Monkey In The Jungle

fun quote ...

"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing." - Randy K. Milholland

My MacWorld '06 favorites.

1. Apple stock. It bumped $10 on the opening day, from $75 to $85. I hope it won't come down.

2. An iPod dock integrated with toilet paper holder. Guys are real geeks.

3. Demo of the game "Wingnuts 2" from Freeverse, which reminded me the time when we enjoyed "1942".

4. Comic Life from Freeverse. That's something you will never think of until you see it.

5. A volume rendering software which take high resolution CT data and assemble them into 3D space. It is way cooler than polygon rendering. Unfortunately I forgot the name.

6. Intel CPU based apple laptop, MacBook Pro. Looking forward to upgrading my powerbook. It is pricey thought.

7. 3D modeling tools from formZ.

"never do the same thing for too long."

I came cross a post talking about whether using computer for long hours will cause vision problem. One guy commented "It is always well-agreed upon that the best therapy is to never do the same thing for too long."

Well, another guy followed " I tried to tell that to my wife... She didn't talk to me for 2 days... that IS theraputic!". It's just funny.

Pike place market.

Two days ago, I went to Seattle downtown with friends, and spent an hour in Pike Place Market. It made me realize how much I miss place like this. News stand with all the papers and managzines that you can think of, used book store full of non-best-seller books, street singers singing sad tunes, and, of course, smelly fish market. I couldn't find any of these in Sunnyvale. I am bored. Sunnyvale is a town with no characters.

I stopped by a bookstore, whose name I don't remember, bought "Science as a process".

typepadbot-perl 0.1a is available for download.

This is the first working version of perl implementation. I hope this will help our non-Pro members.

typepadbot.sourceforge.net

After spending a whole day in my precious Christmas time, this project finally launched. typepadbot creates Google XML format sitemap for your TypePad blogs. typepadbot uses Atom API to communicate with the blog server, and asks for a list of every single entry in your blog. Since the returned data is in XML format, a XSLT transformation is used to convert returned data into Google sitemap format. Although this project is created for TypePad users, since Atom is a standard, it is very possible to use typepadbot on other blog services.

Typepad will hide your .xml files.

I don't why TypePad made such an odd decision, you can not see any .xml file you uploaded into file manager. I asked the tech support, and was told "The File Manager hides feed files so they're not deleted by mistake, which includes ones that are uploaded by you. This is why you can't see them."

Palm TX? Mac users should think twice.

Thanks Santa and my fiancee, I got a Palm TX for this christmas. However the joy of opening new package only lasted half an hour. Obviously, some of the function just does not work out of box. If you are a mac user, I strongly suggest you to think twice before you take out your credit card, because:

1. Lack of documentation for Mac. Most of manual, doc and online resource are for PC users.
2. Bluetooth does not work out of box. Of course, I don't expect zero configuration. But still not working after me playing with it for 4 hours?
3. Hotsync via Wifi does not work out of box.

If you already bought it, like me, and got frustrated. Do yourself a favor, buy Missing Sync for Palm OS, a small extra investment to save whole a lot hassle and time.

1. Since the software is particularly designed for Mac users, the documentation is much easier to follow. You won't see some instructions that don't apply to Mac at all.
2. I used to be a Missing Sync for PocketPC user. Seems to me, their support team is very responsive.
3. Bluetooth just simply works after I installed the software and followed the manual to set up.

It surprised me how much better a third party software compares to the original software that is supposed to provide the same functionality. I haven't try Hotsync via Wifi, but I expect it to work as well.

I have only one problem so far. Every time after a synchronization, even everything is fine, it always pop up a message saying there is an error. I guess nothing is perfect. Seeing an error message while everything is fine is better than seeing error messages and nothing works.

Update: The reason that the error message pops up is because I have conflicted conduits. Once I solved that, the message goes away.

Merry Christmas!

Being a foreigner puts me in an odd situation on Christmas, especially when Mia is back in China this year. Since I don't have family or any relative around, I guess I am one of the few people who don't need to go anywhere on Christmas.

I think Christmas is pretty much like Chinese New Year in China, a time for getting together, being happy, and getting drunk. It is kind of lonely to spend the whole holiday by myself. But it is not totally bad, at least I can get something done, otherwise I would be too busy to do. Go up to Seattle to visit a friend, finish my toy project and read the "Quick Silver".

It should be fine.

Curl + Atom API, seems we have something.

Ok, I am not being cheap. But I really think it's a ripoff for TypePad to provide sitemap only to Pro members. Feed is close, but not a complete sitemap. After poking around a couple of days, it seems I finally find a way: Atom API.

Here's a sample session using CURL to call Atom API:

 

curl -H "X-WSSE: UsernameToken Username="myusername", PasswordDigest="328GU3vlHOkdDpp69oZK6U1qn04=", Created="2005-12-23T02:11:56Z", Nonce="dGVzdDE="" http://www.typepad.com/t/atom/weblog/blog_id=271401

It returns:

<?xml version="1.0"encoding="utf-8"?><feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#"xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">   <link xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" type="text/html" rel="alternate" href="http://garbage-collector.typepad.com/google_sitemap_test/"/>   <title xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">Google Sitemap Test</title>   <id xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-271401</id>   <language xmlns="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">en_US</language>   <link xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" type="application/x.atom+xml" rel="service.post" href="http://www.typepad.com/t/atom/weblog/blog_id=271401" title="Google Sitemap Test"/>   <fullcount xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">1</fullcount>   <entry xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" xmlns:default="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:comment="http://sixapart.com/atom/comment#">     <title xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">This is dummy blog for me to play with the idea of using google sitemap.</title>     <summary xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#"/>     <content xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" mode="xml">       <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">         <p>I try to create google sitemap xml file using template.</p>       </div>     </content>     <issued xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">2005-12-20T15:41:58-08:00</issued>     <link xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" type="text/html" rel="alternate" href="http://garbage-collector.typepad.com/google_sitemap_test/2005/12/this_is_dummy_b.html" title="HTML"/>     <id xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">tag:typepad.com,2003:post-8017140</id>     <link xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" type="application/x.atom+xml" rel="service.edit" href="http://www.typepad.com/t/atom/weblog/blog_id=271401/entry_id=8017140" title="This is dummy blog for me to play with the idea of using google sitemap."/>     <link xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" xmlns:comment="http://sixapart.com/atom/comment#" rel="entry.comments" href="http://www.typepad.com/t/atom/comments/blog_id=271401/entry_id=8017140" type="application/x.atom+xml" title="Comments" comment:count="0"/>   </entry> </feed>

There is only one post on my test blog. However, I am pretty sure it will list every single post with its link.