Bitworking - theories of software development

I've long believed that we each have a story, often unknown to us, that we try all our lives to prove true. As I see it, this is the key to understanding a lot of otherwise inexplicable behavior... It can usually be summarized in five words or less. [Michael Barrish via Mark Pilgrim]

When I was ten I stood in front of a globe. Turn. Pause. Turn. Pause. Turn. Pause. I placed my finger and said, "Here."
"Here, what?", my mother asked.
"Here is where I am going to live when I grow up."
"Why would you pick there to live?"
"It's the farthest place on the planet from here."

I grew up in a small town surrounded by a lot of small town people. People with no hope and no ambition. Small minded and mean. First I moved away. Then I got an education. Now I make stuff. I cook. I build software. I build furniture. Everything I build, everyting I create, gets me farther from that town.

I am not small town.

Congrats to Mark and Dora on setting a date.

I'm proud to announce that this site 100% valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS2. Special thanks to Eric Vitiello Jr. for his help with my XSLT questions.

Of course I'm not gonna muck up my new design with those slightly less than attractive "W3C Valid" icons. Hmmm, maybe the W3C should sponsor a design contest to get them replaced.

On the other hand, this site isn't 100% accessible. Check back in about 30-days for that.

Thanks to all those that noticed and commented on the new site design. I was going for a Nouveau Roaring Twenties look, partly inspired by Sesame Street. Well, not all of Sesame Street, but in the old ones they would run a cartoon of a 1920's bellhop working in a hotel, sometimes carrying bags to the 19th floor or bringing a phone to the 18th table, etc. I love having children and through them finding inspiration in the most unexpected places.

You can always count on Sam, who has an excellent reply to Dave Winer's question about the naming of RSS.

In a comment to Sam's post Dare Obasanjo points out that there doesn't seem to be an XML Schema for RSS 1.0. I poked around myself and could find neither an XML Schema nor a DTD. Seems like a rather large hole if that's the case.

The winning entry in the Viridian Global Civil SocietyDesign Contest is Allen Wong's VacuumPacked Computer.

CVS

There is now a mailing list for cvs updates to Aggie. Sign up here and get an email every time the source of Aggie is updated.

Errors

Aggie will now display any feed errors it encounters on the web page. Previously it only displayed that information on the GUI and not in the web page. If you didn't know to look for errors in the 'Status' column of the GUI then you might miss some news.

Finding

Aggie will now try prepending "http://" to the if you try to add a feed and it fails.

Both the feed finding enhancement and the display of error messages will be available in Aggie RC5.

I just download and started to use NUnit V2.0 with Aggie. I am using version 1.0 in a project at work and it was very nice but 2.0 blows me away with how easy it is to use. The authors of NUnit have rewritten it to use Attributes and reflection in .Net and the end result is a very slick package.

Morbus Iff has posted a great introduction to RDF and the semantic web. If you have been trying to wrap your head around it like I have then this is the "jumping off" point I have been looking for. He also includes some great pictures.

Oh the perils of rolling your own weblogging software. I stopped checking my site in IE somewhere along the way and had no idea is was completely illegible. Many thanks to Dave for pointing this out to me.

Update: I have completely dropped the W3C Core Style, as that was the root of my CSS problems. I've reverted back to pretty plain stuff for the styling now and when I have time I will spiffy up the place.

Now that Aggie1.0 RC4 is out I have some time to go back and comment on some items that I let slip by last week.

Mark is working on an ultra-liberal RSS parser, because as he points out, "You see, most RSS feeds suck." While I do agree that a lot of RSS feeds do suck, I don't believe that building a liberal parser is the answer, at least if that means accepting non well-formed XML. If it is well-formed XML then rss readers shouldn't care what extra information is in the file. There is a robust way to extend the XML, beyond just bumping up the version number.

Invalid characters, unescaped ampersands (Blogger feeds), invalid entities (Radio feeds), unescaped and invalid HTML (The Register's feed most days)

Disclaimer: While Aggie will refuse any feed that isn't valid XML it currently doesn't handle namespaces well and can get confused on new items in feeds. Work is being done to correct this is in the next release.

An excellent and comprehensive article on filtering spam using Bayesian Statistics by Paul Graham. [Found via 0xdecafbad].

I am pleased to annouce the release of Aggie 1.0 RC4.

Special thanks to: Simon Fell, Eric Vitiello, Ziv Caspi, Ingve Voremstrand, and everybody that has submitted bug reports and enhancement requests.

Highlights for the RC4 release

Internationalization

Aggie now has better support for international feeds.

Proxy Support

Now you can use Aggie with a proxy server.

Stylesheets

Aggie supports having different stylesheets to style the resulting HTML. Each stylesheet can have it's own configuration dialog and saved parameters. Here is a detailed explaination of how this system works. How Templates Work In Aggie.

Speed Improvements

There have been many improvements that help Aggie get the news faster. There is now support for the "If-Modified-Since" HTTP header, meaning Aggie will only download a file if it has changed since the last time it was retrieved. Also the HTTP Redirection header is obeyed and stored to reduce the number of round trips retrieving files. In addition all this information is stored in a seperate file so that if you are using Aggie to read an OPML file from a remote site you still get all the speed enhancements.

Command-Line

Aggie now ships with a command line version of Aggie that can be used in background tasks.

