The Shifted Librarian joined my must read list out sheer gratitude for this link:

Some Categories, in no particular order:

Programming
Community
Family
Hardware
The Semantic Web
Recreation
Note To Self
Friends
XML

Ugh. Jim wanted to report a bug in Userland's Radio Userland, and ask a question. The reward for his trouble?

Heh. Spring starts in February here in the Southwest. Since mostly you see cacti and desert shrubs, I thought these flowering trees across the street from the Webhouse were awesome. Reminds me of Virginia.

An excerpt from an email at work:

Ok, this is COOL. David Brown has got Radio Userland working as a Python IDE. The outliner is a miracle worker in this context. Damn, if I only had the $40...

Glenn Reynolds writes about the new Google Search Appliance: "You can also take the raw XML output and work with it, too, which opens up a wide array of possibilities of combining Google's search output with other intranet or Internet services."

This article about the movie studios vs. personal video recorders has been making the rounds.

"The dilemma is, the technology is turning the business model upside down. But that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement." Damn straight.

I've added a new category: Semantic Web to this site.

Hmmmm?

I've been reading about RDF in the evenings, and hanging out on #plex (irc.openprojects.net).

I like this icon.

Adam Curry (yes, that Adam Curry, for those of you who grew up in the 80's) has a very well-written piece up on his site about trust. Read it.

A friend who will remain anonymous just wrote me:

>the best way I can summarize the feeling is like this:
> I was doing pretty well trying to maintain a positive attitude
> but then it all went into the crapper

My Radio Userland stopped working today (free trial over). It was expected. Oh well. I was really enjoying using the outliner to post to my blog. But we're moving soon, and I don't have even the $40 to get a license to Radio.

Hey! It looks like jim got home safe! Good for you, Jim. Now, get blogging! ;-)

I started seriously hacking on python last night. As I asked on #plex: "why do we always start with the most complex project we can think of when learning a new language?"

Anyway, I started on a python library/wrapper for Conversant's xml-rpc API. I've started this project in 3 different languages now, and I never get any farther than the last time. I suspect the problem lies in my somewhat weak OO design skills - transmogrifying a procedural API to an OO one is not an easy task.

This is no reflection on Conversant, BTW. Au contraire - Conversant's API is very OO considering the functional language it's built on. It's more the flattening nature of remote procedure APIs, and my own aforementioned weaknesses.

Wow, it's been a long time... the old Frontier community list ScriptMeridian is coming back to life. Yay!

Linus Torvalds (if you care about this post you'll know who he is) has finally started using BitKeeper, which according to my conversation with Wes was explicitly designed to his specifications as a source-control tool. He has historically avoided any sort of source-control (eg CVS), which is really ironic if you think about it [/.]

I've spent most of the morning checking in changes to my application here at work. I've found a pretty good process that helps me makes sure that the comments that go into CVS represent what has changed in the code.

• Use CVL to identify changed files.
• Open the file in FileMerge to see the differences between versions.
• I have an OmniOutliner document for tracking change notes.
• I go through the diff in FileMerge, and put my comments in the outline under the filename.
• When done, I paste the comments from OmniOutliner into the comments field when checking in the code.