Blog – Page 101 – Niall Kennedy

Google biodiesel San Francisco shuttle

Google now offers shuttle service from San Francisco to Mountain View every day. The shuttle averages 155 employees a day and has wireless Internet access onboard. Sweet! Makes all the city folk want work at Google even more than before.

War Against Comment Spam

Mark Glaser wrote about the war against comment spam in Online Journalism Review. He does a good job of gathering various examples and viewpoints from well-known bloggers and publishers.

Comments fixed

I thought it was a little odd that I had no comments on the site for a week. Turns out an error in MT-Blacklist prevented any comment submission good or bad. I have dumped MT-Blacklist and comments should now be submitted for approval as usual.

Java powered BMW

The current Business Week features a special report on automotive technology. Jim Kerstetter writes about the new automotive software capable of updates and upgrades such as Siemens VDO Automotive’s Top Level Architecture based on Java.

BMW can continually write updates and add-ons that work together without testing, thanks to the underlying Java. Every time a car owner visits a BMW dealer, new software, like a new navigation system, can be added. Partners that know how to program in Java could also write software to run on iDrive. A rental-car company, for example, could automatically send information such as updated mileage rates to its customer via an on-board computer.

I have tested the iDrive on the latest BMW and it is very slick. Frequently used functions accessible by buttons and adjusted by the knob. I could pull up automotive diagnostics easily for real-time trip feedback. Given an Internet connection over a cellular network and a Java computer on board, any commute could be more interesting. I could record any radio program as it happens, or log a GPS location I found particularly interesting. My car could send pictures of the road to a server for detailed traffic information. Open platforms create cool tools!

Firefox Live Bookmarks

I just downloaded the Firefox 1.0 Preview Release. A new feature called Live Bookmarks allows you to subscribe and read RSS and Atom feeds in your bookmarks. A button

appears in your status bar to let you know there has been an alternate source detected and the MIME type is supported by Live Bookmarks. A blue folder appears in your bookmark folder with an individual bookmark for each item or entry in your feed. I like the placement of the icon in the status bar instead of in the address bar like Safari RSS. Another branding win for the RSS format as well. It is good to see alterate link tags being used. Features such as Live Bookmarks should help motivate site developers to include more machine readable information in their code to allow for easier user access.

RFC3229 for partial feed retrieval

Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub, details how RFC3229, “Delta Encoding in HTTP,” could be used to help solve the bandwidth problem of syndicated feeds.

In order to allow the number of entries returned in a feed to be no more than the total number of new or modified inserted into the feed since the last time any specific client retrieved the feed, I propose that we rely on RFC3229 “Delta encoding in HTML” with a new instance-manipulation method defined to provide feed specific delta encoding.

FeedMesh

There is some interesting work going on at Camp Foo this weekend. A peering network for weblog or site update notifications as well as a method for pulling down new entries from a server instead of the entire feed.

Klip for Movable Type

I just added a Klip template to my Movable Type installation. The Klip file is defines a RSS file location as one of its elements and adds descriptive tags for consumption by the Serence KlipFolio application.

My complete template code is below. I am a single author weblog, so your milage my vary.


<klip>

  <owner>

    <author><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryAuthor$><MTEntries></author>

    <copyright><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%Y"$> <$MTEntryAuthor$></MTEntries></copyright>

    <email><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></MTEntries></email>

    <web><$MTBlogURL$></web>

  </owner>

  <identity>

    <title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>

    <uniqueid><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></uniqueid>

    <version>1.0</version>

    <lastmodified><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S "$><$MTBlogTimezone no_colon="1"$></
MTEntries></lastmodified>

    <description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>

    <keywords></keywords>

  </identity>

  <locations>

    <defaultlink><$MTBlogURL$></defaultlink>

    <contentsource><$MTBlogURL$>index.xml</contentsource>

    <icon></icon>

    <banner></banner>

    <help></help>

    <kliplocation><$MTBlogURL$>index.klip</kliplocation>

  </locations>

  <setup>

    <refresh>60</refresh>

    <referer></referer>

    <country>US</country>

    <language>en</language>

  </setup>

</klip>

The environmental savings of digital news

Researchers at UC Berkeley researched the environmental impact of reading a newspaper on a PDA versus in reading the paper form.

[I]f just a quarter of newspaper readers around the country switched to reading the news on their PDA, they’d generate just two to three percent of the carbon dioxide that would have resulted from the 14 million print newspapers they no longer need.

A good argument for syndicated feeds!

TypePad’s new look

Six Apart introduced new designs for TypePad designed by Dave Shea. The templates focus on mixed media display such as a photo collection. Video and audio are supposed to be better integrated as well, so hopefully Six Apart added support for RSS enclosures. Post via e-mail is also improved, allowing for up to 5 e-mail sources.