Blagg and WordPress

My infamous weblog aggregator relies on Bloxsom Blagg to do the grunt work. The WordPress blogs of some of my friends were generating feeds with a CDATA tag in the description field. Blagg let this tag get through into the aggregator post, resulting in these posts not showing any description body. Oh, the tragedy! The small change needed to fix this can be found here. Astute readers will see, in the lines of this patch, that Perl really does suck.

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The Commonly Confused Words Test

I saw this on MJ’s blog, so I had to take the test. Without consulting any external resources whatsoever, my results were: “Advanced You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 72% Expert!” What’s even more flattering, is the following: “Compared to users who took the test and are and in your age group: 100% had lower Beginner scores. 100% had lower Intermediate scores. 100% had lower Advanced scores.

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My GMAIL experiment comes to an end

Since August of last year, when I received a GMail invitation from Rudolph, I’ve been running all my mail through GMail. In other words, GMail was my primary interface to any and all email. It went swimmingly! This is a fantastic product: to my mind, it’s not so much the 1G storage, as it is the fact that you can search for and find emails in the blink of an eye and, quite importantly, the idea of dumping all processed emails into a great big container, called “All Mail” by GMail.

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Ken Livingstone: Could someone explain this to me?

On the one hand we have Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, known for a life long of campaigning against racism and anti-semitism. On the other hand we have Oliver Finegold, a reporter of the Evening Standard. The Evening Standard is a sister paper of the Daily Mail, the paper that supported Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 30s. This context is important. So Finegold approaches Livingstone after a party at City Hall.

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MoonEdit (and my new website)

I was just chatting to Jorik who was on about ME this and ME that. So I’m like, “what’s ME”. So Jorik’s like “ME is MoonEdit, a real-time collaborative text editor”. So I’m like, “Oh wow, that’s like SubEthaEdit, the application I’ve secretly been admiring but haven’t been able to run because of an acute lack of MacOS hardware”. So he’s like, “I don’t know what SubEthaEdit is.” Well, it turns out MoonEdit is a collaborative text editor (see the movie on their website!

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Solving the frikking BadPixmap Firefox/Thunderbird crash on Debian Woody

Okay, you’re running Debian Stable 3.0 (it’s also called woody, or Linux 1958). Because this distribution is older than yer grandpaw, you have the firefox and thunderbird backports from www.backports.org installed. However, you’re not happy, because these otherwise fine packages crash more often than you can open a window (in fact, that’s what makes them crash, for example thunderbird’s login window or the find window in firefox). In fact, you’re downright homicidal.

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Zyxel 650R-31 nat loopback

I run a CVS server on a little linux box at home. This box is behind a Zyxel 650R-31 hardware firewall/router thingy that passes ssh connections from the outside to the linux box. I have a static IP, so a CVS spec looks something like: :ext:me@my.box – this works from the big bad internet. However, on my home LAN, the linux box has an internal non-routable IP, so CVS sandboxes on my laptop can’t be updated, as they have the my.

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Multi-agent frameworks and Python

The 3 second status update: I had a truly wunnerful December holiday in South Africa, featuring an abundance of sun, sea, crayfish, beer, meat, fish, various tasty molluscs, a very exciting jaunt in a 4-seater Cessna plane (thanks Dave!), good friends and fun-loving family. After re-adjusting to Dutch weather and getting back into the work thing for a few days, we spent a weekend in Koeln (or Cologne; that’s in Germany for the geographically challenged), worked some more and spent this past weekend debauching terribly with a large group of friends in Bradford-on-Avon, a picturesque little town about an hour’s drive from Bristol (that’s in the UK, again for the geographically challenged readers).

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