Quote: Dexit Inc. announced today that it has filed a preliminary prospectus with the securities regulatory authorities in each of the provinces of Canada, in connection with an initial public offering of its common shares.

Globe: Electronic payment service Dexit Inc. plans to raise up to $40-million with an initial public offering as it builds the network that promises to make it that much easier to buy a coffee and doughnut.

Randy: Wow!

Financials: Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2003 - $1,990

Randy: My consulting company, Rapid Spiral, had 20x their revenues. Maybe I can IPO for nearly a billion $.

Cory: My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, has been shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, a juried prize that goes to the best Canadian science fiction book each year. I am pleased as PUNCH.

Randy: Congrats! What's a book?

lydgate: I have been slowly searching around for the best RSS feed reader lately.

Randy: Some RSS reader reviews.

I think people are spending too much effort trying to overload URIs. Efforts that try to bring meaning to URIs are often breaking the true intent of the URI. The true intent of the URI is an identifier (the I in URI).

1. Kludging titles into the URI only serves to break the URI. When you change the title, does the URI change?
2. Alternate URI schemes like feed: and tag: are confusing and don't work universally.

iM currently experimenting w/ hiding the address bar. Trying to read URIs is a pointless task of the geek. Mundane users don't read URIs, they read the REAL page title and the REAL page content. Mundane users click on URIs.

Look at my URIs.

http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/?guid=20040530082754

Short and programmatically concise. I also like Oleg's URIs.

http://www.olegdulin.com/index.php?p=357&c=1

Unfortunately, he has indicated that he wants to put the title in the URI. Arggg! iM trying to dissuade him.

Last, Oleg's finance, Anna has a blog and Oleg and Anna have a invitation only wedding blog.

Quote:

1. Take any issue you want to consider. E.g: your relationship with your kids or partner; your relationships at work; your project; your time; your stress -- ANYTHING.
2. Now create a sentence stem that focuses on your issue. E.g. If I want to improve my time effectiveness by 5% I must...
3. Then complete the sentence between 6-10 times. Don't get fixed too long trying to say the right thing, if in doubt, invent - just make sure the ending is grammatically correct.

Randy: A technique worth a go.

XML Dude: Until this weekend I’d never heard of “Purple Numbers” but they’ve been across the radar twice in the last day, first in some commentary by Chris Dent on the Atom-Identifier issue, then again over at Jonas Luster’s place. First I thought, why not? Then, why numbers? The purple-numbers idea seems rooted here, where its description as “a makeshift solution to a relatively simple problem” immediately gave me a warm glow, because so is the Web.

Randy: Hmmm! Lot's of work, but I might actually try this.

Quote: Examine the new security features in Windows XP SP2 that affect Internet Explorer and ActiveX controls, file downloads, pop-up windows, and more.

Randy: And Microsoft begins to break the Web. Thanks!

Broken! I tried to login w/ my usually credentials. I've posted for years w/ Google Groups and previously w/ DejaNews, but today it would not let me login. Not only did the login fail, but when I clicked "Forgot your password" to try and reactivate my account, I never get the activation email.

More trouble in Google-land.

I just read on another blog about a potential threat to the American government. It seems that an organization, intent on overthrowing the Bush government, will meet in Boston in late July. The secret service is aware of the meeting and will be present, an attempt to bring normalcy to the situation. The plan is to overthrow the Bush government before the end-of-year and take control of the U.S. early next year. I have confirmed this to be truth, as one of the leaders of the organizations is a Okut friend of mine. I hope they succeed.

I think I finally resolved the duplicate GUID and disappearing post problem. The new VPN software I installed has some sort-of proxy caching mechanism, that did not obey my cache controls. I upgraded the CacheControls to use SetCacheability. Seems to work better now.

I also added...

• Auto-discovery of the comments related to each blog post
• Individual ETags to each post in a vain attempt to reduce my bandwidth problem. Looks like I'll break 10 gigabytes next month :(
• Remove an XML namespace declaration that wasn't valid or used
• Added XML encoding to RSS files

Email me if you notice a caching problem.

Quote: Earlier this week Attorney General John Ashcroft warned of an attack planned on America for sometime in the coming months. That may happen, but NBC News has learned one of Ashcroft’s sources is highly suspect.

Source: Rantz Dude.

XML Dude: The Problem With “tag:” [is] that URI scheme hasn’t been registered, and in fact may not be; the IETF URI scheme registration process is widely viewed as dysfunctional. The use of unregistered schemes is officially frowned on; the reasons may not concern you, but before you take this leap, you might want to check them out. [cut] I’m not the only one who thinks that changing permalinks is a bad idea; it breaks caches and bookmarks and PageRanks and generally sucks.[cut] So, if you’ve got software that isn’t broken, and you have some commitment to making the Web work better, go ahead and use your URIs as ID’s.

Randy: Tim is bringing sanity to Atom by removing all the Cute Programming ideals and replacing them w/ solid, simple and long lived ideals. Eh!

You are blue collar and Rock n Roll. You Work hard and party harder.

My hits these last few days are four times higher than my hits just last month. My comments feed is not long enough to include all the comments of the last 24 hours. It's amazing how talking about crap will get you more hits than you can imagine. A lot of my hits are coming from my crappiest posts. My top search engine search strings are quite revealing...

1. flamesgirls.com
2. hipster.com
3. flamesgirls
4. "flamesgirls.+com"
5. base64 encoding
6. Perezhogin
7. perezhogin
8. ping icmp
9. sleep c++
10. buggatti
11. base 64
12. sexphoto
13. c++ sleep
14. microsoft netmon
15. java/byteverify.trojan
16. std::string replace
17. FLAMESGIRLS.COM
18. c++ ado
19. im feeling lucky
20. randy charles morin

Yes, my new found popularity comes from writing Google-friendly girl-crazy Webpages. Who'd a thought sex sells? Maybe I should start a porn site.

