Yabfog

Wow!

[via Dave]

Finally have a bunch of my link blogs posted. A little explanation, though.

First, this is an OPML file, generated by NewsGator, filtered through sed, and displayed by Optimal.

Second, I maintain these link blogs in FeedDemon and my own aggregator built on the NewsGator API.

As of the latest version (ver. 2.5), FeedDemon automatically syncs your "News Bins" with your NewsGator "Clippings Folders" -- two terminologies for the same thing. They really ought to pick a name. In any event, now that I've set it up, these should self-maintain without any additional work on my part. That's what programming is all about!

Note to self:

Grab a unified diff of the new version versus the old version:
svn diff -r HEAD --old http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/<old_version> \
--new http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/<new_version>

Apply the changes to the current installation:
patch -d <path_to_wp_install> -u -i <patchfile>

I've always loved the Bugs Bunny cartoon Rhapsody Rabbit and wished I had a recording of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 performed by the pianist who performed it for that cartoon. Well, today I went down the rabbit hole searching for an answer.... And I found it. The pianist was Jakob Gimpel. I also found this fascinating story by Gimpel's son in which he hypothesizes that the pianist in "The Cat Concerto" (the Tom and Jerry version of Rhapsody Rabbit that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for 1946) was Shura Cherkassky. (See: The Cat Concerto Controversy (Mystery Solved?).) Now, to find a recording....

As seen on Scripting News and TechCrunch (among other places)...

Your results:
You are Hulk

Hulk 80% Superman 65% Spider-Man 60% Green Lantern 60% The Flash 55% Iron Man 50% Robin 45% Catwoman 45% Supergirl 35% Wonder Woman 30% Batman 25%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality
Test

Without an analysis of why I was characterized as Hulk, I think this gimmick lacks social punch. Of course, I know what the questions were and what my answers were. So, I can understand being Hulk, but unless you take the Superhero Personality Test yourself, you'll have no idea why this post is at all interesting.

FYI: My BlackBerry's Web browser identifies itself (i.e., "User Agent") as: BlackBerry8700/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

So in PHP, an inexpensive check would be something like:

if ( 0 === stripos($useragent, 'blackberry') ) {
    echo "True";
}

After about two weeks of unresponsiveness, I finally found yet another way to contact the Washington Post to complain about their broken website (see my previous post for more info). This time, they promptly responded to my complaint, and within three or four days, the website was fixed.

My contact person, Sarah Lumbard, was courteous and helpful. Thank you, Sarah.

At some point today, the Washington Post broke its website for Blackberry users (and perhaps other mobile device users).

Now, any time I try to access an article by clicking on a link in my RSS aggregator on my Blackberry, I get redirected to some lame "mobile site," and I can't see the story I'm trying to read.

Shame on you, Washington Post!

UPDATE: Emails went unanswered, so I called them at 703.469.2500. Me: "Your website is broken to Blackberry users." WaPo (with a level of disinterest I thought only possible when talking to an accountant at a cocktail party): "It is?" We'll see what happens...

Del.icio.us rolled out a new API server. Eventually, the old server will shut down. This will effect MySQLicious.

If the old URL was:

http://del.icio.us/api/posts/get

the new URL will be:

https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get

Note:

1. The use of https (for secure connections)
2. The new server name
3. The addition of a version number where the /api/ used to be