October 10, 2003
@ 04:40 PM
The one where yet another person requests a feature that's been in RSS Bandit for months.
 

Categories: RSS Bandit

October 10, 2003
@ 10:52 AM
An exploration of the term Almost Standard Compliant
 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

October 10, 2003
@ 10:27 AM

Since I moved websites I'd like people to access my dasBlog RSS feed as opposed to my old RSS feeds. However whereas getting a web server to send a 301 (Moved Permanently) result to a client is a piece of cake in Apache (simply edit some config file) it seems to be a bitch and a half in IIS.

If anyone has any tips or tricks as to how to setup IIS 5.1 running ASP.NET to send 301s I'm all ears.


 

Categories: Ramblings

In which I go over the first three features I plan to checkin to the dasBlog work space. Click below for details.
 

Categories: Das Blog

October 8, 2003
@ 06:02 PM

I was at Sam Goody again this past weekend where I picked up the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Ninja Scroll and where'll I'll probably soon be returning to once they get the Ninja Scroll Series. I couldn't help but notice the disparity in the way entertainment media like console games and movies are sold compared to music CDs. Sam Goody had an "under $10" rack where one could buy big budget movies from a few years ago for less than half their original price at the time they were first released. Similarly various video games were being sold at half price because they were "platinum sellers". On the other hand I still have to fork over $20 after taxes if I want to pick up a CD over a decade old like NWA's second album. What seemed quite absurd was that it was possible  to buy a DVD for half the price one would have paid for its accompanying soundtrack on CD. There is clearly a problem here yet the RIAA continues to act like the problem is with music fans and not with them. Being blinded by greed is an unfortunate thing.

Phil Greenspun has a post entitled RIAA, friendship and prostitution where he states

In the bad old days of Napster you kept your MP3 collection on your desktop.  Today, however, an MP3 jukebox with enormous capacity can be purchased for $200.  It won't be long now before average people carry around their entire music collections on their cell phones.

Consider this scenario.  You are sitting at Starbucks and see a friend.  He is not inside your Starbucks but across the street in the other Starbucks.  You walk across the street.  Both of you happen to have your MP3 jukeboxes your pockets.  He says "Have you heard the latest Britney Spears song?  It reminds me so much of the late Beethoven Quartets with some of Stravinsky's innovative tonality."  You haven't?  Just click your MP3 jukeboxes together and sync them up.  Any tracks that he had and you didn't you now have.  You're using a digital audio recorder; the device won't do anything except record music.  You're not paying each other so it is noncommercial.  Under Section 1008 what you're doing is perfectly legal in the United States.

<snip />

What is the point of Internet file sharing when people can, perfectly legally, copy as much music from each other as they could reasonably want?  Only a person with zero friends would want to bother with file sharing.

This is an interesting point and one I've heard expressed before by one of my friends who owns an iPod. It takes about 10-15 minutes to push an  album's worth of songs to an iPod. Nowadays when someone tells him about a good album they just bought, he doesn't even have to borrow it for more than 15 minutes to have all the music on his iPod. The problem for RIAA is that unlike listening to music on your PC which could be considered "try before you buy" since the PC is not the main music device of a large number of the population, an iPod is likely to be the main music player of a lot of people and once music is on it there is little incentive to go out and buy it.

Once the next generation of iPods (and other hard drive based digital music players) show up with wireless file sharing (just beam that song Scotty) this trend will be significantly accelerated.

Personally, I hope the music industry adapts but I definitely hope that during the adaptation process we lose the RIAA.


 

Categories: Ramblings

October 8, 2003
@ 04:15 PM
I finally decided to take the plunge and install dasBlog. It definitely wasn't a straightforward experience. Click below to read about the issues I faced.
 

Categories: Das Blog

Recently on the atom-syntax list someone posted a link to Jeremy Allaire's RSS-Data Proposal which to myself, Tim Bray, and Bill De Hora looked like an idea without much merit. The proposal is yet another iteration of the argument of how to embed extra information within an RSS feed besides the traditional elements representing the publication date, author and description of the news item. Jeremy Allaire's proposal not only attempts to solve the problem in a way that is less flexible and less useful than the current way the problem is solved in RSS feeds today (via namespaced vocabularies) but also does not take into account current industry practices for indicating datatype information in an XML document. I had originally planned to ignore the proposal along with the ensuing interest in the format that sprang up in a few weblogs but after seeing an article about RSS-Data in EWeek which attempts to legitimize what is basically a bad idea I decided to go ahead and post a critique of the proposal.

Below is a detailed look at the problems with the RSS-Data proposal and how some of its idiosyncracies can be improved.



 


 

Categories: XML

Jeremy Cowles has produced some kickass XSLT themes for RSS Bandit such as DOS (my new favorite), Halloween and Unwise Terminal. RSS Bandit 1.1.0.36 is now available and contains six new themes, download it from here. The details of the changes since version 1.1.0.29 are contained below.

As part of my ongoing effort to document the thinking process behind the work we've been doing on the XML APIs for the next version of the .NET Framework I wrote an article entitled Can One Size Fit All: Exploring the Possibility of One API for XML Processing which appears in the current issue of XML Journal. The article can be considered a followup to my previous article on XML.com, A Survey of APIs and Techniques for Processing XML

More below on the trojan I mentioned yesterday, why I decided to specialize in computer systems instead of software engineering while in school, hip hop feuds, and release notes for RSS Bandit.

 


 

Categories:

My machine was acting weird this morning, I seemed to have a network connection but couldn't actually access any sites on the Internet. Suspecting a problem with my ISP's DNS servers I called Comcast where I learned that my machine was infected with the Qhosts trojan. It seems I browsed some malicious website (or received some malicious HTML spam) which allowed my machine to get 0wn3d. It seems a similar exploit and trojan are behind the Half Life 2 source code leak. I hate this shit.

More below on the W3C 's recent Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets (aka the binary XML workshop), developer and user communities, the future of BlogX, and really cool software for the iPod.

 


 

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October 1, 2003
@ 12:58 AM

One thing I can't stand is food that has undecipherable expiration dates. I have a cupboard full of Van Camp's Pork and Beans which I keep filling every time I go to the grocery store which now has cans that are anything from a week old to a year old. I recently had an upset stomach and suspected that it was from eating a can of beans that was past its due date so this morning I wanted to make sure I didn't make the same mistake. You can't imagine my irritation when I discovered that there isn't a traditional "Best Before" date on the cans but instead indecipherable gobbly-gook like "N3154 PB" and "09:51-41". WTF? I'm going to have to throw out all the cans I have just to be on the safe side.

Posts below on the The Impedance Imperative Tuples + Objects + Infosets =Too Much Stuff! article in the Journal of Object Technology, Fumiaki Yoshimatsu's post on being careful to not get overexcited about announcements that may occur at this year's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and the Greatest IPO Ever.

 


 

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