Feedburner feed reset
Well that didn’t last long…. didn’t like the results and now I’m back to the traditional feed at feedburner…. I’ll have to continue looking into the best way to mash it all together.
Change of Feed Link
For a while now I’ve been using FriendFeed. The nice part about FriendFeed is that it allows me to aggregate all my various online entities into a simple single feed. So today I’ve decided to try feeding that feed as my primary RSS feed. What I am trying (which may work or may not… we will see) is create a FeedBurner feed out of my FriendFeed Lifestream and I’ve changed the site feed redirect link of my Blogger blog to that feed. My hope is that this way when people decide to subscribe to my blog, it will give them an entire stream of all my feeds. This said, I’m not sure if it will confuse the system when trying to track various posting and also confuse users when some content the see in their RSS feed is not traceable on my actual blog. Well I figure I’ll give it a shot for the weekend, and if seems to be going nuts, well then I’ll switch it back. So lets see what happens.
T-Mobile launches BlackBerry 8820 with WiFi – Engadget Mobile
T-Mobile launches BlackBerry 8820 with WiFi – Engadget Mobile
Looks like I may actually finally be leaving the PalmOS world. This new BlackBerry with both GPS and WiFi is just hard to compete with. The only thing missing is a touch screen… ah the touch screen… well I guess I could live with out it… then again… well Lauren did say that she would get me a new phone for my birthday which was last Friday…. so I think it may be time… I’ll have to do some price research but then I think I’m switching.
Morphing
Sinfest is a regular comic that I read online along with all my blogs. The author occasionally does these really neat calligraphy morphs. Yes I’m sure that he takes a lot of time to think them out, but I just think they are always good. And besides the nifty calligraphy, I just think the comic its self is good. If you don’t mind a little religious humor from time to time, take a look at the regular daily strips.
Whether or not to upgrade to a beta
The next release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) is scheduled for release April 24th, but if you are really daring, you can upgrade from either 6.06 LTS or 7.10 straight to the beta version now out. Now here is the dilemma… I scanned the new features, and yes they look good, but here is the issue, I’ve got an older-ish system with a new-ish NVidia card (not a top notch state of the art card but much newer that the system as a whole) powering my widescreen LCD monitor. Every time there is any kind of change to the kernel, I run into issues. I know that I’ve got to recompile the kernel with the NVidia drivers and all, but it doesn’t always work… quite often I just try not to reboot in fear that the update will krap out. anyways… but I also like living and playing on the edge with tech… so my instinct is to say screw it and go for it with the upgrade… but today is my birthday and it would really suck if I killed my system today… so maybe tomorrow….
HardyUpgrades – Community Ubuntu Documentation
If you are curious enough to try out the latest beta and via the upgrade, let me know how it all goes….
Hurricane warnings coming to Google
MIAMI — Americans in the hurricane danger zone may soon be able to use Google to find out if their own home is threatened by a dangerous storm surge, the director of the National Hurricane Center said Wednesday….
How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
While Apple’s tactics may seem like Industrial Revolution relics, they’ve helped the company position itself ahead of its competitors and at the forefront of the tech industry. Sometimes, evil works….
Skim: a nifty PDF annotating app for MacOSX
Found a real cool freeware app for Mac the other day for annotating PDFs. I was looking for a way to fill in a NCAA bracket for a work pool and came across an app called Skim. The annotations won’t show up in other PDF viewers but you can print them on top of the PDF through Skim (also can be printed to PDF via the standard mac print options). It was designed for annotating scientific papers….
Skim | Home
http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/
Learning Python
I’m a long time C developer. Basically I figure that anything that needed to be coded could be coded in C. I still hold that belief, but 7-8 years ago I came to the realization that while that may be true, it is not always the best answer. For project reasons at work I learned Fortran and began to recognize its value when it comes to math. For other project reasons I learn how powerful simple Unix scripts can be. So basically for the last 7-8 years I’ve seen Unix scripting as a steering tool, C for text processing, Fortran for math, and Java for object-oriented and gui tasks. But recently based on a number of article from Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE) I’ve come to learn about Python.
