The Lex Files

Replayed Instance

Uh oh.

Charlie was sitting beside me. He found a rubber bone that he likes to chew on (which is good, since that’s what it was designed for). I was watching a show on television.

Charlie picked up the bone and placed it into my open hand so that I could hold it at the right angle for him to chew on.

I didn’t see this happen, since I was watching the TV.

I wanted to see just how he had placed the bone in my hand.

So I reached for the TiVo remote and pressed the “Back up 8 seconds” button.

To replay MY LIFE.

Like I said: Uh oh.

Off to Arkansas. Back Monday night!

Jewel Case

It’s rare that a regular old news article makes me laugh out loud. But this story about the singer Jewel in concert… cracks me up.

Horses, Ass

You can’t make this stuff up.

From Fark, I found this article covering President Bush’s minor bike accident today. My favorite thing about the article, though, is the Google Ad matched to the content:

About the Updated Lex Files

1. The most obvious addition is the new design. It’s entirely CSS based now, meaning I’m not using any tables to do layout. For some reason, this is the holy grail of web design.
   
   Instead of using tables, which allow you to put layouts into columns quite easily, now we’re “supposed” to use custom style sheets, which make columnizing much more difficult. This separates our design from our content. And our sanity from our brains.
   
   
2. Added the beginnings of an “About Me” page. It’s hiding over there on the left bar. I always read the About Me page of a blogger whose blog I’m scoping out for the first time… Yet I never had one. About Me pages do seem a bit redundant on a blog. But tough noogies.
   
   
3. JavaScript is Good! Instead of showing that increasingly long list of archives by month/year pairs, I’ve put the archives into a dropdown menu. If your browser has JavaScript enabled, then when you select an archived month, you should be directed there immediately. If your browser doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, you should see a “Go” button to trigger the jump to the archive page.
   
   
4. JavaScript is Evil! Comment links no longer open an annoying pop-up. Rather, you’re directed to an archive page that takes you to a “single-post” view for the post you’re commenting on (or viewing comments for). We even use an anchor link to take you directly to the comment section on the result page.
   
   
5. New links! Be sure to check out the blogs I’ve linked to at left. If you like me, you have no taste. But your loss is also your gain! Since I like these blogs, you just might too. Read on.
   
   
6. PHP codebase rewrite. It’s better now. Still not perfect, but we’re getting there.

Blogs

Leth & Sex is down, but I have the database backed up. (This time.) It’ll be fixed in a few days’ time; a planned upgrade (to house it on the same server that houses this site) went off with hitches, which was the opposite of my intent.

I’ve redone my blog. More on that later. Links to favorite blogs and other sites to be added soon.

-Lex

Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart’s commencement address at William & Mary has been making the rounds online. But I liked it, and suspect some of my readers will too. So, I’m sharing the link here too. And you can’t stop me.

My parents are in mourning.

CBS is canceling the dramas “Hack,” “The District” and “The Guardian.”

Do not read this sentence.

Here is a real subject line from a spam message SpamSpieve correctly filtered out for me this morning:

“FWD: Stop Emails Like This One….”

Disclaimer

“Due to current sensitivities and adult content, viewer discretion is advised.”

That’s the disclaimer on ABC’s promo for its showing of “A Beautiful Mind.”

Weird.

Why I Went Into The Woods

I tend to enjoy the writings of Mark Pilgrim. He’s smart (an extremely talented programmer/developer/etc), analytical, an excellent writer, witty, and has a “backstory” (he’s clean sober now, but wasn’t always, and documents that saga in part on his site). Mark has a very, very popular weblog. These days, searching for “Lex Friedman” on Google ranks comments made by me on his website higher than this website.

Mark really, really hates Dave Winer, who is another hugely popular blogger. (When Dave links to an article of interest on Mark’s site, Mark bounces the link back to Dave’s site, so visitors can’t follow it.) Dave claims authorship or co-authorship of several versions of RSS. RSS, which I’ve tried to explain to the under-informed before, is really simple. Stick with me for a second:

I read Yahoo! News daily. I like to read Slashdot, and Judi’s Mom at Home blog, and 74 other weblogs and news sites. Instead of visiting almost 80 websites each day to check for new posts, I launch my favorite aggregator. My aggregator has a saved list of all the blogs I check — specifically, their RSS files, which are plain text documents, not unlike HTML, that list (x) recent stories from that site, along with information like a subject line, a description, the published date, etc.

Instead of calling everyone in my address book each day to see if they have something to tell me, I check my email throughout the day, and if they have something to say, they let me know. Similarly, my newsreader checks RSS feeds throughout the day and knows when my favorite blogs have been updated, and shows me the newest stories.

Great!

Except, Mark Pilgrim hates Dave Winer. Well, it’s more than that, but that’s a big piece of what it boils down to. Mark and his camp hate Dave and HIS camp. So, Mark et. al. devised Atom.

Atom is like RSS, only different. What one calls a “description” the other calls a “tagline.” Sometimes. And one has creation date, last edited date, and published date, where one has… date. Each camp claims that theirs is the more extensible one. I think it’s fair to say that the barrier to entry for RSS is lower than the barrier to entry for Atom. I picked up RSS by “viewing source” on RSS feeds (including Mark’s, when he had one) — much like I learned HTML. You can probably do that with Atom, too, but it’s a little more complicated. I haven’t created an Atom feed yet, because it’s not super simple looking.

Atom and RSS serve exactly the same purpose. Weblogs now offer one or other or both. NetNewsWire doesn’t officially support Atom yet, but will with its next version. Dave Winer’s annoyed about Atom (I imagine), but publicly supportive for the most part. But…

Google owns Blogger, which allows you to offer a feed now, but I believe you have to choose between Atom and RSS. You can’t offer both. But some newsreaders don’t support both. And some popular blogs — like the new Google Blog, only offer Atom feeds.

Oh, and Mark? At some point — and I think without any announcement — he switched from his RSS feed to an Atom feed. And my NetNewsWire stopped pulling his articles… because it can’t. It took me about a month to notice the change, I think.

But as I wrote yesterday, I’m sticking with NetNewsWire right now, and I like Mark. And I want to read the GoogleBlog. And I’m not going to check their sites each day. And I missed reading Evan’s blog (he created Blogger and now works for Google, on Blogger).

So, I hacked together a script. It’s 100% hackery. It takes Atom feeds and converts them into RSS 2.0. And, horror of horrors… the RSS 2.0 is even invalid. I know, I know, calm down. But NetNewsWire is letting me read Dive Into Mark, and GoogleBlog, and Evhead. And that makes me happy. It won’t make purists happy (since it’s invalid RSS), and it won’t necessarily make Mark or Evan happy (they hate Dave, and he authored RSS 2.0, and they like Atom better), but I’ll take what I can get.

If you want to play along, feel free. But it will surely crash on some feeds, because I only checked it with the four sites I wanted. And it displays some cruft too in the content, but it doesn’t mangle anything.

Interested?

http://thefriedmans.net/atom/?url=http://urlofatom_feed/atom.xml is the format…

Like:

http://thefriedmans.net/atom/?url=http://diveintomark.org/xml/atom.xml
http://thefriedmans.net/atom/?url=http://www.google.com/googleblog/atom.xml