New My Yahoo Beta brings RSS to the masses

From Jeremy Zawodny’s blog:

Well, we just launched a beta of the next generation of My Yahoo that fits into that reality. Instead of “you can add anything you want, as long as it’s on the list of My Yahoo content” you can now add pretty much any public RSS or Atom feed. In other words, the content model is open.

Let me say that again, just for dramatic effect: the content model is open now.

RSS has slowly been edging into the mainstream for a while now. But with this new exposure, we can expect a veritable explosion of new awareness of RSS from the non-technorati. Creators of feed aggregator software and services should expect a fresh deluge of new users. Fortunately, most of the feed software/services out there are pretty mature now.

One note: for some reason, when I tried to add my feed to My Yahoo, it didn’t like the RSS 2.0 version. It would show me the headlines just fine, but then complained when I tried to perform the final add. But it liked the RSS 1.0 (RDF) version just fine.

Job Interview

I just had a phone interview for a job position at a local university. The position is “Senior Applications Developer/Analyst”. I was a bit concerned that my experience with some of the technologies listed in the job description is limited. However, I have a lot of coding experience in a variety of different languages and platforms, and I can pick up new technologies very quickly.

They broke the interview into sections. The first few questions were oriented towards project management in general. How would I go about starting a project, what kind of documents would I use, what are the benefits of using a source control system, etc. The second part was technical questions. What are the methods used for HTML forms and what are the differences between them, what are sessions, and how would I implement them, what are indexes in a database. The technical questions were really pretty simple, and I feel like I answered them pretty well, giving examples of how I had used each technology in the past.

They told me that they would be giving callbacks later this week to the candidates chosen to move on to the next level of the interview process. I’m hoping to hear back. I don’t look forward to having to fight Atlanta traffic, but I think I would enjoy the work there. It sounds a lot like the kind of work I was doing in my previous job. Plus, working at a University would give me a better opportunity to finally finish up my bachelor’s degree.

Petals Around the Rose

I learned about this little puzzle thing called Petals Around the Rose yesterday (via BoingBoing). It’s sort of a dice game where you have to figure out how to solve the puzzle as you go, and once you know how, you can’t tell anybody else. It took me a while to figure it out, because I tried to over-analyze it. In fact, it’s almost an accident that I figured it out at all, considering the line of thought I was trying to follow. Of course, now I’m sworn to secrecy, so I can’t tell you what that line of thought was…

The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and that name is significant. Newcomers to the game can be told that much. They can also be told that every answer is zero or an even number. They can also be told the answer for every throw of the dice that are used in the game. And that’s all the information they get.

The javascript app on the page listed above didn’t work for me in Firefox. I had to use the sample dice rolls detailed in the story about Bill Gates in order to figure it out. As I mentioned before, I’m sworn to secrecy about how to get the answers. But I will say that a child in first or second grade (or even a bright pre-schooler) could give you the answers, once they know the method.

Weight Goal

This morning’s scale weight was 261.0, and my trend weight is just a smidgen above that. We fell off of our eating plan a bit over the weekend. We hadn’t had time to cook much this week, we were getting tired of the leftovers, and we were just generally stressed. So, my weight fluctuated a bit. If you go by the trend calculation, I’m down about 4 pounds from last week, and 11 pounds overall (two weeks so far).

We’re getting back on track now. Susan got a smoker for Christmas last year. We’re going to put it together and try our hand at smoking some chicken and turkey. That should give us some good stuff to eat 🙂

Back to reality

Talk Like a Pirate Weekend was fun, but now it’s time to get back to normal again. Mostly.

Saturday, I was updating my test copy of WordPress from CVS, when I accidentally ran the update command from the wrong directory. I ran it from the top level of this web site. Suddenly, I realized that I had broken everything. I had two options: I could restore things back to WP 1.2, or I could just go ahead and upgrade to the current alpha code. I went with the latter choice.

Since I’m now running experimental code, some things could be broken. If you spot anything, let me know. Everything seems to be fine so far, however.

Pirate filter fix

Michael Heilemann wrote:

> Hey Dougal.
>
> I get the following error when I try to comment on my site with the
> pirate plugin turned on:
>
> Database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual
> […]
>
> I’m running 1.2. Any ideas?
>
> – Mike
> http://binarybonsai.com


Doh! I forgot to announce the fix for that! I discovered the problem on Friday, but I didn’t have time to write it up, and then later I forgot about it.

At the end of tfs-pirate.php, change the final if statement. Instead of 

  add_filter('all','pirate');

Do: 

  add_filter('the_content','pirate');
  add_filter('comment_text','pirate');

Or just re-download the package, I've updated it with the fix.

Spammers are stupid

For the past three hours, a spammer has been attacking this site, attempting to post comment spam. Of course, none of the over 600 attempted comment spams have ever shown up. The attacks have come from a variety of different IP numbers (at least 8 different ones at a quick glance), so it appears that the perpetrator is using remotely controlled “zombie” machines.

The comments have been a breeze to delete from my system (just search on a common keyword, go to “mass edit mode”, check all, and delete!). Since I use Kitten’s Spam Words plugin, the spams contribute more fodder against future spams. And thanks to my Spammer TarPit plugin, I get the amusement of seeing some feedback when I block the next attempt.

Everybody repeat after me…. “Spammers are stupid.”