Python is a scripting language at its core, but overall it is much more. Python has a variety of modules and add-ons. Some basic include modules include NumPy/SciPy for math and science, CSV for delimited text, and XML for xml parsing and generation. My first Python program took me only a day or so to develop and test, it was a CSV translator. Basically it converted one CSV file into another. My next program took me another 2-3 days and it converted a gridded file into a CSV formatted file. And today, I wrote my first XML parser. Using ‘minidom’ from the xml package I was able to put together a simple parser for converting an XML file into a csv file.
All this I’ve basically accomplished over a few weeks of learning using only a handful of simple resources both online and in print. Yes I have many years of experience with a variety of programming languages, but I definitely have found Python the easiest to learn yet. Here is a quick list of resources I’ve found helpful:
- Tutorial at Python.org
- Python.org Library Reference
- Dive into Python by Mark Pilgrim
- Python/XML Howto by A.M. Kuchling
- Python XML Frequently Asked Questions by Dave Kuhlman
- Book: XML Processing with Perl, Python, and PHP by Martin C. Brown
- Magazine: CiSE issue: Python: Batteries Included Volume 9, Number 3
- Python and XML: An Introduction
- Creating XML with Python
I’ve bookmarked a number of other sites for future use but have not gotten to them yet. My next task will be to add a simple XML version of the gridded data file mentioned above, plus add NetCDF writing support and GIS writting support, namely ESRI Shapefiles. I also plan on learning howto wrap my C packages with Python binding. To put it plainly, things that I’ve spent years developing and testing in C for parsing weather related data, will all slowly be phased out and replaced with python code and modules and all opensource.
update 2008-03-19: added 2 more links
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Flickr Photos
More Photos
Browser Support for HTML 5
I get a kick out of all this talk about the new draft of HTML5. Wired posted an interesting article about Browser support for HTML5, it give the lead to Opera. Well the truth of the matter is, ‘who cares’, by the time HTML5 is finalized all Browsers will support it and the bulk of web developers will still be programing in HTML4 and all its addons and server-side services. The only reason I say this is because for the most part, most web users will still be using older browsers in the beginning that either don’t fully support all the aspects of HTML5 or any at all. I have flash backs to the reason I quit developing web pages in the first place. When I was learning to develop web pages it was back in 1996/1997, back when HTML4 was released. Back then you not only had to deal with the new tags of HTML4 but also with completely different implementations between browsers and back them it was before Microsoft was playing ‘nice’ and they had their own set of tags. It was also the same time that Java was growing popularity and the whole write-once-run-anywhere idea was so appealing that the ideal of having to develop static pages with browser dependent tags was just crazy talk in my mind. Thankfully over the years the web has begun to standardize and it has become much easier for developers to reach broader audiences. Anyways… I’m partially diverging from topic.
My bigger question is not for which browsers will be made ready first but more in which developers will be ready first. I can easily see where many of the big names like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others it that level will be ready, but what about the other what 90% of developers and pages (no the 90% is not factual, but when you think of the size and makeup of the web… the big boys are really just search engines for the rest of us little guys out there). So my guess is by the time the bulk of developers make the move to HTML5, one it will only be after the version is finalized, and two, it will be after the browsers are ready to support it, so … does it matter who is first? I know to the browser developers it does, but to the users? I personally think what ever browser is considered the safest will be the browser most flock to and stay with.
Anyways… enough random blabbing…. just mostly thoughts in my head that really don’t matter. And besides the point… I’m really looking forward to HTML5 and I can’t wait till it is finalized. I’m in the process of re-teaching myself web programming, stating with Web-services and AJAX. So my hope is that my self-education keeps in pace with the finalization of HTML5 so that I’m ready as soon as it is released.
HTML 5 Support by Browser: Opera Continues to Lead the Pack | Compiler from Wired.com
March 28, 2008 Posted by nickc321 | commentary, web2.0 | | No Comments Yet