Atomic Playboy

Tonight I’m off for the airport to fly southward and visit the family over Christmas. See you next year!

I now have RSS 2.0 feeds for the comments and the sideblog.

I like it. I like it a lot. Here are the some things I’ve noticed so far.

Pro

• Honors TTL in RSS.
• When clicking links and using the internal browser, it automatically builds a list of auto-discovered feed URLs, that you can subscribe to with just a few clicks.
• Good visual display that gives you an overview of the recent entries, both on an individual blog and in an entire category.

Con

• $29.95. I’m a poor student; $19.95 would be a bit more reasonable for me.
• The internal browser uses the Internet Explorer engine.
• It appears to ignore updates and changes to entries.
• It only updates feeds in the currently selected group. This behavior will be changed in a future version.

FeedDemon is out of testing and is available for purchase. I’ve decided to give it a spin and let Sharpreader rest for a while.

I noticed that FeedDemon actually honors the <ttl> (Time To Live) value in RSS feeds. This is a value that tells how many minutes the agent should wait before fetching the feed again. I have mine set to 120 minutes, and FeedDemon refuses to update my feed unless two hours have passed since the last check.

This is A Good Thing™. There are too many programs out in the wild that tout standards ignoring as a feature.

I recall having a very heated debate about that once. RSS is an XML format, and as such it’s not supposed to work if it’s broken — a browser displays an error if an XML document isn’t well-formed. But most browsers also have a quirks mode where it guesses what the document author wanted, in case the document isn’t well-formed.

Quirks mode is usually used for the older HTML standards, like 4.02 and older; while XHTML and on uses a strict standard mode — at least in Mozilla. Internet Explorer can still mess things up royally with a XHTML document that isn’t well-formed.

For documents sent as text/html, Mozilla must decide whether to handle them in quirks mode or standards mode. (Content sent as text/xml or other XML or XHTML MIME types is always handled in strict mode.) Currently Mozilla does this through DOCTYPE sniffing. That is, it uses the DOCTYPE declaration (DTD) as a hint as to whether the page is a recently written web page that can be expected to behave properly when all standard behavior is used.

My personal opinion is that if a document claims to adhere to a standard, let’s say XHTML, the agent should display a big fat error message if the document isn’t well-formed. Most RSS readers do this since they read an XML format. XML always crashes horribly when it isn’t well-formed; especially if the parser uses regular expressions instead of building an actual XML tree.

There’s a big difference between checking if a document is well-formed and if it is validating, however. You automatically see if a document is well-formed when you try to parse it — the aforementioned crashing and burning appears if it isn’t. Sharpreader displays an error message and a link to the Feed Validator so you can check if the document you’re attempting to read is actually valid.

I really don’t know where to draw the line here. If it’s just a minor transgression such as unescaped special characters, the client can still display it properly even if it means the document isn’t well-formed. But allowing such errors to pass means that the authors will get used to getting away with such errors.

And that could lead to the HTML tag soup all over again.

Now I’m settled in on my new domain. Let it henceforth be known that this blog now is known as Frozen Skies.

The new layout is live on the front page and the individual entries, but there is still stuff to do, mainly add some navigation and iron out some stupid IE bugs, and then fix the archives.

Here are the new syndication links:

• RSS 2.0 feed — the RSS 1 feed is discontinued as it was an antiquated piece of crap with a severe lack of features.
• Atom feed — for all three of you who know what it is.

It really feels nice to have a new, shiny, clean place; the old web structure was crufty and messy. I’m still being hosted by Fnord, though.

Coincidentally, this is entry number 300 on the blog.

Back from Tech Noir. Much fun was had, much dancing was done — and I don’t usually dance. Perhaps I’ve managed to kill the inhibition that has prevented me from enjoying myself on the dance floor?

Pardon the whole bunch of images, but I’m quite in love with my camera.

This girl and her friend walked up to me, put straws in my cider bottle, took a few sips, and gave me a kiss on the cheek and walked away. Note to self: keep an eye out for them next time.

Interlace enters the stage. Interlace doesn’t have any real hit song, but all their material is of a very good quality and very enjoyable. They started with Pinioned and played a whole bunch of their best songs, including Stone Mirror and Under the Sky.

The singer did his best to look like someone who just walked out of doctor Frankenstein’s basement, with plastic pipes protruding from his body and wearing just a dirty white loincloth. Clearly inspired by Stefan Ackermann of Das Ich.

I’m still not sure how I do it, but occasionally I manage to snap great pictures like this one. Here’s the full size.

After Interlace, it was time for Run Level Zero. Not as good as Interlace, but still far from bad. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get any good pictures, and the memory card got full. (If any parents happen to read this, a SecureDigital or Memorystick card would make a great Christmas gift…)

And since this is after all the industrial and gothic scene, we celebrate Lucia our own way. With gasmasks, whips and fake blood.

Oops, looks like I registered a domain. I’ll let you know which one as soon as the DNS propagates.

It’s time for a complete remake here. First this new layout, a domain, and some general cleaning up behind the scenes. My MT templates were a mess, and I’m cleaning out the cruft as we speak.

I intend to become a lot more active here now.

Yup, new layout is live, but only on the front page as of right now. But I’m not quite sure if I’ll use it — there’s something that’s not quite right about it, and I was really fond of the last one. I’ll work some more on it and see if I can take the best parts of the old one and combine with this one.

There are still a few CSS issues to iron out — Internet Explorer, as usual, is unable to center the contents on the page. To be fixed.

If you think the image at the top is huge, it’s because I intend to put some more content there. I’m thinking about writing my own photoblog software, with some random images grabbed from it to be displayed at the top of the page.

The place was quite empty when we got there — 20 persons, top. More appeared later, but it never got anywhere within the vicinity of being crowded.

Alice in Videoland really rocked. After discovering that the battery display on my camera only has two modes — “Full steam!” and “Help, I’m dying!” — I put the camera away and danced for the rest of the concert. Much fun was had. And Toril, singer of AiV, is very cute, to boot.

The geek in me noted that the keyboardist had a Mechwarrior t-shirt.

Pardon the blur, I’m still getting used to handling the camera.

Oh, I bought Alice in Videoland’s debut album, Maiden Voyage, while I was there. 130 SEK is just the right price for a CD.

Alice in Videoland will be playing at Mondo tonight. I like them, so I might go.

Here’s an Alice in Videoland song for you to try out. They make very interesting music: “Curious of cross-genre experimentation, the band elaborated on their sound, drawing inspiration from a spectrum of genres ranging from EBM, synthpop and electro through to disco, rock and punk.”

Not to mention their inspiration from old Commodore 64 games. Alice in Videoland is actually an old C64 game.

And tomorrow Interlace and Run Level Zero will be playing at Tech Noir, which I won’t miss no matter what. I’m a big fan of Interlace, and RLZ doesn’t sound too bad either.

Update: Hey, RLZ even has a blog! RSS feed and everything.