Thanks for reading or at least viewing the pics!

I recently was introduced to AtomEquivalents, which attempts to map Atom elements to similar Dublin Core elements. Unfortunately while reading this, I realized that many were perceived as equivalents, but in fact, are not content type equivalent. I'll present my findings in this post.

• atom:person/name and foaf:name - ok
• atom:person/url and foaf:homepage - ok
• atom:person/email and foaf:mbox - ok
• atom:link/@title and dc:title - attribute in atom, element in Dublin Core
• atom:feed/title and dc:title - content types differ
• atom:feed/author and dc:creator - content types differ
• atom:feed/contributor and dc:contributor - content types differ
• atom:feed/tagline and dc:description - content types differ
• atom:feed/id and dc:identifier - ok
• atom:feed/copyright and dc:rights - ok
• atom:feed/info and dc:description - content types differ
• atom:feed/modified and dcterms:modified - must be UTC in atom
• atom:entry/title and dc:title - content types differ
• atom:entry/link and dc:relation - content types differ
• atom:entry/author and dc:creator - content types differ
• atom:entry/contributor and dc:contributor  - content types differ
• atom:entry/id and dc:identifier - ok
• atom:entry/modified and dcterms: modified - ok
• atom:entry/issued and dcterms:issued - ok
• atom:entry/created and dcterms:created - ok
• atom:entry/summary and dcterms:abstract - content types differ

More than half enumerated are not content type equivalent.

First read this. Then read this.

In the first post, I refer to Blogger Dude, a ranking developer employed by Google saying, "Holy crap! How can they tell it's bulk email? Yahoo, via the help of this so-called "automatic filter" is reading your messages!"

In the second post, Google admits to doing the same and more.

The Ultimate Biz Hypocracy! Scaring consumers from using the competitor's product, while you are doing the same and worse.

Atom Dude: Meanwhile, you can help by spreading the word.  The word is détente.  RSS 1.0 has a reason to exist.  RSS 2.0 has a reason to exist.  And Atom has a reason to exist. And if anybody tells you differently, and won't listen when you suggest détente, take Brent's suggestion and make use of the handy Unsubscribe button.  That's what it is there for.

Randy: I don't think shutting-out stubborn and contrarian voices is the right answer. Not stubborn nor contrarian infer wrongness.

Atom Dude: I still feel strongly that RSS 0.94 should build upon a four year old standard instead of reinventing the wheel.

Randy: Does Atom use a four year old standard or did Atom reinvent the wheel?

Last, how does the French accent look in your aggregator?

Oil Dude: I have been getting this message for a week. Problem is, it will not work. The reason for that is that people will be filling up the day before or the day after. Consequently, this will not affect volume (sales).

What people fail to understand is as long as they keep driving around for no apparent reason they will keep consuming high volumes of fuel.What they have to is quit driving for nothing and/or take public transportation.If they are that concerned they could also quit buying gas-guzzlers.

Also, they are blaming the wrong parties. Oil companies are selling a product that is in high demand. because that is their business.The pricing at the pump is dictated by the cost of crude, additives and the regulations set by the different governments (this is being done for our health and safety). So, if people can reduce the demand, the suppliers of crude oil will have to adjust their price accordingly to maintain their income.You have to remember that the large suppliers are countries that have no other resources.

What bothers me is why people are so concerned about the price of fuel? Why not the price of bottled water which is produced at a fraction of the cost! Actually, I drink water from my tap which is not only cheaper but probably safer. There are more regulations on the manufacture of fuels than there are on bottled water; also more on your tap water than bottled.

Believe it or not, oil companies make approximately one to two cents per litre after all expenses. It's the volume that gives them the large profits. I have spent my working career in the oil business and I can tell you that the high cost does not even affect volume. What does that tell you? People are quick to bitch about it, but will not sacrifice! If you take a look at most other produts we buy, their cost has gone up more than petroleum products.

Some environmentalists say that the higher cost of petrol is good because people will buy less and help save our environment. 'I would bet against that anytime, and win everytime!' How do you like my last quote. Not bad for an old 'Cobalter', hey!

Randy: Hey, iM from Cobalt too. Maybe I know this guy.

Quote: I have received rejections from an unusually large number of exceptionally well qualified organizations. With such a varied and promising spectrum of rejections from which to select, it is impossible for me to consider them all. After careful deliberation, then, and because a number of firms have found me more unsuitable, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your rejection.

Randy: A fun read.

Pretty awesome. Until this morning, I thought Yahoo! MSGer was second rate compared w/ MSN MSGer. No longer!

Update: Code Dude and myself have been IMing back and forth today. Consensus is that Yahoo! MSGer is rad. Too bad everybody uses MSN MSGer.

W Dudes: The RNC today sent a new web video to more than 700,000 Team Leaders, pointing out that John Kerry has a few things in common with the cicadas.

Source: Code Dude.

Randy: Can the Feed Validator be made to spit out a warning if the page pointed to by the channel-level link does not contain an auto-discoverable link that points back to the feed?

Sam: Can it be done? Certainly. At the moment, I don"t think that there is consensus in the RSS community that an auto-discoverable link is a good thing.  In fact, I would be willing to state that there is outright division on this. I think that this is less controversial in the Atom community.  Once  there is some documentation (a PACE would do), I would be willing to incorporate it into the validator.

Randy: I created a PACE on the Wiki. I have to put a little polish on it. Further, who needs to say 'Yeah', to get this into the feed validator for RSS files? I assume the answer is the RSS Advisory Board.

