Blog posts

I’ve been rethinking a few aspects of XML_Feed_Parser following some discussion around the web, summarised in this post from Sam Ruby. Numerous aggregators appear vulnerable to attacks based on malicious HTML in the body of comments, and that includes any based on XML_Feed_Parser that do not do their own HTML filtering/output escaping. There was a brief discussion of the issue on the PEAR email list and I’ve decided to change the package’s default behaviour. In the spirit of PEAR, I’m going to make use of HTML_Safe to process any html or text content in the feed before returning it. There will be extra methods to access the raw content, but it’ll be an extra step so that people know they’re potentially getting dangerous content. ...

To pick up a theme from the previous post, I was very interested to hear (probably via cityofsound) a few months back that Bloomsbury were working on a new series called The Writer and the City. In their words: The Writer and the City is a series of beautifully produced, pocket-sized books featuring great authors writing about cities they know best. Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town is the first I’ve had a chance to read and it’s a great collection of three short stories set in New York City, moving from the tragedy of the War of Independence (when much of the city was burned to the ground), through the bustle of the city’s explosive growth as a financial center in the 19th century and on to the tale of a psychiatrist dealing with her own feelings about the destruction of the World Trade Center as she seeks to manage a patient’s situation. ...

This weekend saw me making my first proper foray into Canada, having previously not been further across the border than Windsor, Ontario, and that only for lunch after having my green card approved. This time we headed to Cameron, Ontario on the far side of Toronto for Culture Is Not Optional’s Practicing Resurrection conference. The conference seemed to go extremely well and was a great time away with friends and meeting new people. It took place on a farm owned and operated by Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat and Henry and Sarah Bakker. Their experiment in sustainable farming provided a great location that was also appropriate for the conference which, whether purposefully or not, ended up adopting an agrarian theme. ...

After TechCrunch posted about the new version of blogger (currently in beta) I decided to give it a look, particularly to see what was going on with their feed support as TechCrunch claim that blogger would be switching to RSS2 for its feeds (revisiting TechCrunch it seems they’re now saying RSS2 will be offered in addition to atom so I don’t know if I misread that or it’s been updated. Personally I don’t see the point of adding RSS2 when you have Atom, and wonder if it might be confusing for some users, but I guess someone must disagree). ...

It’s always an interesting challenge to take a system you are familiar with and try to use it in an entirely new way or context. That’s what I’ve been getting with PHP of late. As more and more of my web development work moves to Rails, I’ve had the chance to work on PHP embedded within Filemaker Pro as I’ve tested and explored Scodigo’s new Smart Pill plugin. For those of us used to programming in full-fledged languages, writing scripts and functions in filemaker can be quite a challenge. Writing and debugging all that recursive code is a time-consuming process, and communicating with external processes isn’t really worth the work without plugins. Smart Pill changes all that, by opening up the entire PHP (5.1.4, including many extensions) engine for use within Filemaker. ...

In the current climate it’s difficult to believe that anything that should give pause to the US administration (or public, for that matter) will. Nevertheless, it’s still good to see such things getting some attention and maybe something will gain the critical mass and longevity to really make a difference. The latest is Harpers Magazine’s coverage of a document thought to be from the safe house of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (either the mastermind of the Iraqi insurgency for many months or a buffoon, depending on which day’s governmental press releases you chose to read) stating that: ...

It used to be said that no two countries in which McDonalds had set up its “restaurants” had ever been to war with one another. I suppose it was some sort of capitalist mantra about how global trade makes us aware of our interdependence, rather than simply suggesting that all the chemicals ingested at McDonalds’ reduced our inclination towards warfare. This morning it occurred to me to check the ongoing veracity of that claim. There are/were nine McDonalds’ in Lebanon, and there are more than 80 in Israel. ...

The first release of XML_Feed_Parser in six months is out the door, and it’s the first (and hopefully only) release candidate. I’ve had several people email me with questions about the package in the past few weeks, most of whom are using it successfully and wanted to see a stable release soon, so it seemed time to get moving on that. This release fixes a few small bugs, mostly related to the packaging rather than to its operation, and I’m now bundling the various Relax NG schemas used for validation to save on HTTP requests. There is one open ticket that I’ll need to attend to, and then all should be ready for 1.0. ...

Kyle Adams posted in the comments on my RubyConf MI entry to say that the first BarCamp in Michigan will take place in Grand Rapids the weekend before RubyConf MI. As I’ll be leaving for Greenbelt a few days later, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it for the whole thing, but I’m definitely planning to drop in for at least some of it. At last a tech conference within a bike ride of my house! ...

It’s far from a secret, but today Kari made the first public posting (and her first blog entry in a year) to announce that we’re planning to move to England some time next summer.