Caledonian Record (edit: now behind a paywall) article on my grant-aunt Virginia’s 110th birthday. Wow.
Archive | 2003
WSJ: Web Allows People Like You And Me to Spot Trends. Uh-Oh.
Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal’s Portal column posits that the web allows us to spot trends, “disintermediating” the trend setters and trend spotters. I’ve always felt that online forums (CompuServe, Wikis, bulletin boards) could give you more of a sense of the market, the “what’s the man on the street opinion” but accumulators and search engines can turn this from an informal survey to a statistical analysis.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day: tchotchke
tchotchke: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. tchotchke [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]
Quote of the Day
Greenspun: “Is it time to accept Bill Gates as my personal savior?” [Scripting News]
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day, July 29, Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” From Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog
Tim O’Reilly interview
Tim’s interviewed on Stage4, as linked from many sites on my blogroll. Always worth reading Tim’s thoughts.
Bob Hope dead at 100.
A wonderful commedian, who brightened many hours for millions, Bob Hope passed away at 100. RIP.
Ars Technica: latest Microsoft flaws may bring on new SQL-Slammer level exploits
Ars Technica has an article, not unsuprisingly, critical of Microsoft, but warning of potential exploits. It seems the urgency to patch is exceeding the concern over the side-effects. “Microsoft RPC flaw, DirectX flaw inviting massive Windows attack” From Ars Technica
RSS as a web service, XSL transforms for the different dialects?
I like the idea of RSS as a web service. For slower, close-enough-to-real-time news feeds such as the FoxPro feeds I’m hosting at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html, hourly refreshes are good enough. For more of an on-demand site such as Amazon, with thousands of different requests, real-time response via and XML web service transformed to an RSS feed is the right answer.
Now, is there a way to transform the RSS 2.0 feeds that I’m producing to display the other dialects of RSS that a requestor might be interested, such as 0.91, 0.92 or 1.0? Or is there a core commonality that I could produce and then transform (on the fly through XSL, or more programmatically) to generate the desired feed? I don’t want to discourage traffic by not providing information in the format requested. I’ve already run into one aggregator site that was interested in 1.0 only.
Here are some clues a Google search gave me:
radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/ 2002/03/18/anXsltTutorial.html
http://www.ecommnet.co.uk/articles/bloggerRDF.asp
Here’s the opposite effect, consuming different RSS feeds via XSLT:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/01/02/tr.html
Amazon, XML and RSS… an exciting development
Amazon Does RSS, Officially. Amazon’s web services API had already led to several smart folks creating RSS feeds of its product listings — Lockergnome’s… [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]
Gary Burd explains how Amazon’s RSS feeds work. [Scripting News]