Quote: Film documentary "Super Size Me," a critical look at the health impact of a fast-food only diet, has been downsized at cable network MTV which has refused to air advertisements for the film, its distributors said on Wednesday. [cut] "Super Size Me" has been a hit at box offices, and it earned Spurlock the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary director at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The film began playing in theaters about two weeks ago and rose to No. 10 on domestic theater box office charts this past week. It has grossed $2.9 million in ticket sales -- a hit for a documentary -- and last weekend scored a per screen average of $6,759, just behind No. 2 film "Troy" with $7,014.

Quote: While PHP 4 was the first version to offer Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) capabilities, many considered the feature to be poorly designed and more an afterthought than anything else. PHP 5 resolves many of the version 4 OOP inconsistencies, not to mention greatly enhances the language's object-oriented capabilities.

Randy: Welcome 2 the 90s. This article must be very embarrassing to the LAMP crew.

iM thinking about releasing my Weblog software under this license. In particular, the Attribution-NonCommerical CC license. Thoughts?

Update: Enforcement.

Randy: Scoble, how come you don't do autodisco? A Radio limitation?

Scoble: Is this something that needs to be done server-side?

I pointed him here. He thinks he can do that. When he does, I'll feel a great amount of accomplishment. Now my feed reader will automagically subscribe to him.

Cost of Sex = $332

Twister Dude: A friend pointed me to a soon-to-be-launched online dating service that uses MSN Messenger as it's core platform for deployment. This new service, LemonTonic, is truly interesting in many different regards.

There is a new virus. The code name is "WORK". If you receive WORK from your colleagues, your boss, via e-mail, or from anyone else-do not touch WORK under any circumstances.. This virus wipes out your private life completely. If you should happen to come in contact with this virus,take two friends and go straight to the nearest bar. Order drinks and after three rounds, you will find that WORK has been completely deleted from your brain. Forward this virus warning immediately to at least five friends. Should you realize you do not have five friends, this means you are already infected by this virus and WORK already controls your whole life. If this is the case, go to the bar and stay until you make at least 5 friends.

Source: Dad.

"Yes, the web is like radio and cb," Dave replied. "But it is also like a front porch. I might put a few flower pots on the porch, a couple of chairs, a BBQ, a swing, decorations that say something about me, and perhaps invite other people in. Imagine if you could visit my front porch and find pointers to all my friends' porches."

Randy: Vision.

This is beginning to look like another Microsoft success story. Currently, Source Safe is inadequate. Issue tracking is neglected. Watch out CVS, Bugzilla and Rational ClearX.

Update: Anybody know if this includes the next version of Source Safe or an issue tracking component?

Scobleizer: Why can't you all use the XML icon?

Goodness Dude: If your aggregator can't handle it, throw it out and get a new one. If your publishing software can't handle serving it, join the rest of us here in the 21st century and get some software that does.

Randy: Why not do both? Scoble, how come you don't do autodisco? A Radio limitation?

Quote: This week, the gossip Web site wonkette.com [editors note: a Gawker media publication], a sassy, often raunchy web log popular among Washington insiders, highlighted another Web log, or blog, supposedly written by a Capitol Hill staffer. The author, calling herself "the Washingtonienne," wrote that she is a staff assistant in a Senate office and detailed her sexual relationships, which include, she said, getting paid to have sex with older men including a married "Chief of Staff at one of the gov agencies."

Source: HumbleOpinion.

iM investigating using a .NET Obfuscator. Any references would be welcomed. Thanks!

Quote: Junk mail now accounts for nearly 70% of e-mails worldwide, according to filtering firm MessageLabs.

Randy: If you count mailing lists, then this figure is a lot higher. I generally avoid mailing lists that send me individual emails for each post. It adds to the 70% clutter. Of course, I hate SPAM period. Yahoo! mail has done a great job of filtering out the SPAM, unfortunately iM added (w/out consent) to several mailing lists per week and the clutter continues.

1. Why do Americans sell gas in gallons instead of liters?
2. Why do Americans use miles instead of kilometers?
3. Why do people think eXtreme Programming means programming w/out processes?
4. Why do people continue to develop software w/out processes?
5. Why do organizations continue to accidently create open SMTP relay nodes?
6. Why do organizations create unmodereated (unmonitored) mailing lists, subscribe you automagically and you can't unsubscribe?
7. Why does Google have 44 HTML errors on their 13 lines of HTML code that is their homepage?
8. Why does Buffalo have really badly constructed and maintained highways?
9. Why does Buffalo get such bad weather, all-the-time?
10. Why do people smoke in front of my children and even theirs?

• I left Brampton at 6PM and arrived at Six Flags before 9PM, which included a one half hour wait at the border.
• My son went to the Batman show three times. The Batman theatre was cold and the show was extremely loud. The Joker scared my son after the show. My son loved it.
• Even though the weather was wet, we spent most of Sunday at a water ride (wave pool).
• Four trips on the carousel, two on the ferris wheel. The ferris wheel is 185 ft high (highest I've ever been on) and was acquired from the 1959 World's Fair.
• The weather was wet and we even survived a major thunder storm that tore the supports of my awning. The awning survived as I quickly packed it up in the middle of the storm when the supports broke.
• The campground is second rate. Our site was a grass lot, no trees. No recycling. Firepit was simply a hole in the ground and was flooded out by the rain. Thirty minute wait to register on arrival, even though we were pre-registered.
• The park is much smaller than Canada's Wonderland. The water rides are adequate. The roller coaster are tops, as is the ferris wheel.
• My wife spent at least $100 USD on merchandise for the kids; Batman cup and plate. Batman doll. Batman backpack. Power Puff Girl diary. Power Puff Girl doll (Blossom). And more.
• This is definately a teenager, young adult oriented park. Not geared to families, although they do have a few kid rides.
• Smoking is allowed throughout the park, which is a big disappointment. Remember, iM a smoker. I had one cigarette during the entire weekend. I don't smoke around my children and don't like when other people do either.
• On the way back, we stopped for some shopping in the Niagara Falls U.S. (Military Rd.). The lineup at the border was over an hour. And iM home now.
• Price is fair. $300 CDN (after tax) for upto six campers for the long weekend. Includes park admission.
• Overall. I love camping and enjoyed myself despite Six Flags. We'll go again, but only because my son loves the Batman show.

