Gareth Simpson's Notes

Dogfood

Monday, May 24, 2004

There’s nothing like actually using something for finding out bugs.

So jTextile is now incorporated into a project at work, and its quality has improved imeasurably.

I’m pleased to say that we even handle all 5 bugs in Textile4j correctly (as of time of writing).

People seem worried that jTextile uses gnu regexes instead of the in built JDK functions, but to me this is a decided advantage as it can be deployed on 1.3 JVMs.

Maybe I’ll port it to 1.4 at some point, but there’s no mad rush. It works, and works (increasingly) well.

Now if only Phil would release the latest code :-)

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Wow, another iTunes SDK

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Looks like Apple have opened up iTunes even further

That’s really cool. The visualization SDK was great but nothing I’ve wanted to do with iTunes so far has involved visualization.

I wonder if I could / should port iTunesOnTop or iScrobbler to this new SDK?

Actually I wonder what other cool things are possible.

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Opera and RSS

Monday, May 17, 2004

Many months after the original prediction but only several weeks after my denial a major(ish) browser has added RSS intergration into the browser.

Unfortunately it’s a little lame. I’d have thought that the big plus of putting this stuff in the browser would be the ease of subscription that would arise. Sadly this isn’t the case. You can subscribe to a feed by clicking on it’s link which is good but it doesn’t support feed autodiscovery so unless you track down the feed as a real link you’re sunk. If you’re masochistic, you can also subscribe from the links window (which lists all links on a page) but it only flags a link as a potential feed if it has a .xml extension.

Reading feed is done in the mail window and works adequately. It’s a standard three pane view so there’s not much to say about it.

The real downside though is one that I can’t see an easy work around for. If you close the browser, your feeds aren’t updated. Most dedicated feed readers I know run continuously and put notifications in the System Tray / Dock. When you close Opera, it’s gone and that’s the end of your feed updating till you run it again. That’s OK for a small number of feeds, but unwieldy when the subscription list runs to the hundreds.

Oh and no Atom support.

Close, but no cigar.

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Open Source WTL

Thursday, May 13, 2004

The world’s gone crazy. MS looks like it’s gearing up for another open source release.

This project has just turned up on Sourceforge apparently registered to Nenad Stefanovic the maintainer of WTL.

WTL is a great way to develop windows applications in C++ (if there is such a thing) and it has a very active development community behind it. If they’ve now got a way to feed back bug fixes and the like then that’s got to be good.

Update

It’s real:

From: Nenad Stefanovic
Sent: 12 May 2004 23:57
To: wtl@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [wtl] ANN: WTL moves to Open Source!

Hello everybody,

WTL is now available as an Open Source project on SourceForge.net. WTL
is now part of the Microsoft Shared Code initiative that enables the
community to contribute to the project.

You can find the project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl.

Feel free to send your questions/comments/suggestions to me.

Cheers,
Nenad

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Who are spampoison?

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

And why are they inexplicably referrer spamming me?

I have lots of entries like this in my referrer log:

Which is all deeply odd. They seem to have the laudible if slightly pointless goal of building up a network of email spam honey pots. Which makes all my referrer spam all the more inexplicable and not a little hypocritical.

Er?

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Always be Logging

Monday, May 10, 2004

Something is broken in iScrobbler for Windows 0.0.3 compared to the supposedly more primitive earlier versions. The problem is, that on my machine everything works perfectly.

Can I figure it out? Can I buggery. So I’ve spent a productive couple of hours sticking a load of horrific logging code into it in a bid to uncover the cause.

Will it work? Who knows but it’s got to be better than no logging at all and it gives Shrike and Aspect something to do (thanks guys!).

So now I have a comment about iTunesOnTop which claims that it won’t work since upgrading to 4.5 only on my machine everything works perfectly ...

Hey ho

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If I only ever used my mac ...

Monday, May 03, 2004

I’d probably quit writing my aggregator and just use PulpFiction cause it sounds like it’s got pretty much everything I want.

That’s assuming it’s quick to load and doesn’t eat all my memory, which is my other major requirement.

Anyway, functionality wise, it looks like I’ve found more “inspiration”

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