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.

 

 

I've tended to avoid discussions about politics and current affairs on K5 since they typically devolve into pointless shouting matches with people talking past each other and heaping insults on their verbal opponents. However sometimes I read something that disgusts me so much that I have to express myself.

We now live in a world where the government of the largest military power in the world says 1 + 1 = 3 to justify going to WAR and its citizens sit docilely like sheep speaking only when they want rationalize their apathy and inaction. Thousands will die, billions of dollars will be spent yet the economy is still in the shitter, states are slashing education budgets all all over the place and the War on Terror^tm is yet to nab the main terrorists of the past few years; Bin Laden and the Anthrax mailer(s).

If you are easily incensed by people who do not share your opinions and feel like posting a response in this diary, don't bother. I won't be engaging in pointless K5 flame wars. This diary is just for me to get the thoughts out of my head and have a reference I can point people at that is accessible online.

 

 

I worked on RSS Bandit this weekend. I can now officially state that it now has more features than any other client based RSS news aggregator on the market. :)

OK, posturing aside I have added some neat features. Here is a screenshot showing off tracking read/unread messages, the system tray icon and various menu options. I also have importation of OPML files working fine. For the curious the second screenshot shows the results of importing Gordon Weakliem's subscriptions file. More on my progress below and a potential release schedule.

Poll: Favorite Office Space quote?

 

 

I've noticed more and more fellow Borg are blogging (fifteen spotted in the wild so far) and can't help noticing the wide variance in the content. Some people post personal stuff, others post about technology or philosophy, while some just talk about work. More thoughts below.

 

 

Dave Winer asks What About Your Data specifically he has this to say about the importance of access to your content in this age of weblogs and message boards

This is much more important than having access to the source of the program, a program must give you complete control of your content, and for that, you must be able to get a copy

I can't help but agree. What good does access to Scoop or Slashcode do for me if I can't migrate my journals and stories from K5 and Slashdot to my own server or another online community.

A couple of New year resolutions, my five year plan, ruminations on RSS Bandit and more below.

Poll: First Choice for Weblog Software?

 

 

A few days ago I mentioned trying out a few news aggregators. At the time I thought FeedReader was a good choice but I've since then come across some of the problems Will Sargent mentioned. Most annoying have been the random crashes and forgetting to update my feeds. The lack of a way to track stories I've read between runs of the program is also quite annoying. So this morning I decided to write an RSS News aggregator.

Here are twoscreenshots of my baby in action. Of course, I was late for work. More below.

Poll: Favorite News Aggregator?