Graceful Exits

When OPML is OPML but it isn’t OPML

I’ve built something, just in time for me to crowbar it awkwardly into conversations at OKCon.
Matthew Somerville is well known for his accessible takes on rubbish websites: most useful is Traintimes, a layer on top of one of the equally poor commercial British rail sites; most notorious is Accessible Odeon, a fixing of the Odeon [...]

One of my resolutions this year is to try to cut down on the carbon I spend on music. Notwithstanding my purchase of the In Rainbows discbox, I’ve amassed an awful number of discs of metallized plastic in barely-recyclable containers. (I say “barely” because K. got me a pencil for Christmas made out of old [...]

Flickr is working with the Library of Congress on new project The Commons. Currently there are around three thousand photographs up there from two collections, and according to the Commons homepage they’re all copyright-free. More information in the relevant post on the Flickr blog.
This is wonderful news, especially because the collection is being released through [...]

There’s currently no plan to switch off FM stations. In fact, many radio bosses have said oh, for heaven’s sake to the very idea. There is, astonishingly, less of a plan for radio switchover than there is desire among the general public for TV switchover. So that must be some sort of record for nothingness.
Seriously: [...]

Creating your own arrows in OpenOffice (.org, 2.0) is a pain. There’s tutorials out there that claim to show how to create arrows from OOo diagrams, but I’ve not had much success with those. However, by taking apart an existing arrow, I’ve managed to work out the rather nasty syntax
OOo arrow libraries are suffixed .soe, [...]

Mark Mandel wrote his own version of Coldfusion’s XmlTransform() function, using the underlying Java transform classes. Although one of his annoyances—that XmlTransform() won’t take any parameters—has been solved in CFMX7, XmlTransform() is nonetheless a slow operation, as the transform engine has to be cranked up, the XSL compiled, the transform effected and then everything garbage-collected, [...]

It’s one of the worst-kept tech secrets in the world, but Real Audio streams can be downloaded using software such as mplayer and then converted to MP3 format with lame. Both of these are available in Ubuntu using the non-Ubuntu package manager Automatix. The possibility of doing this conversion implies that, although the BBC offer [...]

A busy few weeks, but they’ve included an import from a Blosxom blog to a WordPress blog which is worth describing. There are a couple of established methods for importing the data, and I opted for the one that seemed the most modular. This was Eric Davis’ Import-Blosxom method, consisting of a PHP script on [...]

Now I know the title sounds presumptuous, but there’s a certain methodology I’ve settled into that seems to work really well for encouraging Javascript that’s legible and safe. I thought I’d share it with anyone that doesn’t consider themselves a JS playa, in case it’s of some use to you too.
Most Javascript libraries these [...]