I voted today to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 15 members and choose them privately.

After serving on the board when it was private and not exceptionally well-regarded by the RSS community, I think it's extremely important to operate in the open. However, the requirement to publicly evaluate and vote on new members chases off anyone who isn't completely flame-retardant. One prospective member with years of experience in RSS development withdrew his name from consideration when he realized the vote would be conducted publicly.

As for the expansion to 15 members, we could use more members in technically complex areas like the draft spec and profile work.

I had a programming project this weekend that reminded me how complex XML interoperability can be, even on a relatively simple dialect like Really Simple Syndication. We could use a few more XML gurus and longtime RSS developers to complement current members who are more involved in usability and educational efforts.

Programming · Rss · Xml · 2006/04/10 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Watch Out for the Guns

The Jacksonville Barracudas hockey team has been run the last several years by Ron Duguay, the former New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings player. Duguay was a '70s heartthrob who skated without a helmet, relying on big hair to protect his head.

In a story about Duguay stepping down from the team, the Florida Times-Union included a photo of Duguay in his office, where he hung a bare-chested poster of himself showing off Ron Burgundy-like guns and a total eclipse of the hair.

If you'd like Ron in your own office, the poster's up for auction on eBay.

Sports · Jacksonville · Florida · 2006/04/10 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Handling Numeric XML Entities in a Weblog Move

I'm exporting a Radio UserLand weblog to Movable Type for a client, turning Radio's XML archive of weblog entries into a Movable Type import file. I wrote a Java application that employs the XOM XML library to read Radio's weblog data.

Some numeric character entities in Radio's XML data threw me for a loop: â (’), À (¿), Ž (é), ‡ (á) and — (ó). They were transformed -- either by XOM or the Xerces XML parser that it uses -- into garbage characters that display incorrectly in Movable Type.

After fumbling around, I found a solution: Read a weblog entry's XML data as a text file, replace the numeric XML entities with the equivalent numeric HTML entities and parse the resulting file with XOM:

// replace bad character entities with good ones
public void prepareFile(String source) throws IOException {
  File sourceFile = new File(directory + source);
  BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(sourceFile));
  File destination = new File("input.xml");
  BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(destination));
  String text = "";
  do {
    text = text.replaceAll("â", "’"); // curly single quote mark
    text = text.replaceAll("À", "¿"); // upside down question mark
    text = text.replaceAll("Ž", "é"); // lowercase accented e
    text = text.replaceAll("‡", "á"); // lowercase accented a
    text = text.replaceAll("—", "ó"); // lowercase accented o
    if (!text.equals("")) {
      writer.write(text, 0, text.length());
      writer.newLine();
    }
    text = reader.readLine();
  } while (text != null);
  reader.close();
  writer.close();
}

This is a clumsy solution that relies on escaped markup to produce the HTML entities, but I can't find a better one without editing the client's Radio data by hand. I'm trying to avoid that, because I want to use this application to move other weblogs.

Radio UserLand saves an XML backup of all weblog posts and categories in the software's backups\weblog\Archive subdirectory. If you're using Radio, enable the Archiving in XML preferences to take advantage of this feature, which makes it easier to export the data to another weblog publishing program.

Xml · Radio · Movable Type · Java · Html · 2006/04/08 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Anna Badkhen's coverage of the East African drought has taken her from Kenya to Somalia, where she filed a report marking 15 years of anarchy and the shooting of a local radio journalist as he traveled to a seminar. The topic of the event: "reducing violence in Somalia."

Politics · 2006/04/07 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

The World's Most Beloved Coroner

I chaperoned a field trip this week to a high school production of The Wizard of Oz, which was fun because kids love getting out of school to see plays. This one had winged attack monkeys roaming the audience, the Wicked Witch singing Michael Jackson's "Bad" and a climactic scene involving water guns.

At the end, they brought a surprise guest on stage: Meinhardt Raabe, the 90-year-old who played the Coroner in the movie.

Raabe, who lives in a retirement community south of Jacksonville, may be the oldest living Munchkin. He's a former Civil Air Patrol pilot during World War II, 30-year Oscar Mayer spokesman and teacher who still makes Oz-related appearances.

Dressed in character, Raabe delivered his famous declaration:

As Coroner I must aver,
I thoroughly examined her ...
and she's not only merely dead,
but really most sincerely dead.

When he finished, several hundred schoolkids roared so loudly I thought it might knock him down.

Movies · Florida · 2006/04/06 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Netcraft Toolbar Catches Phish

One in 20 people fall for phishing scams and provide their account information to bogus versions of PayPal, EBay and other ecommerce sites, according to a study by Rachna Dhamija of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society.

The study presented real online banking and fake phishing sites to subjects to see if they could tell the two types apart. ... The most sophisticated site caught out 90 percent of the 22 people participating.

I began using the Netcraft Toolbar in October, which works on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox and detects known phishing sites and other suspicious pages. I've tried some of the phish links to see how well the toolbar works, and it has warned me about all of them.

Security · 2006/04/05 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Movie Downloaders Pay a High Price

Six studios have begun selling movie downloads this week on Movielink. Purchased movies can be kept forever for computer viewing and burned to DVD but can't be watched in DVD players. There's also a limit on the number of computers that can view a movie, and the service and site require Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.

Prices for new movies are higher than DVDs -- Nicolas Cage's The Weather Man sells for $27 on Movielink and $22 on Amazon.Com. So you're getting less convenience at more cost, though no one had to package, ship or stock the movie.

Though Movielink might be worthwhile for rentals and hard-to-find movies, I'm having trouble seeing the value for major releases. Current customers appear to agree -- aside from The Weather Man, the best-selling downloads are obscure sexually themed movies and foreign films. The No. 1 seller's currently Sappho '68, a "deep, penetrating piece of artful vintage erotica" that rated only one customer review on Amazon.Com:

This is a very poorly made, cheap, nudie film. No story or characters to speak of. It is practically a silent movie ...

Movies · 2006/04/03 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries