Gimlé

Dorothea Salo has just found out that sometimes an ugly application with a badly designed user interface will do the job better than the pricey proprietry competitor.

There is one thing I like about GNU/linux and FreeBSD, something I have come to rely on, and that is the fact that if it has something to do with system maintainance or automation, then free software has something rock-solid to sort you out.

This is actually the one area where Mac OS X lags behind its freer counterparts. The Apple tools are, and have always been, horribly inadequate. Norton Disk Doctor or Diskwarrior (most often both, if you want to be really safe) are de facto required purchases for any new Mac user.

Just finished reading Parsing RSS at all cost Mark Pilgrim’s second column at the O’reilly website.

It has already appeared on Blogdex, which means that everybody either has read it or is about to in the next two days no matter what I do.

But there is one thing that needs to be said.

The reason for having an ultra-liberal RSS parser is because an important proportion of feeds don’t validate.

Mark fails to say the obvious. All RSS is automatically generated by an application of some sort. The webloggers are end-users themselves of weblogging applications.

So we should lobby the application developers to automatically validate the RSS feed every single time it is generated and automatically fix the most common errors (unescaped ampersands).

Lobbying hundreds of users who are rightfully trusting their tools is just a silly notion.

It is not the responsibility of the end user to keep track of what seems to him to be arcane notions on validity.

Those who should know better need to be told better.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.