Chunking and scanning RSS feeds. "I've been somewhat surprised to find myself preferring the Radio UserLand aggregator to the others I also use: NetNewsWire and NewsGator. Last night I realized why: it's a matter of chunking and scanning. In RU, I scan and dismiss batches of 100 items. On a typical day, when I receive a few hundred items, that's just a couple of clicks -- modulo any additional effort to save or respond to an item. In NetNewsWire and NewsGator, it's more of an item-by-item thing. There are consolidated views available, but they display headlines (or truncated previews) only. Processing a lot of feeds feels like more work."
... [Jon's Radio]
8:55:14 PM comment []
SQL and XPath. V.S. Babu wrote to ask what product was executing the XPath-enabled SQL query I showed yesterday. It's a beta of the new version 3.0 of OpenLink's Virtuoso. I've refined the query a bit, so that it also picks up RSS 1.0 feeds:
... [Jon's Radio] Very cool. I checked out the site. I thought the killer graphic was here. Isn't this every protocol you ever wanted to connect? Wow.
8:05:26 PM comment []
Jon Udell talks about the promise of power and freedom in this entry: "To have a multitasking and multithreaded operating system, right on my desktop, for my own personal use, seemed an incredible luxury." Good points. Pre-emptive multi-tasking would be so much cooler if it was the user who could preempt whatever the machine is doing that it thinks is so important that it's ignoring our clicks!
5:20:25 PM comment []
"Neither United nor Air Canada appears to have any idea where my bag is, because they have no record, other than the tag they gave me when I checked the bag in Santa Barbara, of its existence." Poor Doc. Travel nightmares seem more the norm than the exception these days. Last time I travelled, luggage handlers in Detroit misplaced my bag, but fortunately I have such hideous tastes in colors that I could pick it out at 50 yards. I think travel is not as much fun as it used to be.[The Doc Searls Weblog]
11:29:27 AM comment []
VFUG March Newsletter Now Available. VFUG (the Virtual FoxPro User Group) just released the March issue of its monthly newsletter. Articles in this issue include one by regular contributor Les Pinter, Email VFP Reports by Phil Bartow, Understanding Structured Exception Handling in Visual FoxPro 8.0 by Mike Helland, Part 4 of A Basic Introduction to Automation using MS Visual FoxPro by Matt Jarvis, We Are All Visual FoxPro Beginners by Carl Warner, Wireless Devices, Part 3: SMTP > SMS > MMS by Tom O'Hare, tidbits on conferences, what's new for Spanish members, assorted URL resources, tips including Using the Registry Class, End of File Gotcha, Extended Characters Showing Incorrectly, Office Menus - Prevent the Automatic Collapse, Paste from the Clipboard and then call a specific keypress, and more. As usual, you can view this monthly newsletter online or download its text version and all other back issues free at the VFUG site. Not a member? Join VFUG for free at the site. [FoxCentral.Net]
10:32:58 AM comment []
Latest CodeRed variant lacks built in obsolescence. Same old tricks with moderate-to-low risk worm [The Register] Saw a couple hits in the web server log yesterday: GET /default.ida followed by a slew of NNNNNNN's. If you didn't see hits in your logs (you do read your logs daily, don't you?), perhaps you'd better check to make sure you're not infected.
62.212.113.49 - France, ADSL
61.222.207.187 - Taiwan
64.35.166.213 - Digital Solutions, San Jose
and on the second day,
64.106.162.220 - a customer of DataPipe of Hoboken, NJ
64.229.11.167 - a customer of HSE, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
64.35.166.213 - a repeat, from above. Five times.
64.35.112.148 - XO Communications, seven times.
64.231.108.158 - Bell Nexxia, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
64.252.199.131 - SBC Internet of Meriden, CT
So, I went from three to sixteen attacks in a single day. Hysterial media would predict the end of the world by the end of the week. Me, I think I'll just send email to the abuse aliases for the clients I can find.
