Rage Against The Mac

Yahoo! News – Norwegian pilots land plane after axe attack by passenger

A seemingly unstable passenger attacked two pilots aboard a Norwegian passenger plane with an axe

seemingly unstable?! Ya think?

Jive Software to Open Source its XMPP-based IM Server, Jive Messenger:

Jive Software, a leading provider of knowledge-based support software, announced today that it will license its Jive Messenger application under the GPL Open Source license.

This is fantastic! I really hope this gives the Jabber community a well-needed kick in the ass. The 1.4-series releases of the C-based jabberd had lots of “potential” ages ago, but they never really had the stability they needed. Then jabber2 came along and things got worse. OpenIM’s a freaking joke. The servers suck, the (non-Windows) clients bite, but the technology is awsome. Err, where have we heard this story before?

Brent Simmons and Ranchero Software have out-done themselves once again. With the release of NetNewsWire 2.0 (in ß, but still…) and MarsEdit 1.0 (again, ß) he’s raised the bar on weblogging tools. Actually, only MarsEdit is a weblogging tool; NetNewsWire has become more of a staple of my Internet activity than Safari and Mail.

Others have gone on at length about the new features in NNW2, so I’ll pass on all that other than to say so far, so good! There’s some niggles yet to be worked out, but I’m not going to overlook the beta designation. The beta of NNW2 shows the potential final product has and showcases the hard work the Ranchero folks have been putting into this product. I finally coughed up my $39.95 for the package deal for NNW2 and ME1 and I feel a better person for it.

There are some issues yet to be worked out with MarsEdit and Blojsom; I finally figured out (with the help of a faithful  employee and Blojsom’s lead developer) how to get ME to post to Blojsom. The required configuration parameters for the blog setup in ME are:

Home URL: http://example.com/blojsom/blog
Software: Other MetaWeblog-compatible
RPC URL: http://example.com/blojsom/xmlrpc/default
Blog ID: /

Replace “default” above with your Blojsom user id. The positioning of slashes is critical. This only allows you to edit and create posts in the root category of Blojsom. If you change the Blog ID to, “/othercategory”, ME will grab posts in the category “othercategory”.

I recently discovered the joy of XPath, thanks to a talk at one of the IndyJUG meetings a couple of months ago. Once I got the most basic of grasps on XPath queries, I was able to start churning out some pretty slick scraped RSS feeds for things like Pollstar artist and city searches, eBay searches, Iconfactory and Konfabulator recent updates, and a bunch of others. Actually, that little project’s a good showcase of a couple of my favorite tools, Henplus and Tagsoup. Anyway, one of the biggest difficulties I ran into was visualizing the results of XPath queries without having to dump the results with an XSL stylesheet, which was a less-than-elegant solution. After a bit of Googling, I came up with a tool called XPE. It's the only "free" (for any definition of free) tool I’ve found so far that allows me to evalue XPath statements and see their affect on a document. XPE isn't terribly fancy in the interface department, and can be a little sluggish at times, but it is extremely effective. The default view on startup is a graphical tree representation of the nodes in the loaded XML document. When you evaluate an XPath, XPE highlights the matched elements (but not text nodes) and expands the short-format to it's fully-qualified (and durn ugly, I might add) form.
All in all, a very nice Open Sourced tool (BSD license).

Al Gore Caught Speeding, Pays Ticket

Reuters – Former Vice President Al Gore paid a $141 fine for speeding on a highway last month near Oregon’s coast, a state police official said on Friday.

... and in other news, Jimmy Carter farts, wakes wife.

Great video. I can relate…

Anyone who stood behind me yesterday would’ve felt like the truck in this United Airlines jet safety video. I’m back in action, and free of dangerous exhaust!

(via The Farm.)

In my copious free time ™, I worked up a quick Blojsom plugin filter based on Dougal’s text filter suite for WordPress, which happens to include a Talk Like a Pirate filter. It’s a fairly simple concept, but, as usual, I went a little overboard. In order to avoid unintentionally piratizing links and other non-text elements in an entry, I used tagsoup and some XPath queries (thanks to Xalan ) to iterate over the text nodes. This took me a few hours to whack out, but I’m sure it would have taken a few more to come up with regular expressions to match non-tags.

There’re both binary and source tarballs available. The binary contains three JARs that you drop in Blojsom’s WEB-INF/lib directory (tlap.jar, tagsoup.jar, and xalan.jar). Do the usual enable-plugin jig (arrr=org.bravo5.tlap.TLAPFilter in plugin.properties) and add “arrr” to the plugin chain for your favorite flavor (vanilla! yummy!).

Please be aware that this is walk-the-plank-ware. That means if you try to come back at me when it makes your computer go kablooie, I don’t want to hear it. I know it’s alpha (at best), and frankly, it compiled and ran the first time (mostly), so you just know something’s broken… I’ll update this entry as progress … er … progresses.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.—jwz

update

The source is now in my Subversion repository