SteveX Compiled

Congrats to the guys at NASA on a smooth launch.  It’s good to see us (the inhabitants of this rock) back in space.

My simple thought on the RSS vs Atom debate:  RSS not having any way to identify a particular item, a unique key, makes it difficult to implement well.  You have to come up with heuristics to figure out, given an RSS feed and the set of tags the publisher has chosen to include, how to [...]

I’ve been taking pictures with my new digital camera for the last few weeks, and being 5 megapixel, the images are huge.  A 1 gig memory card and a fast camera means I can generate a huge amount of photo data pretty quickly.  So after a few weeks of this, I need to move some [...]

I’ve been meaning to digitize this for ages, just for the nostalgia value.  (Click on the tape).  

I’ve had a Scientific Atlantic SA8000HD High-Definition PVR from Rogers for the last year or so, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. StarChoice just released their DSR530 HD PVR. I used StarChoice in the past, but I switched to Rogers for the HD PVR, but now that StarChoice had one, I ordered it. I’m [...]

Alleviating the podcast bandwidth crunch can be done using an existing peer to peer mechanism that’s proven its ability to massively distribute data for the last 20 or so years.. Usenet. It’d be easy to do too: Add NNTP to a podcast publishing tool. Use the Message-ID of the message in the RSS enclosure. Add [...]

It’s been reported that iTunes is lax in parsing the RSS extensions that they added to support iTunes. In a nutshell, the way iTunes finds the nodes it needs in an RSS document is apparently by scanning through the document doing a case-insensitive compare of the node name to the name it’s looking for. XML [...]

When a customer support line announces “We are currently experiencing a higher than normal call volume” every time you call, wouldn’t that mean the higher call volume is “normal”?

Cool… This works: iTunesLib.IiTunes iTunes = (iTunesLib.IiTunes)new iTunesLib.iTunesAppClass(); IITTrack track = iTunes.CurrentTrack; track.Rating = 60; I was trying to set ratings in previous versions of iTunes and not having much luck; finally I can write something to move all my song ratings from the Windows Media Player database into the iTunes database. iTunes still doesn’t [...]

I’m back from a week off near Haliburton, Ontario (Carnarvon, actually, but most online maps don’t seem to have Carnarvon).  We rented a cottage for the week, first time I’ve done that, and I have a few things I want to do differently next year: Find one with Air Conditioning.  Yeah I know, you’re supposed [...]