Nonsequittal Rumblings

As I read different people’s blogs, I notice…

I’m such a geek.

People write about their daily lives, their feelings, etc…

I write about new open source software I find, programming stuff (I will in the future, I’m sure), etc, etc, and other geeky stuff.

But, hey, let’s face it. This is the stuff I get excited about. And I don’t see myself changing anytime soon. No, if I change, then that wouldn’t be me any more.

So, let’s have some change of mood. I’ve talked about Jazz band before. It’s the band is organized by my work place. We recently had a party of our own. The band played in the back yard of one of the band member’s house – in which we rehears every Monday evenings. They invited their neighbors to let them see what in the world is going on at their place every Monday.It so coinsided with the weekend when Emily flew in from W.V., and Evan was with me as well. It just turned out to be a perfect timing.

Playing music is always fun. I’ve always enjoyed it since the first day I picked up trumpet… 18 years ago. Emily also told me that she had fun listening to us. It was really good to hear. So far, she had no chance of hearing me play with the jazz band I talk about all the time. It’s not a professional band. It’s just a hobbyist group, just for fun… and people love us for it. She loved it! What a great feeling.

I think I’ve finally come up with the solution I like.

I’ve used nntp//rss for a while. It works well to a point. But it’s not perfect. I can’t perse some RSS files for some very minor errors. http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fweather.gov%2Fdata%2Fcurrent_obs%2FKICT.rss is one example of those. See how minor the error is? A program should be able to ignore that kind of error, and go ahead and perse the document.

I’ve also mentioned about the lack of support for the HTTP authentication protected feeds on nntp//rss. It was going to be supported as of version 0.4. But I’m really not seeing any developement activities. I’ve decided to give up on it.

Also, another gripe is that the way it perse is not always plausible. Reading slashdot feed on it was not very pleasant.

Now I found a new answer. Actually, 2 answers.

1 is a Thunderbird extension called Forumzilla. Usage is very easy. You save the xpi file locally, and install it from Thunderbird. Restart Thunderbird. Go to “Tools” -> “Feed Supscriptions” and set up your stuff! Very nice.

The second solution is Thunderbird 0.8. It’s still in pre-alpha state. But the latest nightly build includes the built-in RSS functionality. Unfortunately, I can’t use this build at work right now, because the proxy support on the windows build seems to be broken, and it crashes every time I try to access the outside documents.

A switch from 0.7 to 0.8 nightly build was rather complex. I had to jump through a few loops to import all the saved messages to the new profile, which now supports all the mail account save the incoming messages in the local folder inbox. Hopefully it will be much easier in the production release of 0.8.

If you’re not too fond of Thunderbird, there also is another choice. As of version 2.0.2, ~Awasu~ has an option to switch the browser engine in its view pane from IE to mozilla. Finally, someone has done it!

But I’m using Thunderbird, and not Awasu for couple reasons. For one, at work, the access to the windows registry is very restricted, and Awasu couldn’t work with that restriction. And for the other, Thunderbird is open source; Awasu is not.

There we go. We now have safe and practical RSS environment.

Additional note : Forumzilla is a bit more cumbersome to use than Thunderbird 0.8 built-in RSS parser. Why? Because forumzilla does not list the link within the normal header or the message body. I have to show “All” the headers, and copy and paste the Content-Base URL. It still works better than anything else I’ve used so far at my work, so I can’t complain too much. (With this, I can be up to date on the latest anime release, get the torrent URL, pull up the Azureus remote-control page, and start the download while I’m still at work. It’s really nifty.)

Normally, I’m not a big fan of sound track albums. They are nice go with the memory of films or series. But usually, they don’t grab my attention enough to make me say mmmmm! And there’s a good reason to it too: the music contained in sound tracks are usually made to be background music. It’s not supposed to draw the viewer’s attention from what’s on the screen, but it’s supposed to help the viewers get into the mood.

HINOTORI is based on Tezuka Osamu’s masterpiece manga. In this story, Hi no Tori (phoenix) possesses special blood, which can give immortality to anyone who consume it. Through the multiple stories weaved into the series, the artists ask one of the most fundamental questions of life and death.

The music production for the series is just as grand. No fake orchestra is used in this recording, for a change! Czech Philharmonic is worldly renowned orchestra, and they’ve done a good job on these tracks. Some tracks are mix of orchestral work with some feeling of easy listening feelings. Those are so-so tracks.

Tracks I’m impressed more are those tracks set purely in classical mood, some of them played along with Niko, traditional Chinese musical instrument. Track 6, Shingun is a grand work, making me think of Mahler (symph no.2 mvmt1), Brahms (symph no.1), and Saint-Saens (symph no.3 mvmt3). Track 7, requiem is a string trio + Niko. It’s very beautiful. Track 8 is based on Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, arranged for orchestra and Niko. It’s another beautiful track. It reminds me of Beethoven’s 9th, 3rd mvmt. Track 9 makes me think somewhat of Stravinsky’s ballet, Firebird.

I love symphonic works in general. And the composers/arrangers have done good work to match my taste! I just wished that more of this album was filled with these types of music.

I hesitated to buy this album. I’ve never bought sound track album in my life before this one. And I’m very glad of this purchase. I’m grateful for NHK for planning and producing this series, and doing a fabulous job at it.

http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/sharing/
This is a place where people can post their purchases if that purchase was influenced by something you’ve downloaded via P2P. There are some studies that shows that P2P file share is actually boosting the music sales, not hurting. This is one person’s attempt to show that it is a possibility. While I don’t know of the effectiveness of this data, I’ve encountered something neat.

