Monday, April 22, 2002

We've done a bit more tweaking to Jon's currently subscribed to, and think that we've got it pretty much where we want it. Find the tweaked-up script here . Here's what we've changed: Just a little bit of the table formatting.  Obviously, you are free to tinker with that as much as you please. Pulled out the writing of image tags as a sub-script (is that what it's called in UserTalk?).  That's the "on imgTag(...)" bit right at the start of the script. Most important: we noticed that occasionally our subs() script would get hosed by the addition of a new channel.  All of a sudden, our macro would fail, and we'd get a bizarre error message: "Can't evaluate the expression because the name 'channeltitle' hasn't been defined." Turns out that the error was a genuine one -- but in the RSS feed, not in the script.  We haven't kept careful track of RSS version numbers, and don't know the schema well enough to get haughty about it, but apparently some people are putting feeds out there that don't include the channeltitle element.  Solution: just wrap the code that addresses the channeltitle element in an if that makes sure channeltitle is defined.  I've highlighted that part of the script in bold. P.S. Am I crazy, or are SOAP calls from my template cached, but XML-RPC calls are not? 7:11:30 PM

I'll write this in the first person, because it's kind of personal and it would be really tacky and unbecoming to adopt the "Inquisitorial We" for this kind of thing. I work at a non-profit, and it's taken the downturn of the late '90's a little longer to hit us than it did most of the for-profit world.  So, today is the day of our building-wide Reduction In Force. Somewhere between 5% and 7% of our staff are going to find out today that their programs or positions have been downsized. Sure, it's not 10,000 people losing their jobs all at once.  Sure, it's a relatively small proportion of the staff.  Sure, I am 90% sure that I'm not getting RIFed today. But it still sucks to be here today. 9:44:43 AM

Related to Cory Doctorow's rant (below), this recently in from Consensus at Lawyerpoint: Why is a content protection system necessary for digital over-the-air television? Hollywood representatives have, from the beginning, given one answer: a protection system is needed to prevent "Internet piracy," or even "Napster-ization." There's one problem with this rationale: it's not true. Don't be fooled. The BPDG standard is not about stopping "piracy." It's about Hollywood regaining some measure of control over what you can and can't do with television. It's about cramming the VCR genie back in the bottle, and giving Hollywood the power to bring new technologies to heel before they can deliver new capabilities to consumers. The proposed BPDG standard will have no meaningful impact on unauthorized copying or distribution of televised content. Here's why. 6:57:29 AM