Referer Logs

Aggie now supports placing a link back to the users website in the referer logs. The genesis and explaination of this idea is documented on Content Syndication with XML and RSS. The page that the referer log entry points to is here (using bitworking.org as the example site) http://bitworking.org/AggieReferrers.html?userWeblog=http://bitworking.org

I took the GNU GPL and LGPL Licensing Quiz and only got 4 out of 9 correct. I don't know if this quiz is such a great idea, after doing so poorly on the test and reading my mis-interpretations of the licenses I'm pretty leary of using the GPL or LGPL for any project. [Found via diveintomark]

But then Hollywood dropped its bomb. When it came time to setting out the actual criteria for DTV technology, Hollywood announced that it would consider only one proposal: new DTV technology would be legal only if three major movie studios approved it. [Cory Doctorow]

Literally, what is legal is based on the opinion of the major studios. Are you outraged yet?

Then there are feeds, like Aaron's feed, which are too bleeding edge. He puts an excerpt in the description element but puts the full text in the content:encoded element (as CDATA). This is valid RSS 1.0, but nobody actually uses it (except Aaron), few news aggregators support it, and many parsers choke on it. [diveintomark]

Aggie 1.0 RC4, which should be released this Thursday, supports the content:encoded element. On the other hand, I just found out that Pamphlet currently produces an RSS file that doesn't work in AmphetaDesk (I haven't figured out what to do about that yet). Thus balance is maintained in the RSS universe.

Ziv Caspi has been doing some cool things with Aggie, including building a mail enabled version. One quote struck me:

Recently, I've started getting wierd errors from the W3C XSLT Service.

Which makes me wonder if were closer to my prediction than I thought.

Check out this map of the scandals.

And just tonight before Christopher went to bed we had a lesson on geography and maps. How timely.

Want to see this weblog raelStyle? Here's how it was done.[Sam Ruby]

Does this mean there's one less Radio-driven weblog? Either way the how-to is a great starting point for converting Radio archives to Pamphlet format. Now I just need to decide if I want to do that for my own site.

Doesn't that have ramifications for someone's Long Bet?[Mark Paschal]

Yes, it does look like Martin Nisenholtz has been setup to lose that wager. Makes me wonder two things:

1. Did Dave Winer know this when he took the bet?
2. Would Martin Nisenholtz know a robots.txt file if one bit him on the...

Ever done a search in Google and come up with an article in the NYTimes? Me neither. Never.

Serendipity

making fortunate discoveries by accident

Stupidity

The NYTimes, for making sure no one ever stumbles across their website

The NYTimes robots.txt file:

# robots.txt, nytimes.com 4/10/2002
#

User-agent: *
Disallow:   /96
Disallow:   /97
Disallow:   /98
Disallow:   /99
Disallow:   /00
Disallow:   /01
Disallow:   /1996
Disallow:   /1997
Disallow:   /1998
Disallow:   /1999
Disallow:   /2000
Disallow:   /2001
Disallow:   /2002
Disallow:   /2003
Disallow:   /2004
Disallow:   /2005
Disallow:   /learning
Disallow:   /library
Disallow:   /aponline
Disallow:   /reuters
Disallow:   /cnet
Disallow:   /partners
Disallow:   /archives
Disallow:   /indexes
Disallow:   /guests
Disallow:   /events
Disallow:   /features
Disallow:   /reference
Disallow:   /specials
Disallow:   /services
Disallow:   /thestreet
Disallow:   /weather
Disallow:   /RealMedia
Disallow:   /nytimes-partners

RTP Bloggers

Singing 20. Dancing 20. Jumping up and down 20. Saying it slowly for the full effect T..W..E..N..T..Y. Because 20 is the number of pounds I have lost in the past two months.

How? By reducing my intake of carbohydrates, an Atkins-like diet without going to extremes. I'm currently losing one pound every three days. I started two months ago when I stopped drinking soda, for the most part because I decided the *large* amount of soda I drank couldn't be healthy. I cut back to drinking at most two glasses of sweet tea a day (Y'all didn't think I'd give up my sweet tea, did ya?) which has half the sugar of soda. Boy was I suprised to find out a month later that I had lost 10 pounds. Around that time the NYTimes article on the Atkins diet came out and backed with my first hand experience both Lynne and I started on the diet. We have both since lost over ten pounds together in the last month.

Note: I would *love* to provide a link to the Atkins diet story in the NYTimes but it is in their "Premium Archive" and you have to pay to see it. So no link. So no google karma. So no increase in their page views. Less ads viewed. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid NYTimes.

Here is a screenshot of Pamphlet, a study in minimalism at this point. Not even an edit button! The way you edit a post is to drag-and-drop the URL of the permalink off the browser onto Pamphlet.

Thank you for all the enthusiastic questions I received today. Yes, I will be releasing Pamphlet as open source, once I get the code and project build structure cleaned up. I will be hosting it on sourceforge just like Aggie, and it will be licensed under the same MIT license as Aggie.

One of my real quandries with Pamphlet is how to handle CVS and sourceforge. Right now Pamphlet shares one source file with Aggie, but I plan on the overlap growing with time. So do I create three seperate projects, one for Aggie, one for Pamphlet and a third for the library of common components, or do I lump them all into one sourceforge project together? I would love to hear how others have resolved this.

Note to Joe: http://bitworking.org/index.rss seems to have an extra /pamphet in the rdf:about and link values.[Sam Ruby]

Thanks Sam. I need to look at that this evening.

Update: That bug has now been fixed and the links on the archive page lead to HTML pages and not raw RSS files.

Welcome to the new and improved BitWorking.org. Now published with my own .Net blogging tool: Pamphlet. You will notice that the decor has changed as I've dropped the selectable layout and moved to this rather stark style. The major reason for that is because I have been working on the functionality of Pamphlet. As development settles down I will go back and spiffy up the CSS.