Notes from my terminal

Ramyun overkill

Jan Manuel reviews lots of instant Asian noodle soups, also known as either ramyun or ramen, in his new English-language "consumer blog".

Yet another proposal to stop Spam

This time at Tim Bay's weblog. Basically, it means that you only trust SMTP relays that you have to pay and in return sign your e-mail. While I'm confident that the peer-pressure factor ("sign-up on SMTP4All if you want to send me e-mail!") will work (it worked for fax machines and IM, after all), I'm not sure if this is the solution to all problems: E-Mail infrastructure will rely on too little hosts. Viruses in Outlook could easily use up all your "e-mail allowances". And last, not least: Legitimate bulk e-mails (things like newsletters or maybe even mailing lists) will be made impossible, unless they are operated by a comericial entity. Still, good food for thought.

Thingster, a wish-fulfillment engine

Thingster is a community web-service that lets you make wishes and fulfill other people wishes, based on geographic positions, FOAF and RDF/OWL. Wishes, as given as examples on the website, can be things like a good breakfast or help in searching lost kittens.

Schockwellenreiter still unreadable

I blogged about my problems with NetNewsWire Lite and the Schockwellenreiter's RSS 2.0 feed earlier. What I find remarkable is the fact that the problem persists. And it's always the same: There are characters in the feed which don't make sense in the default encoding. A quick glance at the Feed Validator would have helped. I'm currently thinking about writing a CGI that slurps in the Schockwellenreiter's RSS, re-encodes it and spits it out again so I can read the feed in NetNewsWire Lite. Anyone else who's interested in such a solution (a one-liner in Perl or Ruby, I guess)?
Update: Okay, I lied. Sue me. :) My Ruby hack takes 7 lines, but basically it just prints a new XML declaration with the correct encoding set for MacRoman:

require 'net/http'
puts "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"mac\" ?>" # print correct encoding
Net::HTTP.get('www.schockwellenreiter.de', '/rss.xml').each {|line|
  unless /^<\?xml/.match(line)
    puts line
  end
}

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

The title says it all. Read the text and learn.

Converting RSS to WML

Cute:

If your website is available in RSS format, you can easily make the site wirelessly available to mobile phones, PDA's, and WAP-enabled pagers, using this tool.

New software doesn't necessarily make you happier

Two updates appeared on my radar today: Both NetNewsWire Lite and iCal have new versions available for download. I like both pieces of software a lot and use them on a daily basis. However, I could be happier. While the iCal update is decent but no sensation, NetNewsWire Lite is a bit of a disappointment. Non-validating RSS feeds are as annoying as sadly ubiquitous. NetNewsWire Lite's new strategy? The old version used to render non-valid feeds, if it could make any sense of it. The new version will display nothing but an error message. The most prominent victim in my subscription list is "Der Schockwellenreiter".

Text processing shootout: Ruby vs. Python, YAML vs. XML

It all started on Sam Ruby's weblog, with benchmarking between Ruby (the language) and Python. Python came out as a clear winner, although I'd say the comparison was a bit unfair (compairing REXML, a pure Ruby implementation, with Python bindings for the C library libxml is probably not completely unbiased). So, does that mean that Ruby is slow for text processing and Python is fast? No, not at all. The challenge to beat Python+XML with Ruby+YAML is up at whytheluckystiff. And guess what? It looks very nice for pure Ruby Atom/YAML processing when it's done right.