No blogging till Monday evening/night.

Blogger Dude: I've actually been using "RSS" as a generic term internally because for a lot of people, it's exactly what you said: That's what you hear about.

Randy: Atom is a flavor of RSS? Hmmm!

Update: From here-forth, I will refer to Atom as another fork of RSS or AFOR. If u do the same, then feel free to link back to this post. Like this, AFOR.

4 the guys.

M$FT Dude: Another new phenomenon [cut] that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS.

RSS Dude: Anyway, Apple decided to compete with our scripting system, and began by creating a clone of our interapplication communication toolkit. They were having a big sales meeting in Hawaii to demo the new stuff, but sadly it wasn't ready. So our friends at Claris demo'd our software, and told everyone it was Apple's.

Randy: It's stories like these that make the blogosphere what it is (great). I encourage you to read the whole story, it's only a few paragraphs.

Patent Dude: Professor Bigus argues that the clear milestones provided by patent law allow for a better relationship between investor and innovator.

Randy: Patents have perceived (not real) value. It feels more comfortable to invest in this perceived value, than to invest in an idea (also perceived value) and nothing else.

Often, the most difficult people to work w/ are people who spend all their time pretending to work. Instead of actually doing real work, these people will spend equivalent effort to make it look like they are working, w/out actually really doing any work. They can often fool most everybody and I've been fooled for months and sometimes over a year by such people. But after a few months (sometimes a year), if you remain fooled by them, then you are the fool.

For instance, I had one co-worker who fooled me for quite some time. We had a weekly status meeting. This person would screw around all week, but the day of the status meeting and sometimes the day before, he'd put on a show to make it look like he was actually trying. I think he actually use to fool himself into thinking he was trying also.

The thing I don't understand is why you'd spend effort to pretend to work, instead of spending that equivalent effort doing actual work.

Quote: In the latest twist in SCO's closely-watched $5 billion lawsuit against IBM, the Free Software Foundation has said it does not plan to turn over certain internal documents and communications with key open-source proponents, as SCO had asked in a subpoena.

Randy: This isn't rocket science, it's code. If they copied the code or not, then it would be obvious either way. The American legal system has failed.

Tanenbaum refutes the whole idea that Torvald's Linux is a Minix copy cat crime. This should put an end to the speculation and if it doesn't then...

My morning coffee is brewing, can you smell it?

Quote: I've been working with a lot of XSLT recently related to our BLDoc project. In the case of one of the translations, I had a need to create a resulting document that used only empty XML elements, such as:

<element />

Randy: I struggled w/ this one and thanks to Quark Dude, I have a solution.

Quote: Email spoofing - the forging of another person's or company's email address to get users to trust and open a message - is one of the biggest challenges facing both the Internet community and anti-spam technologists today. [cut] DomainKeys is a technology proposal that can bring black and white back to this decision process by giving email providers a mechanism for verifying both the domain of each email sender and the integrity of the messages sent (i.e,. that they were not altered during transit).

Quote: based on "extensive interviews with more than two dozen leading technologists including Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie and Andrew Tanenbaum."

Tanenbaum is the interesting reference. Tanenbaum wrote a book on Operating Systems that contained the entire source of the Minix OS. It is well known that Torvald used Minix as a base for writing Linux. In fact, the first versions of Linux were compiled using Minix. It has been suggested that Linus copied a lot of the Minix kernel. I can't validate that either way, iM not familiar w/ the code. But, the copy behavior would validate SCOs concerns.

My latest posts just disappeared. Hmmm!

• #developer
• Google's corporate statement

I'll repost later and investigate.

Update: iM testing a new blogging client this morning. I'll check the Weblogs after work to figure out how the XML-RPC went haywire. I suspect it's the software or my Blogger/MetaWeblogAPI implementation.

Update: Last night I installed some new crappy VPN software that didn't behave very well. I wonder if it could be the culprit?

Update: Looks like the VPN software is at fault. It has some kind of caching thing, which caused the server to respond w/ a cached guid.

MVP Dude: It's for all the marbles. I'm sitting in the house loading up the pump, I'm loading up the Uzis, I've got a couple of M-16s, couple of nines, couple of joints with some silencers on them, couple of grenades, got a missile launcher. I'm ready for war.

Randy: Hmmm! Not exactly the worst thing anybody has ever said. It's amazing how we love to knock people off of the pedestals we've made for them. MVP Dude out-classed us all by apologizing for nothing.

Source: RSS Dude.

Lately, I wrote one of the Atom chief's about my concerns w/ Atom. He told me that I should come to the meetings and voice this opinion in forum. Otherwise, I will be ignored. Great, I live thousands of miles away from the meeting place and my posts on the mailing list are ignored because I'm not part of the Atom inner-circle. Tell me again, that Atom is an open standard. I guess it's open to the inner-circle.

I've been using Yahoo! Mail for over a month now. It's amazing. I didn't setup any personal SPAM filters, I just use the Yahoo! default SPAM filter. At first, CBS Marketwatch SPAM was sneaking thru the Yahoo! filter, but after a month of reporting it as SPAM, Yahoo! agrees.

Actually, I have one personal filter. I get a lot of virusalerts (dozens sometimes hundreds daily) from my emailSP. For every individual virus, I get that email, which Yahoo! kindly and immediately sends to the Trash. Thanks!

• The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself.
• Use a JScript command in Internet Explorer. In the Address bar, type the following command, and then press ENTER: javascript:alert("Actual URL address: " + location.protocol + "//" + location.hostname + "/");

CodeGen Dude suggests that a better workaround is using Moz.

