XM Podcasts

Cool! XM satellite radio is making some of its programming available as free podcasts. Beginning December 11, you can download XM content hosted by Bob Edwards, James Carville, Mike Krzyzewski, Barry Switzer and Opie & Anthony. But what really excites me is XM Unmasked, hosted by the extraordinarily funny Ron Bennington. [ Expand All |… Continue reading XM Podcasts

Server Move Done

The server move is done. I’m sure there will be problems, but so far so good. The new server is actually a home server — very adequate machine, but I anticipate connection and traffic delays, as well as disruptions due to power outages (which are pretty frequent here). Eventually, I’ll probably hook up a UPS,… Continue reading Server Move Done

Notice of Probable Downtime

This site (and Optimalbrowser.com) will be likely be intermittently available starting this evening (U.S. Eastern time) and lasting for a day or so while I move servers.

Weird Traffic

I just saw some weird traffic on this blog. Last week, I was testing a plugin when it went a little haywire and automatically created a bunch of posts (based on my NewsGator clippings, including a lot of law related and gadget related topics — things I read about but don’t write about). And then… Continue reading Weird Traffic

Character Encoding Help

Tom Morris is pulling his hair out dealing with XML character encoding issues. I’ve gone through this myself. I found that the SimplePie feed parser has great logic for dealing with this, so I adapted it to my needs in my PHP class XMLParseIntoArray. I think I’ve expanded on SimplePie’s approach a bit, but it’s… Continue reading Character Encoding Help

FreeNX with Fedora 8

Just finished installing Fedora 8 on one of my machines, only to find that one of my favorite tools, FreeNX (a VNC-like remote desktop protocol), would not work. Turns out Fedora 8 ships with a known bug. More info here. PITA.

New York Times Home Page RSS Feed Driving Me Nuts

The New York Times is doing a lot of great things with its website and RSS feeds. But somewhere along the way, they’ve introduced a bug in their code that generates the RSS feed for the home page. The bug is that the channel title switches back and forth between “NYT > NYTimes.com” and “NYT… Continue reading New York Times Home Page RSS Feed Driving Me Nuts