. So after asking a few people who didn't have a solution I decided to save the spreadsheet as XMLSS then wrote an XSLT stylesheet that used my EXSLT extension library (for date functions) to update the value in that particular column. Of course, right after I did this one of my coworkers pointed out that all I had to do was change the value in the first cell in the column, left-click and drag to update every other column by however much I updated the first cell. His way took a few seconds while mine took about 15 minutes and was much more complex to boot. Geek.

Speaking of geeky distractions, you need to try out this very impressive online guessing game.

Ruminations below on the AI Winter, why derivation by restriction should be avoided in XSD, and Slashdot on mass walkouts.

I got back into work with a vengeance this week. I had six meetings on Monday and I just realized I that besides this milestone's spec deadlines I'm supposed to complete articles for both O'Reilly's XML.com and XML Journal plus there's this article that I've owed MSDN for months that I just finished this morning. Sheesh!!!

After Mark Pilgrim's hack I decided to get with the program and now strip potentially malicious HTML from RSS items in RSS Bandit. That and a bug fix constitute v.1.1.0.16 of RSS Bandit (Oh, and I now include the OPML file for Blogs @ GotDotNet with the install). Get it here

Thoughts on George Bush's resume, the Matrix Reloaded (shitty plot, fantastic action scenes), and a blog parody that's making the rounds.

The newest version of RSS Bandit is available. The primary improvements in this version are performance related specifically the app is more responsive, better support for handling feeds with errors (thanks to Justin Rudd's feedback), Outlook 2003-style smart folders, ability to view all items in a particular category, plus lots of drag N drop support for doing things like subscribing to feeds and moving nodes from one category to the other.

Old users will be glad to know the installer no longer requires you to uninstall previous versions of RSS Bandit but is now smart enough to figure out that it should overwrite previous installations. I apologize for not reading the docs in the first place and figuring out how to do this in the past.

You can grab the latest bits here. More details about changes in this release provided below.

It's amazing how you can use a piece of software every day and still not be aware of fundamental yet extremely cool features it has. I just noticed that Torsten added code to RSS Bandit a while ago that highlights in red any blog post that references your homepage link. Here's a screenshot of it in action. More comments below on related RSS Bandit features.

So I'm back. I've posted in general about travelling and even put up some pics. This post contains all the pent up XML geekery that I haven't been able to post over the past few weeks. Thoughts on passing XML around in the .NET Framework applications, links to the slides and code for my TechEd 2003 talk, opinions on Don Box's TechEd 2003 keynote, a note to reporters who are considering asking me about "Microsoft's official position on RSS", RSS Bandit updates and beating the W3C at its own game.

Most of my travelling is done. In the past 3 weeks I've been in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Lagos, London, Dallas, Abuja, as well as brief lay overs in Chicago and Houston. I have a bunch of stuff to blog about from the Nigeria presidential inauguration and the international first class travel to the poor reception of my TechEd 2003 talk (entirely my fault) and RSS Bandit goings on.

I'll probably post a few entries tomorrow to cover everything. For now I have a poll which I'd appreciate if folks answered.

Poll: Most Effective Weight Loss Mechanism You've Tried?

The importance of contingency plans cannot be overestimated. I thought I could drive to Canada, take care of some paper work at the US consulate, drive back to work, do a test run of my TechEd talk before handing in the final version, drop off my car and make it to the airport in time for an evening flight. This plan was derailed half way through the morning when I found out that I had to hang around Vancouver until 3:00PM before I could get my paperwork finished. So I missed my flight...

Click below for my impressions of Vancouver, my thoughts on the mini-blogger meetup at CrossRoads, responses to various blog posts about XML, an RSS Bandit update and Jayson Blair (how low can he go?)

Poll: Have You Ever Missed A Flight?

So it turns out that I still have stuff to blog about before I leave. The first inspired a KeanuReevesVoice("Whoa") from me. There's now a blog from a Senior VP at Microsoft, Eric Rudder now has his own blog.

The list of B0rg Bloggers is getting long indeed.

I'm unplugging for a while. Before going I decided to release version 1.1 of RSS Bandit. The release notes are contained in the post below and they outline all the new features since version 1.0d. Also some random comments about RSS, OPML, the Blogger API and other XML geekery to do with weblog interaction.

It seems quite afew people liked yesterday's RSS Bandit release. The release is now available on GotDotNet with one, two or is that three bugs fixed. I've been having problems accessing the GotDotnet server I'm supposed to be using for testing autoupdate so it is likely I'll have to do a v1.1 release without the feature or else wait until I get back from Nigeria and TechEd before I bang out a final v1.1 release.

More below on feuding pop stars, <blink>XML XML XML</blink>, Google removing weblogs from their index and how I spent my birthday.