Dyepot, Teapot

This is more techy than most of what I post, so I won’t mind if you skip on to the next thing, but there’s something I want to comment on.

I read a lot of different feeds. I use Bloglines to manage this, because it’s web-based and fairly reliable, and it was the thing I’d been hearing about the most when I decided it was time to move from regularly visiting several different websites to collecting all of them in one place. It works okay, but after a while the folder-based organization system starts to break down. It’s hard to sort things by both topic and how urgently I want to read them. People I know in person => read immediately. Fashion blogs => okay to skim once every couple of weeks. Thus, I am in the process of hacking together something to handle this, using a mishmash of Perl and Ruby on Rails. (Remind me to post about my love of Rails some other time.)

The other effect of this is that I’m reading a lot about different syndication formats to get a sense of what works, what doesn’t, and where the buzz is (main topics of interest have been the assorted versions of RSS, plus Atom, plus OPML which is really an outliner format but is also commonly used to exchange lists of feeds). And I’ve been rather irritated to discover a ginormous psychodramafest surrounding RSS and OPML issues. Never underestimate the group (however loosely formed) ’s ability to act like a bunch of overgrown 13 year olds. Not linking or naming anyone, because the whole thing is truly idiotic.

I’m only mentioning it because for me it has (at least to me) an interesting technical side effect. I’m going to focus on working with Atom, not RSS, and XOXO (an alternate outline format, also used for describing lists of feeds). It’s my program, so why not? OPML kind of sucks anyhow. It’s an ugly use of XML (putting all of the data in attributes, not elements). I’ll still need code that can read all of these things, but for output? I’m picking the formats that come with the least baggage.

That’s all. I just wanted to say something to remind myself of where I don’t want to be. If you want people to play with your software or formats or whatever you’re trying to introduce to the world, don’t be a drama queen. It wastes everyone’s time.

Tags: geek, programming, RSS, Atom, OPML, syndication, drama queens

The sweater is finished. Designed and knit in two weeks. Can you believe it? I had no idea I could complete a project like this that fast. I’m done a full two and a half days before the deadline, even. Pictures soon. I’m planning to wear it tomorrow. Wow. I feel like there ought to be champagne to celebrate.

Tags: knitting, Knitting Olympics, finished object

I made a couple of small updates to the lunchcart map page, including a formatting change that should hopefully make the map align itself next to the sidebar now, instead of below it. I’d appreciate if someone using IE on Windows could check this for me, since I won’t be able to confirm it myself until Monday.

I also created a little script to let me automatically update the status info on my main webpage. It generates an RSS copy of the info as well, so you should be able to point your favorite feed aggregator at http://www.speakeasy.org/~aeschright/status.rss now to find out when I’ve updated the page, should you care to do so.

As for my Olympic sweater, I got most of the way to the waist, tried it on again, and concluded that it was too tight across the belly, so I had to rip back several inches and fix that. This is only a minor setback, though. I’m sure by the end of the weekend I’ll have fixed that section and made significant progress toward finishing the body of the garment.

Tags: lunch carts, maps, rss, status pages, Knitting Olympics, knitting

Today I discovered a very funny programming guide: Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. You should take a look even if you are not a programmer and don’t know what Ruby is and even if you are not even slightly a geek, because there are cartoon foxes who like chunky bacon and sidebars with suggestions on how to pirate the contents of the book in strange ways. And this, which had me convulsing with suppressed laugher at work:

Seven Moments of Zen from My Life

1. 8 years old. Just laying in bed, thinking. And I realize. There’s nothing stopping me from becoming a child dentist.

So why am I reading a Ruby programming guide, however amusing? I think I’m going to attempt to install and muck around with Ruby on Rails, which is a web programming framework that’s been getting a lot of buzz in the last year, and I think could be useful for certain Major Project Ideas I’m pondering. I’ll post links to anything interesting I manage to whip up.

Tags: ruby, programming, geek

My fears about being able to knit a sweater in 16 days appear to be unfounded. Here’s where I was after the first night:

And here’s the state of the sweater now:

The other update you’ll be eager to hear is that I now have confirmation that Frances is not sick, just picky:

It was nothing a jar of lamb baby food couldn’t fix. I’m sure she’s having trouble with her sense of smell and ability to chew as she gets older, but I was surprised that she suddenly decided dry food was inedible. I’ll try putting wet food on top for a couple of days to see if she’ll eat them mixed together.

