Jeremy Zawodny's blog

Coding Again

I spent more than 50% of today coding to get the next release of mytop ready. Integrating patches, fixing bugs, updating docs, etc.

You know what?

It was good. It's been too long since I had more than 20 minutes of time to actually deal with code rather than e-mail, meetings, or writing various documents (or thinking about what to write in them).

The new mytop will be out in a few days. I've asked some folks to try it out first.

O'Reilly Blog RSS Suckage

Anyone know who runs the RSS feeds for the O'Reilly blogs?

They're all broken in a very important way. Take for example, Tim O'Reilly's weblog. The RSS URL is a gnarly one: http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/index.php?s=/Tim+O'Reilly/&sw=dc_creator&_fl=rss10&t=1ALL.

No big deal, right? I only need to put it in my aggregator once. The trouble is that no matter which of the O'Reilly weblog feeds you subscribe to, they all have the exact same title in the XML:

...
  <channel rdf:about="http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/">
    <title>Meerkat: An Open Wire Service</title>
    <link>http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/</link>
...

Yup. Every one of them says "Meerkat: An Open Wire Service" in my aggregator. That makes it really hard to subscribe to more than one O'Reilly weblogger's feed.

I guess I can't compalin too much. After all, they finally added the orange XML buttons to each author's blog. But still. This really seems like a no-brainer. Does nobody at O'Reilly subscribe to their co-{author,worker}'s blogs?

How to spend a Wednesday

You could practice landing a glider in a field, like I did (pictures).

Or you could sit at your desk and stare at that computer screen, just like you do every day.

I'll let you in on a secret. Flying into fields is more fun--especially when there's an instructor in the back seat to make sure you don't do anything stupid.

It's even more fun when it opens up a new door in your flying--one that means better summer soaring conditions and more interesting soaring sites.

But don't take my word for it. Find your local SSA affiliated soaring club and see for yourself.

When did "creative" become a noun?

Someone says, "Hey, have a look at the new creative for our site!" and I can't help but to think how stupid that sounds. Creative what?

Do we really need yet another word to describe a creation? Aren't words like logo, advertisement, design, layout, or presentation sufficient and less vague at the same time?

As if the word "creative" hasn't already been abused to the point of being totally meaningless: "Hey, look what Bob did. That's very creative!"

Yo, moron. Odds are good that you mean "original" there. Any time someone creates something, it is by definition a creative exercise. So you're stating the obvious. As for it being "very creative", how do you judge that exactly?

Damned language. It keeps "evolving" in stupid ways.

(No. I have no idea why this bothers me. But it does, in a "my Internet is down" sort of way.)

Ahhh. It feels good to have that out of my system.

Flame away if you're bored. :-)