I just found the site yesterday via slashdot. Then, just today, shiorichan made a purchase that was motivated by mp3 albums she had downloaded. I was happy I could share this little site with her.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/japan_bobby_fischer
What is this world coming to? We can be accused of violating immigration and international relations laws for the sake of arts and fair competition? I know that laws are there for anyone and everyone. But at the same time, I thought there’s certain amount of public relations that the enforcers need to keep in mind. So, what good does detention of a chess master bring to U.S. and Japan? I really can’t tell. I personally feel somewhat repelled. Hrm.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1152402.htm
This is one news I need to hide from my daughter. The kins of Kanga and Roo being culled! She will start worrying about when kins of Pooh will be culled.

The woe continues.

I quickly found out that nntp//rss does not support any feeds thta require HTTP authentication. Well, it doesn’t yet, as of version 0.3. The support is planned for 0.4, and I can see the code in the CVS. But it’s been over a year since the release of 0.3, and 3 months since the last visible update on 0.4 branch.

So, I set out for another alternative once again.

BottomFeeder

I couldn’t figure out how to configure proxy setting, which I need when I’m at work.

Awasu

It’s somewhat interesting looking, cool name, and even has an ability to swap the integrated browser for viewing pages within the program, although it’s not officially supported. The problem is, HTTP user authentication, etc are only enabled in professional version and up only. I wan a freeware, preferably an open source product.

Syndirella

This one was just still too poor in feature and UI etc.

NewsMonster

Finally something that’s integrated to Mozilla. The problem is, when I installed it on Firefox, it was ugly. This one is NOT for Firefox. It’s only for Mozilla and Netscape 7! Firefox users, stay away from this product!

I give up. I just can’t find the solution I can get happy with. For now, I’m going to stick with nntp//rss + Thunderbird. I got very acustomed to having RSSReader running all the time, but this needs to change now. Besides, now I have 2 programs in one – both email and rss in T-bird!

I have experimented with several aggregators since yesterday’s post. So, what did I find out? I found out that I don’t like all of my candidates.

Opera

pro: displays HTML news contents, does not require .NET or JAVA

con: clunky UI, in-line image not supported

FeedReader

pro: displays full HTML news contents, does not require .NET or JAVA, fast

con: Relies on MSIE engine

RSSOwl

pro: Runs on Java technology, good UI

con: no support for HTML contents, default HTML viewer is MSIE for windows version

comment: The default browser for unix/linux version is Mozilla. I don’t understand why they couldn’t do the same with windows version

So, I searched for alternatives.

I thought about using XSL to display contents as HTML. But using this method lacks the support for old/new item flag, which I really like on all of the above mentioned programs.

Then I thought about writing my own RSS parser in PHP. It wouldn’t be too hard. It’s not the fastest solution, but handling XML in PHP was pretty easy when I’ve tried it out in the past. (It was just recently that I found the power of building OOP-based library for handling XML in PHP, without use of DOMXML. Maybe I’ll mention that some other day.)

I tried out MyYahoo‘s RSS aggregation service, since I already use MyYahoo. The result wasn’t too pleasing.

Besides, surfing through all those RSS news using those web interface would be a bit clunky. I wouldn’t like it too well anyway.

I tried out nntp//rss. It’s RSS to NNTP (usenet protocol) gateway, written in Java. The idea is close to those of YahooPOPS and HotPOP – the POP3 simulators for Yahoo Mail and HotMail. Except it can be configured to subscribe multiple feeds (they are not targeted for 1 news source, thank goodness!), and uses NNTP to communicate with the client, not POP3. I really like how it works. Now I can use Mozilla Thunderbird to view the RSS news.

And here’s one more thing: while I was searching for all these program,s I also stumbled upon quickSub – a small javascript library that makes subscription to the news feed easier for many RSS programs, including RSS Bandit, SharpReader, and, of course, nntp//rss. Now, it’s time to go add this library to Froth-Bite’s release page.

…or aggregator, you might say.
http://www.winplanet.com/article/2432-.htm
As most of us know, MSIE is loaded with security holes. It’s not all too buggy, but it’s insecure. All the security experts nowadays warn against the use of IE. Well, IE isn’t a bad thing if you keep up with all the security patches, firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. But still, we’re still finding more security holes everyday. That scares me. So, I’ve been sticking with Mozilla based browsers – namely, Phoenix, Firebird, and now Firefox. (Or Firepanda, if you use Fireanything plug-in.)

That’s fine and dandy for the most part. But recently, I was thinking, it’s not too wise of idea to be using applications like RssReader, which is based on .NET framework (not too bad) and MSIE (bad bad bad).

Well, fine. So I’ll make a switch. There are plenty of non-.NET/MSIE based aggregators around. Yes, sure. But most of them are JAVA based. I don’t hate JAVA, especially as a user of Azureus. But, I was hoping to get Mozilla based RSS Reader. And so far, I’ve only found side-bar RSS reader plug-in, which isn’t powerful enough in my opinion.

Anyway, for now, my choices are RSS-Owl and Opera’s built-in RSS system. If anyone out there know of any good reader that you really recommend (especially if it’s something like Thunderbird add-on), then let me know. I’d be eager to try it out.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl…/japan_iraqi_boy

When the news these days are filled with crimes and people’s idiocity, it’s a good change to see a good news make it to the headline news once in a while. And I like what I read! (The article was the top headline news for “World News from AP Asia” section on MyYahoo for me this morning.)

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/local/9076360.htm

There are more people who are bored than I can imagine. I generally don’t like bitching, but sometimes, I can’t help. It’s clear that some people just can’t get the grasp of the bigger picture. And the cries from the officials speaking in this articles are not being heard by enough people. Why… why… why…