Originally, I posted this on my b-links blogs, but then I realized it must be shared w/ the greater world (all two-dozen of my readers). Mom and Dad, please avert your eyes. Everybody else may look.

Source: View Dude.

Randy: Stuck in the middle. Not really, most CDNians would fall on the left of the chart. For a CDNian, iM quite right-wing conservative.

Sources: CodeGen Dude and Jax Dude.

According to this bulletin, many sympatico users cannot use their email address to acquire a .NET Passport. The error you get when registering is very ambiguous.

The portion of your e-mail address that follows the @ symbol is part of a "reserved domain" such as hotmail.com, msn.com or passport.com. Please type a different e-mail address.

Very confusing to end-users. Good job M$FT.

Some weird stuff reguarding the Nick Berg incident...

• http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000233.html
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/15/22827/0477

Hard to say that the evidence is compelling, but it is believable. And the whole story, however told, is unbelievable.

Update: Here's the video.

I think one thing I do extremely well is picking my friends. I've always avoided people who backstab other friends, because I know they will eventually backstab me. On many occasions, I've given up on friends because of the way they treated other people. I'm not saying that you have to be like Jim, although many of my friends are like Jim. I'm saying that if you are like Joe, then you are not my friend.

On the other hand, I've had many acquaintances who had friends like Joe. I could never understand why they continued that friendship, which caused them no end of grief. But they continued to protect their friend who is like Joe. These protective friends, are often more like Jim, than Jack.

FOAF Dude: Atomic fusion is the aim, not fission.

Randy: Most RDFers including FOAF Dude have previously told me they view the future as having two syndication formats; Atom and RDF. That's not fusion. That's fission.

Goalies

• Brodeur - Obviously the best goalie in hockey.
• Luongo - Won gold last two season @ World Championships.
• Belfour - Did the third goalie well @ the Olympics.

D-men

• Blake - A lock.
• Brewer - Huh? Derek Morris.
• Foote - A lock.
• Jovocop - A lock.
• Niedermayer - A lock.
• Pronger - A lock.
• Redden - This is our best new addition on D.
• Regehr - Huh? Jay Bouwmeester.

Forwards

• Doan - Gretzky's player. He likely wouldn't have made the team if it weren't that he played for Gretzky's team. I don't mind the pick, but there was better.
• Draper - I like this pick. A great role player.
• Gagne - Gagne is fringe. I don't mind the pick, but there was better.
• Heatley - A lock.
• Iginla - A lock.
• Lemieux - A lock.
• Maltby - I like this pick. A great role player.
• Marleau - A good fringe pick and I agree w/ it totally.
• Morrow - Huh? Keith Primeau.
• Richards - Huh? Vincent Lecavalier.
• Sakic - A lock.
• Smyth - A lock, especially w/ his previous international experiences.
• St Louis - This is the guy who has to show up offensively in the big games.
• Thornton - A lock.
• Yzerman - Eye? Alex Tanguay.

Drop your chintzy attitude and write a cheque 4 $70 to Six Apart. Ah, u have multiple blogs, it'll cost more. I guess Ben and Mena are finding out who was their real friends and who was just using them in the gambit.

Free software is killing innovation. It doesn't pay well anymore. The entrepreneurs are moving to a more profitable arena, because software developers are screwing themselves w/ ideological crapulence. It's simple macro-economics. If somebody gives away free beer, then brewing becomes less profitable. Layoffs. Bankruptcies. Sound familiar? Sounds like the last 3 years in Silicon Valley.

"What needs to change in Atom, that would change my opinion and make me an Atomite?"

The answer is two-phase...

1. Re-use elements of RSS 1.0, Dublin Core and RSS 2.0 where applicable. Don't re-invent element names and element types when sufficient prior art is already available for re-use.
2. Full Web Services Interoperability compliance.

Doesn't seem like much to ask, but Atomites seem more interested in re-inventing the wheel.

Update: When I raised the WS-I basic profile w/ an Atomite, he thought that the issue had not come up for discussion.

Thing Dude: msn2foaf is a Perl botlet which logs onto your MSN Messenger account and outputs your contact list as friend-of-a-friend RDF/XML data.

Zimmer Dude: Google recommends the AmphetaDesk feed reader (see the "Feeds page", e.g http://groups-beta.google.com/group/GRRM/feeds\) but AD doesn't support Atom! Morbus Iff has no idea why Google singled out AmphetaDesk in this fashion.

Randy: Ouch! I pulled a muscle laughing too hard.

New RSS Dude: I continue to hear from well-wishers about my invitation to join the RSS Advisory Board.

Mark Pilgrim:

entire puppet government of RSS resigns in protest new puppet government quickly installed

Shelley Powers:

For those of you who subscribe to my feeds, note that I'm dropping the RSS 2.0 feed starting next week.

Why? Because hosting an RSS 2.0 feed is providing indirect support for behavior that sucks the joy out of my day. Because Dave Winer is a hypocrite, and the so-called RSS 2.0 'advisory board' is a mockery on true open standards efforts. More importantly, though, when I woke this morning, I said to myself:

Today is a good day to stop supporting assholes.

Starting next week, I'm boycotting deodorant.

Randy: Funny!

Goodness Dude: It really is impossible to do any sort of work that requires concentration when a nine-man team is outside your window, reducing trees to their component molecules.

It was my Dad's birthday. And guess what? It's his birthday today again this year.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Quote: There are several reasons why we aren't implementing XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0.

Randy: Thanks for screwing us again.

W3C: The W3C agrees that Atom is an important developing application. We feel that its specific relevance to the Web, however, indicates that it may find more success in a standards setting organization with work in similar areas. Due to its close relationship to the range of Web-based technologies, we suggest that the Atom community propose to do this work in the W3C.

Randy: This is becoming more of a popularity contest, then a technical exercise.

