Also see the list of articles, none to be taken seriously.
29,000 rubber ducks, tossed overboard between China and Seattle more than a decade ago, will wash up on New England shores shortly.
After a mammoth journey, they are expected to start washing up on the New England coast. And while they will be bleached and battered from their journey, they are providing invaluable information on the ocean’s currents. They were flung into the Pacific on the International Date Line, level with Oregon, USA.
[via Boing Boing Blog]
News.Com: “An increasingly popular technique for preventing e-mail abuse is frustrating some visually impaired Net users, setting the stage for a conflict between spam busters and advocates for the disabled.” [via Scripting News]
Via Car Talk (so you know it will be funny), problem reports from pilots to maintenance crews.
Problem: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
Solution: Almost replaced left inside main tire.
[More]
Here one week, gone the next.
The Register: RFID Chips are Here.
CNET News: Wal-Mart cancels ‘smart-shelf’ trial. The retail giant cancels testing for an experimental wireless inventory control system, ending one of the most closely watched efforts to bring RFID technology to store shelves.
NY Times: A Safer System for Home PC's Feels Like Jail to Some Critics. But by entwining PC software and data in an impenetrable layer of encryption, critics argue, the companies may be destroying the very openness that has been at the heart of computing in the three decades since the PC was introduced. [via Tomalak's Realm]
Jon Udell on cross-browser JavaScript programming:
Mozilla has emerged from its long nuclear winter to become a pillar of the Linux desktop. Alpha geeks everywhere (including Sun and Microsoft) are running Safari on their PowerBooks. But here’s the reality check you knew was coming: cross-browser and cross-OS compatibility remains nearly as elusive as ever. I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say that testing CSS and JavaScript effects on the three major OS platforms, in six different browsers, isn’t a good use of anybody’s time. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
I posted a blow-by-blow account my trip the Bermuda 1-2 sailboat race back from Bermuda, with pictures and a couple of movies.
I’m leaving for the next couple of weeks on the Bermuda 1-2 race. The second leg (Bermuda to Newport) starts this Friday.
Here’s hoping for a smoother start than the first leg’s.
Email access will be poor. (And yes, there is a dearth of Wi-Fi hotspots in the Atlantic.)
The race organizers put up a Java race tracker applet. If you’re curious how I’m doing after June 20th, check class 4, Nimros.
Joe Gregorio has a RESTy comment API based on RSS 2.0. His article compares it with the soup of other protocols available: TrackBack, PingBack, and Post-It. One problem: it links to the author’s home page rather than a specific post, so it’s not good as a link-notification mechanism, as TrackBack is. And John Gruber points out that TrackBack isn’t really that good for comments in practice, because the dominant implementation just resends the article summary.
His Referrers list, however, continues to show a lot of junk along with the real links, including one user’s local Radio Userland aggregator on port 5335.
Announcing DirectRSS. For when you want as little as possible between you and your RSS.
It’s an open-source MetaWeblog API implementation that modifies RSS 2.0 files in place. It also supports the Blogger and b2 APIs. No database required.
With it, you can use a weblog editing client such as NetNewsWire or w.bloggar to update an RSS feed, then use XSLT or the companion HTML renderer to generate a web site.
To handle larger collections of posts, it supports Dave Winer’s blogBrowser format, which, instead of a single file, uses one RSS file per month and one folder per year. To the weblog client, it looks like one big file, with all posts editable. A file containing the few most recent postings is generated automatically, for the benefit of news aggregators.
It was originally written as an XML experiment, but it’s proven reliable. It’s packaged as a Python CGI script, and comes with its own pre-configured Python web server for running locally. If you already have Python installed, there’s no setup required to run the working tutorial. (If you don’t, it only takes a few minutes to install Python.) It’s compatible with the bundled Python in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and other Pythons lacking an expat parser. (It falls back on xmllib.)
New features in this version include full support for namespaces in both the RSS file and the MetaWeblog API, post modification dates, and a tutorial showing how to render the posts into HTML.
Currently, it’s packaged with ShearerSite, the (awkwardly-named) web interface that also performs the rendering into HTML. I may split out just the RSS editing portion if there’s interest. The HTML renderer can display RSS 2.0 files or blogBrowser archives filtered by category, date range, or numeric range.
See the download page (hosted by SourceForge), tutorial, and revision history.