Clearing out the backlog of stuff I've found: TikiText, a MT plugin by Timothy Appnel. Joe Clark is logging and annotating William Gibsons Pattern Recognition. Not only are there real supertasters, but it's unhealthy for you to be a supertaster. Continuing on my Chicago theme of mass transit, here a success story of Portland and Vancouver. Online magneticy poetry

Dorothea asked about experiences with Cheetah. I am currently in the process of re-doing the templating mechanism in RESTLog, throwing out my hand made templating scheme and replacing it with Cheetah and it's been a great success. I initially learned of Cheetah from Sam Ruby as he is using to write his own blogging software. The transformations are fast and Cheetah, to me, has struck just the right balance, sticking to adding features needed for templating and avoiding the tempation to become a full-blown language on it's own, instead deferring to Python when appropriate.

In his post on Dynamically Extending API's Mark provided the groundwork for some Python code I was working on at the same time. Mark ends up creating a list of tuples from an RSS file. What I needed was to run over an RSS file and produce a dictionary for each 'item' encountered. In addition I needed the namespace mapping to be "fixed". In this case "fixed" means that 'dc' always maps to the Dublin Core namespace.

The latest version of Aggie is 1.0 Release Candidate 5. Full source, executable, and README are available as a download. If you are curious here is a screenshot of Aggie at work. Special thanks to: Simon Fell, Eric Vitiello Jr., Ziv Caspi, Ingve Voremstrand, Tim Danner, and everybody that has submitted bug reports and enhancement requests. Improvements in Feed Retrieval HTTP Compression Added support for HTTP compression.

Just finished reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I really enjoyed the book, the prose and pacing were great. Now I'm sitting here in a post-gibson-book-buzz, that infinite possibilities feeling riding on smooth rails of language. Just like when I finished all his other books, I try hard not to read anything else, lest it break the spell.

Now back from my trip to Chicago. Had some spare time this trip to take in some sights. Visited the Navy Pier for a while and enjoyed the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows. Wandering around looking at all the stained glass reminded me of much of the flash animation you see today. Bold black outlines of solid color. So who's going to be the Tiffany of Flash? Anyway I really enjoyed being in Chicago.

I grew up in the sticks of Connecticut. No public transportation in a town of 2,000 people. We would occasionallly take trips into Boston and I always loved it. There is something I find comforting in a crowd, in the hustle and bustle. It doesn't hurt that everyone in Chicago is so damn nice. People meet your gaze, return a smile, say hello. In that way it even beats out Boston.

Yes, I'm in the News and Observer today. Mark has a good summary of how all this got started.

After much delay and footdragging I have released a demo version of Pamphlet.

In case you didn't glean it from Thursday's post, or the site redesign that it inspired, Lynne and I are adopting a baby girl from China. Like any large process it has it's own nomenclature. We have finished the "paper chase", the process of gathering all the required documents and getting them notarized, certified, etc. By the middle of this month they should be on their way to China and we will be "

This article on boxesandarrows is a mostly flamebait and I should avoid commenting on it. But I can't resist. First he constraints his argument to a mythical universe where SVG, MathML, SMIL, and XForms don't exist. Then says since he can't do everything he wants to in that tiny realm the only alternative is to go with proprietary technologies. His excuses include: Bandwidth Sorry, there's no way in hell your JavaScript and CSS, which should be in seperate files and cached on the client, even come close to the size of image files.

Somewhere in China a woman is pregnant. What she doesn't know is she's having a girl. Her baby holds an invisble red thread the kind that connects those destined to meet. Through a year and more her newborn girl will travel through abandonment and orphanage. What she doesn't know is where that red thread leads. It leads to me. And I am waiting. To hold my daughter.

Wow, I just came across explodingdog. What I found fascinating was going back in the archives and seeing how his drawings have evolved over time.

I mentioned last Friday that I wouldn't mind seeing a more resilient form of XML. Now if we take that more resilient form of XML, mix it with Mark's liberal RSS parser and Sam Ruby's Coping with Change and throw in a dash of REST what do you have? Could these be the building blocks of phenotropic computing? Phenotropic Computing is the active area of research of Jaron Lanier who talks about the idea in the interview Coding from Scratch [found via Jon Schull].

"An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break." - Chinese Proverb I stumbled upon your site looking for the full story of the red thread. We have had our daughter for 4 years now and truly believe in the red thread. Posted by Linda Brann-Heier on 2003-09-30 I am currently involved in a play whih is being divised based on this proverb and I found it has inspired many of our team.

I have been doing a lot of XML manipulation in the implementation of RESTLog recently and come to really despise the DOM. In the best of situations it leads to akward and verbose code, in the worst of times.. well we won't use those words in a public place... A pretty good clue that an API is fundamentally broken is you keep re-creating the missing pieces or obvious patches from platform to platform.

A part of me wants to rail against Mark Pilgrim's latest article Parsing RSS At All Costs. On one hand I think it introdcuces a positive feedback loop into the systen to introduce a liberal parser. That is, once you sink below Well-Formed, you end up in a race to the bottom. Who is to say what is 'liberal' enough. Tomorrow someone will introduce a new parser that is even more liberal than Marks.

I gotta say 80/20 Inc. rules. Yes their web site needs a little polish, but the product is amazing. They make it simple enough that even I can design and order something. You should see their site NOW. They evidently updated it and now shows animations and some movie clips. Pretty COOL! Posted by Jim Clark on 2005-07-06

Ziv Caspi and Simon Fell have been doing great work updating Aggie. I, on the other hand, have been a complete slacker. I have been distracted. RC5 will be coming out soon.

Ken has posted some of his thoughts on releasing software: However, when it comes to releasing something of my own creation into the wild.. I find I'm hesitant, and reluctant, and otherwise disinclined. That is just one small quote of a much larger post that must be read in it's entirety but I have to say it does strike a cord with me. Putting Aggie up on SourceForge was fun but also caused me considerable congnitive dissonance.