Update: The more I think about this, the more iM sickened. Here the W3C is talking about moving RDF forward, yet they are moving onto the back of Atom, which is a competing format to RDF Site Summary. Just great! More specifications and no standards. Atom does not respect prior art, that is, it doesn't move the standards process forward, it moves it back to the starting line.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/USENETGROUP/feed/topics.xml
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/USENETGROUP/feed/msgs.xml

where USENETGROUP is something like 'comp.arch'.

Randy: Now you can read USENET SPAM from any Atom capable news reader.

Source.

Rogers Cadenhead: I never get a chance to scoop Scripting News, so I'm going to jump the gun with this announcement: I've accepted an invitation to join the RSS 2.0 Advisory Board, the group that evangelizes the RSS 2.0 specification.

Randy: Awesome choice!

Quote: "Last time I looked, he's wearing a suit back there, the same type of suit I'm wearing," Tortorella said. "He's not in the battle. There are two quality teams here. He should shut his yap. It's not about him. It's about two quality teams."

"We understand how Philly works as far as the dialogue that goes on with all this stuff here, but when it comes to a coach to an opposing player, it's disrespectful and it's wrong. That's got to stop. Park your ego. Shove it in your pocket."

WiX Dude: We are now successfully using WiX to make MSIs as part of our automated build process. Currently the MSIs are nothing fancy and have no custom actions. They look and act exactly like the MSIs that Visual Studio .NET produce. Following are the steps I followed. I'm sure there are better ways to accomplish this, but it's working for now, and maybe putting this recipe out there will encourage someone else to try playing with WiX, or to share how they are using it.

Randy: WiX Dude is doing some interesting things w/ WiX. This is a great read for anybody trying to use WiX for more than a trivial installer.

Quote: A Tampa Bay Lightning promotion that offers unlimited free beer to people who agree to buy season tickets is drawing the ire of safe-driving advocates.

Randy: iM considering a move to Tampa.

The project you are trying to open is a Web Project. You need to open it by specifying its URL path.

Knowing what a nightmare SourceSafe problems are, I set out to find a fix. Here's how I went about it:

1. Went to the IIS MMC snap-in and enabled Directory browsing.
2. Launched VS.NET and went to File | Open | Project from the web...
3. Typed in the project URL, and once the Open Project dialog popped up selected the .csproj file. Now pay attention: not the .sln file!

Recap: The Calgary Flames are heading back to Calgary with a 2-0 stranglehold on the Western Conference Final after defeating the San Jose Sharks 4-1 here on Tuesday. The line of Marcus Nilson, Shean Donovan and Ville Nieminen all scored for Calgary in the victory.  "That line was good tonight. They were all good," said GM/coach Darryl Sutter.

Randy: The Flames have won 10 playoff games, w/ only 6 left to complete the miracle. Mind you, most cinderalli teams fold in the finals (i.e. Ducks, Hurricane, Sabres, Capitals, Panthers, Canuks, Kings, etc.).

SPAM over GMail Dude: How long does it take to fill up 1 Gig of storage with spam? How well do Gmail's junk filters work? Let's find out! Spam my shiny new G-mail account at prattboy@gmail.com Give my address to spammers, newsletters, annoying people, whatever, and let's see how long it takes!

Randy: Le funny! This person needs help. Please give their GMail address to all the great SPAMmers. Don't forget a CBS Marketwatch account. Some believe HTML over HTTP over TCP over IP is the protocol stack of the Web. This Dude has realized that SPAM over SMTP over TCP over IP is bigger than ever.

Quote: Frank Quattrone, a star investment banker during the Internet stock bubble, was convicted Monday of obstructing justice by sending a 22-word e-mail encouraging colleagues to destroy files.

Randy: As one of the only 724 x-employees (non-executives) to actually profit off of Frank, I owe him a big thank you.

GMail doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor for composing emails.

I've determined that anybody who says GMail is good, must be coming from the Outlook thick-client world. If you don't know, Outlook has a Web client that kicks GMail's ass half way round the world and back. It even does task tray notifications when you get new mail. And I think Outlook Webmail sucks compared to Yahoo! Mail. You bandwagon jumpers are nuts. Google must be good right? No GMail sucks! Big time!

I'm going to use my blogger account for B-links.

The images of abuse in a U.S. run Iraqi prison couldn't be more disturbing.

Disturbing too is that Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense knew about this and didn't take immediate action and didn't even inform the leaders in Congress. John Kerry has called for Donald Rumsfeld to resign -- and the Kerry Campaign is asking us to show support for his decision by endorsing his statement here:

http://johnkerry.com/petition/rumsfeld.php

I did -- and you should too.

Randy: Do you think they care if iM not American?

Source: Ernie Eves.

Note the link in the source. It's a google search for Ernie Eves and it lands you on Dalton McGuinty's homepage :)

Congrats to Oleg Dulin for graduating w/ a Masters in Comp Sci. He's wondering what TODO in his newly gained spare time, otherwise spent studying. Here's some suggestions...

1. Rating girls on Hot or Not.
2. Write a new syndication XML format. But do more than just rename the current RSS tags.
3. Write a yet another Webmail client and offer 1 gigabyte of storage while offering little more than the ability to read and search email.
4. Write a function that takes a persons FOAF URL w/ embedded mbox_sha1sum and outputs their email address. SPAMmers would pay $$$.
5. Figure out how to stop SPAM.

I remember using a bread rack in place of a server rack. We had to place tissue under some of the servers to give them adequate support. A mediocre server rack was around the same price (give or take a twenty) as the bread rack.  The bread rack use to sway back and forth. I was anticipating that it would topple over someday, hopefully not on top of someone. Anyone wanna guess how successful the company is today? ... S'not!

Can u c the potential of this new script?

