Digital Apocrypha

NY Times: Dogged Engineer’s Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage. A sad story, and an outcome that is fairly inevitable once administrators start overruling engineers.

Dare Obasanjo on revamping the RSS Bandit news aggregator. I’ve been using RSS Bandit for a few months now, and find it pretty good. I like the fact that its free, and the source is available for me look at if I want.

I tried NewsGator a couple of months ago and, although I really liked it, I had to drop it because I don’t use Outlook at work. From what I’ve read recently, its even better now.

Guardian: “Bleak statistics show that Russia’s population could halve in size within 50 years” Scary. Maybe the Chinese will make them an offer for some of the spare land?

Text (pdf) of the new UK anti-spam law. Nice to have it, but completely futile.

JList.com – weird products and stuff from Japan. Very interesting. 

BlogPulse – Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs. The Key Phrases list is great, but why can’t I rss-subscribe to it?

Mark Pilgrim on RSS auto-discovery.

Speaking of which, the feed validator has moved to http://feedvalidator.org 

Wired: Monsanto sues famers who label their milk as free of artificial hormones.

Eclipse: “a kind of universal tool platform – an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.” Interesting.

Well, I’m back. And if I wasn’t so damn tired I’d write-up what I did last week. It’ll have to wait. #

I’ve finally started to look seriously at re-designing this whole site. Using CityDesk for everything just isn’t working for me anymore. I’d like to be able to blog from work, or from the laptop when I’m at home. Unfortunately, excellent though it is, CityDesk is tied to my desktop machine in our home office. So I’m actively looking at building a simple ASP.NET framework that gives me some of the capabilities of CityScript, but with a dynamic database at the back-end instead of CityDesk’s static approach. I can then add some simple webforms to enable me to blog from anywhere I have a browser window. I’ll continue to use CityDesk to create the more static content, and this will all live under a new “weblog” sub-domain that I’ve set-up. I also plan to split-off the photo galleries into a separate sub-domain, XMLify them, and use a different page layout to the blog. Now all I need to do is find the time to do it…

And in other news:

Halley Suitt points to Michael Wilson’s account of escaping the WTC just in time. Raw, gripping, mandatory reading.

William Gibson steps out of the blogosphere, just as Brad Wilson returns.

Ray Ozzie steps in to try to save the web browser. Best of luck, mate.

Kraig Brockschmidt’s book “Mythic Microsoft“. Interesting, if you can filter-out the bogus spirituality.