So I alluded to some problems I was having when combining Planet d00dism and Netflix‘s activity RSS feeds. However, based upon how the planet site currently looks, I overestimated the the effect that the deficiency in their feeds would pose. You may notice that the first entries of Netflix are in a big clump. Obivously, all those movies didn’t go out and leave at the same time. This appears to have happened because Netflix doesn’t use the optional pubDate field of the RSS 2.0 format. ...

After thinking a lot about how to implement my own Erikkregator, Marshall recommended RSSMix. Now, that was an excellent suggestion. However, that only solves the problem of the RSS feed. I wanted to have a webpage to go along with it though. At that point, if I was going to be programming with an RSS parsing library, I might as well be mixing my own RSS feed. That sounded extremely painful though. That’s why I was glad to come across a slick piece of software called Planet. ...

So my good friend Allison invited me to her house in Worcester for a cookout. Good times. I went home in a good mood. The next morning, mother woke me up. Did you get in an accident last night? she asked. Now, I didn’t remember an accident. I wasn’t that out of it. It made me wake with a start though. It turns out that while I was parked on that side street in Worcester, someone managed to hit my car. This is the 4th time it’s been hit while it was stationary. Line right up ladies and gentlemen. See the car that only gets dented when not in motion. ...

Growl is an awesome piece of freeware that supplies a universal event notification system. Sounds complicated, but basically, it gives applications alternate ways to tell you things. One of the new features in the 0.7 version is the ability to send these events to networked computers via Bon Jour. For example, let’s say you have a downloading application that issues events upon completion. However, you kicked that download off at your desktop and you want to use your laptop. You don’t want to babysit your desktop to know when it reached completion. ...

I just couldn’t resist posting up this piece of spam. Subject: please call me Frank From: “Glenn” [email protected] Hi., Would you like at least $1500.00 to $3500.00 per day just for returning phone calls? I do! If you have a telephone and can return calls you are fully qualified for this program. Thank you, Johanna Okay, so which name should I use when I call the number?

One of the neatest things I’ve found lately is the proliferation of websites to manage aspects of your life publicly. Seeing as I’m not totally privacy paranoid, it’s a fun hobby. I recently discovered All Consuming which was created by Erik Benson. It’s a neat way to track books, music, and movies that you’re reading, listening to, and watching respectively. Robot Co-op, the company that runs 43 Things, bought it up. This means that the two services will soon be intertwined. 43 Things is one of the sources on Tag Central but unfortunately All Consuming is not because they don’t supply RSS feed for their tags. Hopefully that will change. ...

I got home really late last night. It wasn’t because of anything even mildly exciting. Rather, my left front tire decided to die. I noticed a slow leak lately (like a couple PSI over a couple weeks) but it decided to shit the bed yesterday. I stopped at a gas station near work. Guess what. It was broken. I put 75 cents into a broken air pump. That flipped my Hulk rage switch. I had to put the donut on the car and drive home. ...

Today has yielded two news items from Apple. One is wild speculation. The other is real news. Let’s start with the real news. iTunes Podcast Support Steve Jobs, at D: All Things Digital Conference, announced that iTunes 4.9 will have Podcasting support. iTunes will allow you to subscribe Podcast RSS feeds and automatically download the song files into your library. The update is due within 60 days. In the meantime, I’ll still use NetNewsWire (and I may do so after). Apple adding this is almost trivial now that they have the Safari RSS backbone to use. The question in my mind is whether Apple will try to integrate a bittorrent client. I find podcast feeds that distribute using Bittorrent exceedingly irritating. Currently, the only feed that I subscribe to that does this is This Week in Tech. Ok, ok, so they probably have the largest listening audience out of any podcast, but having to screw around with Bittorrent completely defeats the purpose of podcasts (they’re delivered automatically without user intervention). ...

I added my Feedburner feed to the site’s header to make it more easily accessible to users. Firefox users get to see the entire list of feeds. Safari users are less blessed. They can only click the singular RSS button in the location bar. According to Apple, Safari uses the Atom Feed Autodiscovery standard. When Safari displays a web page, Safari RSS looks in the HEAD element for a LINK tag that points to an Atom or RSS feed. The schema for these links is fairly standard and is supported by most news readers. It is described on page 40 of O’Reilly’s Content Syndication With RSS, and in Mark Pilgrim’s draft document on Atom Feed Autodiscovery. ...

I had to take this quiz because Henry took it. I expected to be classified as KING NERD (the highest rating), but I failed miserably. How can I possibly continue using this domain? It’s no longer appropriate.