Monkinetic Weblog

Well, I installed Jaguar today, and all was going well until I found out that Mail won't let me use the menu. It's the weirdest thing. No other apps seem affected, but in Mail clicking on the menu bar does nothing. This is not an acceptable state of things. :(

Dawn Olsen found this site via my post about the Lo Fi Allstars it would seem. Not sure, but Dawn seems a bit enamoured. -)

Some of you may have noticed that Jodi and I have not been online lately - Jodi and I are in Virginia on a short trip, and have not had net access much. I'm now in Tidewater at Nate's place, using his broadband connection. Mmmmm.

I was emailing with Seth this afternoon about the link traffic our respective sites get, and he commented:

"you don't say much about your job hunt, the little projects you must be doing to keep yourself busy and sharp, or your cycling."

Lawrence Lessig was looking for a theme song for the copyright reform movement:

Got a revolution behind my eyes
We got to get up and organize
You want a revolution behind your eyes
We got to get up and organize

Ok, I've got my new Java RSS parser working on the two redmonk feeds (rss 0.91, rss 1.0). I need to test it on some more feeds, but for now I'm going to work on integrating it into an app I'm working on. If all goes well, I'll be releasing the app (it's a web app) at some point in the future.

Mark Pilgrim points to Bruce Schneier's latest article on the entertainment industry. It contains this pithy bit: "They're trying to invent a new crime: interference with a business model."

After the RIAA and other media commpanies tried to get Congress to write them a bill allowing them to hack your computer to find out of you're trading copyrighted mp3's, this ISP is now blocking the RIAA's web site on its network, and set up a honey trap for them. What's a honey trap you ask?

Information Wave will also deploy peer-to-peer clients on the Gnutella network from its security research and development network (honeynet) which will offer files with popular song titles derived from the Billboard Top 100 maintained by VNU eMedia. No copyright violations will take place, these files will merely have arbitrary sizes similar to the length of a 3 to 4 minute MP3 audio file encoded at 128kbps.

This is most cool: AllConsuming.net is crawling the list of updated blogs (according to weblogs.com) and sucks out links to Amazon.com books. It then shows what blogs are linking to what books - a quick and easy way to find new books and what bloggers think of them.

Just finished The Last Samurai, by Helen Dewitt. It's a remarkable piece of fiction centered around the story of a single mother and her prodigious son who share the mother's fascination, nay, obsession with Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (Salon).

John VanDyk sat next to an economist on the plane. I can't believe there are people that think this way.

On Jim's excellent suggestion, I spent yesterday porting Brent Simmons' Obj-C RSS parser class to Java. It was fairly easy, since I had the basic structure to go by. Also, I could use JDOM instead of the Carbon CFXML apis for XML parsing. (JDOM is a very Java-friendly API for XML).

Mark Pilgrim was looking for a liberal RSS Parser for Python, I'm now looking for a liberal parser for Java. By liberal I mean that it can handle a large number of types of RSS files as input without borking. It does not mean a parser that cannot handle Rush Limbaugh without borking.

Garth Kidd responds to my search for a Java RSS parser with visions of... Jython, running Mark Pilgrim's rssparser.py... fascinating proposition.

Well, I have a phone interview today at 2:00 PST. If you like, please think employment thoughts for me then!

I recently moved the domain registration for redmonk.net from Verisign to Dotster. They're running a $8.95 domain transfer special through August 31, and they're a great registrar.

Paul Murphy wrote an article for Linuxworld, Take A Mac User To Lunch. Recently he posted some reactions to the article, with some corrections and other good info. Check it out.

Driver 8:

"Way to shield the hated heat
Way to put myself to sleep
Way to shield the hated heat
Way to put myself, my children, to sleep"

Last week, while Jodi was away visiting family, I went up to the Grand Canyon for a couple days. I needed to get away and get some time to reflect and get "centered" - the last month has been pretty tough on Jodi and I. While there, I met up with a Swiss couple, Reto and Daniela, who hail from a small town in Switzerland very near to the one where I spent 3 months in school. We got to talking and reminiscing, had tea Wednesday evening, and decided to hike together Thursday. You can see them in the quicktime movie below. (Assuming I got the object + embed tags right).