Set objFirewall = CreateObject("HNetCfg.FwMgr")
Set objPolicy = objFirewall.LocalPolicy.CurrentProfile
objPolicy.FirewallEnabled = FALSE

Windows XP SP2 has a built-in firewall (previous called Internet Connection Firewall) that can be torn down w/ script. I wouldn't be replacing your old software w/ this new paper thin firewall :)

Is a great time killer.

I finally got a GMail account. I logged into my Blogger account and it asked if I wanted a GMail account. Now I have one. My GMail email address is randymorin@gmail.com. A quick run thru the functionality and guess what? It's Webmail. Very basic Webmail.

• It's suppose to have some great search of your email archive, but that's it.
• Well, I can't import my email, so I can't test the archive search w/ anything but canned emails.
• There's no POP3 access to external accounts.

Not much here at all. What's the big deal?

Update: I've forwarded all my email to GMail. I'll report back in a week or so.

Update: It took 40 minutes for some email to forward thru kbcafe.com to gmail.com. Other email sent at the same time, took seconds to forward thru from kbcafe.com to yahoo.com.

1. Brodeur - w/ the silver prove it.
2. Khabibulin - 1992 World Junior Gold Medal, 1992 Olympic Gold Medal and 2002 Olympic Bronze Medal..
3. Roy - 1 full year after retirement, he's likely still one of the top three NHL goalies.
4. Theodore - Bruin killer.
5. Luongo - Florida state has the best goalies in hockey.
6. Giguere - A one year wonder?
7. Joseph - Two years running, he was defeated by the Wing's inability to score.
8. Belfour - Aging, but still great.
9. Hasek - Healthy, he still could be the best. Unfortunately, unhealthy.
10. Osgood - Not great, but he's proven he can win the silver.

Hmmm!

Quote: It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites. On Google Print pages, we provide links to some popular book sellers that may offer the full versions of these publications for sale.

Source: Syntax Dude.

Cocoon Dude: Today I received 1797 messages. All of them is spam. I disabled my account completely, so if you are trying to email me the message will bounce. I am thinking of a long term solution to the problem.

Randy: There's also this new email replacement for communicating w/ friends. You can carry it with you or leave it at home. You can hide your contact number. It sometimes comes w/ a Wifi connection, Bluetooth, camera, a PIM, an inbox and is often intergrated w/ Microsoft Windows.

Put the following in the address bar and hit enter. Or just click the link.

javascript:document.cookie

I assume you have available the entire javascript language from the address bar. Also works in Netscape/Moz. Coolage!

Quote: Links are the Web's lifeblood. But couldn't finding them, sharing them with friends, and posting them to a home page or blog be made easier? That is the goal of www.dudecheckthisout.com, a new free service that allows users to collect and share links with just a few clicks. ... "The ability to relate people's link collections to one another is very powerful," said Grad Conn, a founder of Dude, Check This Out.

Update: This article increased the number of active Dude accounts from 16 to about 55. Two weeks later, the number of active accounts has shrunk to 26.

Here's a new online social networking Website. This one needs a grammar and spell checker big time.

There is no money to made in creating another ID coding system.

Which reminds me. My blog need a speelcheker to!

More from Social Dude.

Quote: This CBC documentary on war-crimes committed against Afghani prisoners with the complicity of the US military is shocking. It alleges that thousands of Taliban POWs were murdered -- most by being locked in baking shipping containers in the middle of the desert, with the survivors brought to a remote place and executed with 30-50 US soldiers in attendance. The source -- the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -- is hardly known for alarmism or irresponsible journalism. The UN has offered to investigate, but only if the safety of the investigators can be guaranteed, something that the US-allied Afghani warlord has refused to consider -- and since the making of the documentary, many of the sources have been tortured or disappeared.

Update: The CBC page on this program has lots more info (Thanks, Simon!)

Source: Ninja Dude.

Translation: What's left to save? Not much, the [Atom] file format spec, after a year of heated discussions, doesn't bring much new compared to RSS 2. The API hasn't gone through any organic growth (ala MetaWeblogAPI) yet, a definite advantage, but also a drawback: after a year spent in endless discussions, the end-result is not really encouraging. There were in the end only a handful of raving supporters ready to launch Atom, and now with Tim Bray and Sun, we are in danger of having a new useless toy that salespeople are going to try to shove down our throats, just because it has been standardized by Sun (where's MicroSoft?).

Randy: Wow and right on!

Source: XML Dude.

Quote: PayPal, the global online payment service, today introduced PayPal Web Services, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to the PayPal platform based on open standards.

Randy: SOAP cool!

Source: VOIP Dude.

No more goatee. iM sad today. VOIP Dude is honouring the Leafs for one more day.

XML Dude is hosting an Atom Community Meeting. Others to attend Atom Dude, x-Opencola/Blogger/Google Dude, Phishing Dude, and Syntax Dude. All the Atomites in one building. Convenient :) Can we hold the next meeting in Brampton, Ontario, Canada? Otherwise, I can't attend. iM seeing an increase in the number of geek-get-togethers unrelated to social networking on the West Coast.

from the 50s and 60s.

Source: Biz Dude.

Third period...

• It's over, I'm warming up the shaver (my goatee). Oh wait!
• Pilar should have been playing every game this playoff.
• Captain Clutch does it again.

Fourth period...

• If they win, tonight and Thursday, TO will go crazy.
• Fire Quinn!

Hire Jacques Martin tomorrow morning. We need a coach that'll teach the young players to play. I also like Joel Quenneville. I wouldn't resign Belfour either. He's been good, but let's try and bring in somebody like Luongo.

Quote: I would like to invite you to join the Technorati team for an evening of pizza, beer, and conversation. We have been amazed at some of the things you have been doing with our technology and we'd like to take an opportunity to meet you and thank you. And we'd also like to know what you think of it and what we can do to be of service to you in your development.

