RasterWeb!

I love watching the Olympics, and I know I’ll get in trouble for this… but I love watching people wreck.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anyone to get hurt, but seeing people wipe out can be quite spectacular. The “Ooooh! That’s gotta hurt!” responses and all that. Pure Gold!

I blame television for this, more specifically, ABC’s Wide World of Sports. As a child I remember seeing Vinko Bogataj wipe out week after week to the phrase “…the agony of defeat…” While it’s amazing to see athletes do the things they’ve trained to do, and do them spectacularly, it can be even more amazing to see something happen that no one ever expected to happen. Um… spectacularly!

I’d be the first in line to order a DVD titled “Blooplympics: Wipe-outs, Crashes, and Wrecks from the 2006 Olympic Games” or something like that… Maybe they’ll show a blooper reel at the end…

Simon posted some great notes from the Future of Web Apps Summit, which are a must read for people interested in building web applications the right way.

The comments also mention more notes at Adactio and mp3 files (what, no enclosures?) at SteveC’s blog.

I am once again trying Eclipse, mainly for dealing with Java code. I’ve never been a big fan of IDE‘s , choosing instead to live by the “unix way” of stitching together small specific tools into a chain that works how I want it to. jEdit has been my text editor of choice for years now. Yes, I’m one of those people who lives in their editor, and had customized it, and tweaked it, and made it mine to the point that I’m not about to give it up. Still, I’ll see what the Eclipse has to offer…

It has been brought to my attention that I snore. Loudly. Very loudly.

When I was a kid I did not believe it when my brother told me that I snored, so he set up the reel-to-reel tape recorder and proved it to me. The results were astounding.

I’ll be sure to follow Mr. Orchard‘s advice: If you snore, get tested for sleep apnea. Now. but in the meantime (meaning I’ve not yet made an appointment) I decided to record my snoring to experience it in all it’s glory. What else would a geek do?

The cheap little iRiver I have only records 2 hours and 15 minutes, but that’s enough to get a good taste of it. It’s been interesting looking at the waveforms, it seems that the first 30 minutes or so are pretty calm, then it gets pretty damn loud for the next 30 minutes, then tapers off just a bit after that.

What, you want to hear it? I’ve put a sample file up on archive.org that is about 19 minutes long, right at the loudest point. See: Extreme Snoring 001. (I could do a whole podcast based on snoring!) It’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license so feel free to remix it, mash it up, or use it for whatever you’d like (annoy the neighbors?) as long as you abide by the license. (If you’d like to license it under different terms, just contact me.)

Magpie RSS is a feed parser written in PHP. It’s easy to use and does what you want it to do. And as long as you’re using PHP (and PHP is working right) you’re golden.

Unfortunately, I need something just like Magpie RSS, but for JSP.

I’ve found two articles from 2003, one titled Using RSS in JSP pages and one titled RSS Utilities: A Tutorial. That first one mentions the Informa RSS Library for Java which looks interesting, but also worries me because 3 months ago their news page had this:

We started working on the next Informa, which will besides other modernisations based on Hibernate 3 and no longer depend on XDoclet. The core code is going to be refactored, expect therefore that your old database scheme will have to be upgraded.

Yeah, that makes me want to dig into it today…. sigh…

(And don’t bother looking at the RSS JSP Tag Library as that project seems to have been around for more than 2 years without releasing anything.)

Any suggestions?