0xDECAFBAD

It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Some quickies

  1. Et tu Dave?

    I'm mostly in catch-up mode on the hubbub surrounding RSS, so I can't say much other than that I like both flavors though I prefer the RDF approach best. But... it's strange reading about UserLand's abandoned trademark application for RSS.
  2. Chimera rocks my socks:

    Mark Pilgrim likes Chimera. Personally, I've been using it as my primary browser for about 5 weeks now, and update to the latest nightly every few days. I had a glitch or two, but it's come light years from when I first started playing with it and it already seems to leave Mozilla-proper in the dust.
  3. Caffinated scraping:

    I've been cobbling together an (X)HTML-to-RSS scraper using what I've learned of Java, XSLT, and XPath lately. I've been tempted to slap together an aggregator of my own, too, but no: AmphetaDesk has not made me itchy enough to do it. The scraper might be of some use to someone though.
  4. Strange connectivity urges:

    I've been having these strange urges lately to start playing with P2P-ish things again and build a collection of rendevous that piggyback on a number of existing infrastructures (ie. IRC, IM, NNTP, email, etc). I want to get back on the path of investigating complete decentralization, or at least some robust thing which lies in between. At the very least, though, I want to start doing some sort of IM-RPCish thing between behind-firewall PCs. And this Jabber server I just installed on my new JohnCompanies system should be nice. (It's at jabber.decafbad.com)
  5. Soaking in LiveJournal:

    Blessed be, I need help: I've convinced them at work to let me pilot a weblog/journal system on our intranet - and I've started by installing the LiveJournal source.

    I've also installed LJ here on my new server from JohnCompanies, but I'm not quite sure what I want to do with it beyond tweaking and personal hacking. I've been musing at possibly enhancing some bits - particularly with regards to RSS syndication and aggregation, maybe some backlink tracking.

    Maybe I'll polish the thing up a bit and offer it up as a sister to LJ where the 15-year-olds will not reign and reciprocal connections with the outside world are encouraged and facilitated. Would any of you pay for something like that?

    This seems pretty ambitious, and it's likely I'll never do it, but hey.
  6. And on other fronts:

    Still in the underworld with Java, trying to get this project dragged past the finish line. Jaguar rocks and I took my girlfriend to the Apple Store opening in Novi, MI; we didn't buy anything, though it was close. There's a second Apple Store opening in my area in Troy, MI; the danger has not passed. And finally, I have succumbed lately to playing Grand Theft Auto 3 and it has affected my driving and given me pedestrian-smacking instincts to subdue while walking around town.
  7. That is all. For now.

shortname=ooobfe

Archived Comments

  • Quadsk8
    Re: 3.Caffinated scraping Just stumbled accross this: SuperGrabber at http://www.bannerdots.com/scripts/scripts.php did you know about it? Is it something comparable? Lawrence
  • l.m.orchard
    Hmm... close. Basically what I have for this scraper is a few parts in a pipeline: * Grab an HTML page * Mangle it into valid XML with JTidy * Run it through an XSLT sheet to become RSS I might also implement the old "start clipping here, end clipping there" scraper method with some regex support. Basically, I want to have my own robot that distills any data source into RSS because all the others didn't quite do what I want.