When: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Where: Technorati, 2800 3rd Street. See Mapquest directions at http://tinyurl.com/2nhtu (Enter the building on the 24rd Street side)

If you're planning on coming, please RSVP to salon-sf@technorati.com and let us know how many people you'll be bringing so we can get enough food and drink. We've set up a page on our Developers Wiki with additional detail and topics for discussion.

I hope you can make it, and don't forget to bring your WiFi-enabled laptop!

Randy: Can we move the locale to Toronto? :)

• Programmers working on the command line who find typing VSS commands faster than launching VSS Explorer and using menus.
• Administrators or builders who write and maintain batch files and macros that execute many VSS commands in rapid succession.

VSS supports command-line commands by using the SS.exe program, which is usually in the Win32 subfolder under the folder you choose in the setup program.

Sometimes you're just looking for that one line of code.

string stripped = Regex.Replace(textBox1.Text,@"<(.|\n)*?>",string.Empty);

I seem to be getting more of late. Not keeping any stats, just a realization that my Inbox is more often full of more and more SPAM. I get so much, I can't read it all and you know how much I like to read SPAM. I hope the authors of the SPAM accept my apology for not reading it all.

I got a verify and update your paypal information phish today. The domain was quite creative. And happy birthday to Don Park, our resident phishing expert. Orkut has been reminding me everytime I log on that Don's b-day was fast approaching.

First period...

• Two games in a row, McCabe leads off by tee-ing up the puck for a Flyer player.
• Twice, the refs blew the whistle when the Leafs had a scoring opportunity. Also an obvious missed call that would have given the Leafs a two-man advantage. The bounces are not going the Leafs way.
• Clearly, the games in TO were ref'ed in favor of the Leafs and tonights game is obviously going to be ref-ed in favor of the Flyers. Why play these games? Just ask the refs who they want to win and we can go home early.
• McCabe again! Three times in two games, three of the last four goals were McCabe's fault. No question!
• Nieuwendyk gets us back in the game.

Second period...

• It's over.
• The refs are calling a lot of interference penalties this playoff, where the player w/ the puck gets hit hard or dumped. That penalty makes no sense. For instance, Roenick's penalty, which was a clean hit.

Courtesy my friend Lucius.

Quote: Lemontonic confirmed today that it will launch the first phase of its revolutionary new online dating application and web service on Monday May 3rd, 2004.

Randy: Cool!

This is a horrifying incident that occured last night. In Perezhogin's defense, he is being suspended because he didn't miss. Garrett Stafford the target of his swing took an equally vicious swing at Perezhogin's head immediately prior and missed. Sorry Stafford, but you deserved it and Perezhogin, you deserve what's coming, but I may have done the same. When someone hacks at our head, the reflex is to hack back, especially when weapon is already in hand.

Further note: Garrett Stafford prior to his missed swing, cross checked Perezhogin across the face, no miss.

Update: The fact that the journalists are failing to report that Stafford cross-check Perezhogin across the face, is admission that they are simply horrible journalists, more willing to report horrifics than the truth.

If u implement axWebBrowser, you'll find the WindowClosing event doesn't fire. This is the work around, which I confirm works.

1. Right below the System.Windows.Forms.Form class add another class whichderives from SHDocVw.DWebBrowserEvents2. For example:\

public class IEEvents: SHDocVw.DWebBrowserEvents2
{}

2. Save the file and go to class view (View | Class View menu option). Go to IEEvents class in the tree view and expand it. Keep expanding its children till you see 'DWebBrowserEvents'. Right click and select 'Add | Implement interfaces' menu option.

3. A method for WindowClosing event should be generated by above step. Apply the 'DispId' attribute to the method as shown below:

[DispId(0x00000107)]
public void WindowClosing(bool IsChildWindow, ref bool Cancel)
{
//message box to the event handler works
   MessageBox.Show("Closing Event", "IE", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Exclamation);
}

4. Add the following lines of code to the end of the Forms 'InitializeComponent' method.

UCOMIConnectionPointContainer pConPtCon =
(UCOMIConnectionPointContainer)this.axWebBrowser1.GetOcx();
UCOMIConnectionPoint pConPt;
Guid guid = typeof(SHDocVw.DWebBrowserEvents2).GUID;
pConPtCon.FindConnectionPoint(ref guid, out pConPt);
IEEvents e = new IEEvents();
//make sure you declare private int dwCookie in the form class but outside this method
pConPt.Advise(e, out dwCookie);

5. Add the following lines of code to the beginning of the Forms Close handler method.

UCOMIConnectionPointContainer pConPtCon =
(UCOMIConnectionPointContainer)this.axWebBrowser1.GetOcx();
UCOMIConnectionPoint pConPt;
Guid guid = typeof(SHDocVw.DWebBrowserEvents2).GUID;
pConPtCon.FindConnectionPoint(ref guid, out pConPt);
pConPt.Unadvise(dwCookie);

Six-seven years ago, I was working on a project where we were installing a new computer w/ our product and database. Late Friday night, I got the computer all setup and ready to go. The project lead was scheduled to fly out Monday morning and drop the computer off w/ the client in Montreal. This project lead came into work on Saturday and reconfigured the computer to lock it down. Monday afternoon, he called me from Montreal to tell me that the computer was no longer functioning. I wasn't able to remotely fix the computer and the project lead returned home w/out getting the computer working.

The next week, I had configured a second computer and this time, I was to fly out to Montreal on Monday and deliver the computer. I came into work on Sunday, just to check things out and found that the project lead had again come to work on Saturday and reconfigured the computer to lock it down. I removed all his changes and suddenly realized why the computer wasn't working in Montreal. Lesson: Don't make last minute changes. Deja Vu.

Quote: Past work experience:

Flash Dude: Randy is asking about our FOAFnet spec. Here's how it would work......