Tags: knitting, Knitting Olympics, cats

I think my cat is on a hunger strike. The last few days I’ve noticed that when I pour her dry food back into the cup to measure out how much more she needs (it helps encourage her to eat the stale stuff if I mix in some fresh food every morning) the amount appears to be the same as when I put it in the dish the day before. She’s not acting sick or lethargic, but I’m still a little concerned. I hope this isn’t an attempt to get me to buy more wet food. She acts like a junkie toward that stuff.

Tags: cats

The knitting olympics got off to a good start last night, a least at my house. Thanks everyone who came over to giggle at dancing cows and alpine dresses with me.

Kari tagged me for a “five things you might not know about me” meme a little while ago, and I haven’t posted because I’m having a hard time thinking about five things that both qualify, and I actually want to share. But I’ll give it a shot.

1. I don’t like to sleep with the closet door open. I think it started when I was in preschool and saw some tv sitcom/drama episode where a kid had a fire start in the closet, and being a preschooler, I decided that there couldn’t be a fire in there if you couldn’t see it. Now it’s such an ingrained habit, I don’t think about it, but the universe feels out of order if the closet door is open when I go bed. I no longer worry that a fire could start in there.
2. I’ve been using the internet since 1994. I was 15 at the time. These days, there are a lot of 15 year olds online, but back then, almost everyone was at least in college, unless they had really geeky parents. I still sometimes miss the old-school days of Gopher, and Usenet without spam. It is weird to have nostalgia for plain text?
3. My mother thought I was incapable of learning to cook until sometime toward the end of high school when I finally figured out how to make rice without burning the bottom of the pan. It took me a while to learn that I need a timer for everything. I get distracted and forget I have tea brewing all the time (like right now for instance. I’ll go grab that and be right back). Fortunately overbrewed tea is still quite palatable. Burnt rice, not so much.
4. I’ve gone through alternating periods of really wanting to be involved in tech things and being thoroughly sick of it. You might guess from the recent mapping and programming that this is currently a “yay, tech” cycle. I think it’ll last a while, maybe indefinitely. The problem is that I tend to get sick of the asshole arrogant bullshit that runs rampant in hardcore geek circles and decide I’d rather hang out elsewhere. Computers are not the most important thing ever. But they are pretty neat. Right now I feel like I’m tracking a lot of interesting developments and poking at it from my own angle, and that makes me happy.
5. I want to conquer the world. Not in an imperial overlord sense, but by creating something that changes how people do things on a wide scale. Hopefully for the better. Google’s a great example of this. No one forces you to use it, but you do because it works. They offer new services and you use those too. Because they work. At some point they’ll grow too much and have people doing too many things on their terms and no one will like it anymore and something else will take its place. But even if that happened next year, they’d still have an amazing accomplishment to their credit.

Tags: Knitting Olympics, meme, about me

Friday I came home to an email from FIFA saying I have been allocated tickets to not one, but TWO World Cup soccer matches. In Germany, this summer. So this is going to be a busy year for international travel.

In April we’re traveling with friends to Sunderland in Northern England, to return a visit from the Sunderland fans last summer (if you don’t follow soccer or the EPL, Sunderland is a team in the top professional league in England). It sounds like they have quite a party planned for us. We’re expecting to attend two games: one vs. Manchester United, and the other against Newcastle, Sunderland’s biggest rival. That’s all in the first few days we’re there, so we’ll be spending the rest of the trip in Edinburgh and London.

Then in June, Lucas and I will be in Germany for the World Cup. We’re going to see the US team play Italy in Kaiserslautern, and Ghana in Nuremberg. Still need to book plane tickets and lodging, so I don’t know where else we’re going to be yet. I really want to spend some time in Munich, because that was my favorite city when I was there ten years ago. We’ll have rail passes, so I’m sure there will be lots of options.

Tags: World Cup, travel, soccer, Sunderland, FIFA