March 2004 Archives

The Pink Panther, one of my most favorite cartoons when I was a child (and an adult), is turning 40 next month. Those cartoons were my first exposure to the space-age bachelor pad and mod design stylings of the 50's and early 60's that I still love to this day. The music, my first exposure to lounge music which is still in my weekly rotation. (Henry Mancini was the man!)

MGM is celebrating in grand style. On April 6th, The Pink Panther Film Collection starring Peter Sellers are finally being released on DVD. the early ones were great, the later ones not so much so. (I wish they would do more with the actually cartoon of which only one collection exists of a handful of the ~175 that have been produced.) I have The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark already queued up in Netflix. They are also releasing a few recordings of related music including Ultimate Mancini and Ultimate Pink Panther discs. Most intruiging is The Pink Panther Penthouse Party of music inspired by or covering the characters music. Artists included include a lot of what I'm listening to today – Ursula 1000, Mocean Worker, St. Germain, and Nicola Conte to name a few. Looks good though I'm not sure about the inclusion of Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice. (Works for Christopher Walken, but the Pink Panther?)

As if that isn't sweet enough, MGM has asked Shag (aka Josh Agle) a cat whose illustrations I really dig, to give the character a fresh new look. Check out the site here. It's all Flash though. Given the subject it almost works.

BTW New Yorkers: Shag is opening a new exhibit, Before the Eviction, at Earl McGrath Gallery in Manhattan on May 13th. I'll be making the trip back down to see this one.

While the posts to this weblog haven't been terribly interesting or frequent lately, I've been quite busy coding away. Here is a lot of what I've done that is now public.

CPAN Modules

The links in this section are to the latest version in CPAN as of this post.

Text::BIP 0.51

The Blosxom Infrastructure Package (or simply BIP), is an object-oriented module for facilitating event-based file system indexing. Release back in January after almost a year of internal evolution and refactoring, the purpose of this module is to provide a lightweight mechanism for facilitating event-based file system indexing. In many ways it's File::Find with a slightly more specific and object-oriented interface.

When Rael Dornfest released blosxom, his lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application, I was intrigued by how much could be done with so little. The one feature that made the biggest impression on me is how blosxom used the file system as a simple hierarchical document database. I began to apply this technique in a number of my scripts whose scope was outside of the realm of the traditional weblog uses blosxom was designed to handle. To better organize and reuse my code, I created a module that implemented an extensible framework that I could begin dropping into my scripts. The result became BIP.

Text::Tiki 0.73

TikiText is a structured text formatting notation that primarily descends from wiki and plain text email conventions. It strives to more intuitive then common wiki notations by using the least amount of characters from plain text. It is easy to learn to learn the basics, but provides richer functionality for those who want to dive in. Like most text formatting engines, Tiki abstracts users from needing to know or understand markup whenever possible. It differs in that it makes valid and semantical XHTML markup easy and lets CSS do its job.

Besides internal refactoring and bug fixes, 0.7x includes functionality and hooks for wiki linking. While wikis are a part of TikiText's lineage, it was never my intention to create a new Wiki notation or tool. Based on the feedback I received from the initial releases, that changed.

XML::RSS::Parser 2.12

I released a major refactoring and enhancement to my liberal object-oriented parser for RSS feeds. Version 2.x has what I think is a much better and simpler object model then the short lived 1.x release. It supports XPath-esque queries as of 2.1.

XML::RAI 0.1

The RSS Abstraction Interface or RAI (said ray) is a bit of an experimental module for me. It is an object-oriented interface to XML::RSS::Parser trees that abstracts the user from handling namespaces, overlapping and alternate tag mappings that is common in the RSS space. Its only a 0.1 release, but I'm using it internally and it seems to be working quite well. It will be interesting to see if it lives up to its mission in the wild.

Net::Trackback 0.991

This module is an object-oriented interface for developing Trackback clients and servers. The big change in this version is that it has been fully OO-ized and hence more adaptable. This previous version (which had an upper case B) was a crude hack of the standalone Trackback client Ben and Mena Trott released. Recently I had to use it and had forgotten how poorly it was so I HAD TO rewrite it.

XML::Parser::Style::Elemental 0.40

This module is a slightly more advanced and flexible object tree style for XML::Parser. I wanted something simple and virtually transparent, but wasn't satisfied with the built-in styles of XML::Parser. I needed a reference to a node's parent and namespace support. In developing my code, I decided to go the distance and made it a reusable module I could distribute.

MT Code

mt-closure

A utility script for closing comments and pings open for a specified period of time. Is a pure MT solution and is not tied to a specific database. Not rigorously tested. (Treat as beta for now.)

XSearch 0.2

The built in search functionality in MT does fine, but at times I've found myself needing something more or different in my work. What I've wished for was a pluggable search facilities like MT's template engine.

In scratching my own itch, I've thrown down the gauntlet and finally done something about it. I've created MT::XSearch an extensible framework for creating search plugins for Movable Type.

Announced on the mt-dev mailing list, this framework is for coders. My hope is that other coders will create various search and application functionality off of this framework.

Up on deck is adding some type of template tags for navigating through large search results.

mt-publish-on 0.11

Nothing really new here, but I thought I'd mention that I fixed a bug where dependent pages (such as an index page) were not getting rebuilt with the newly published entry.

Phil Windley posted that there has been some interesting questions and discussions on his forum highlighting a readers post about RSS vs. Atom.

I thought it was worth reposting the reply I made on the forum here since I've been too occupied to post much else:

One thing that is always missing or overlooked in the discussion/debate/furor of RSS vs. Atom is that Atom provides a unified feed format and API – RSS, in any form, does not. The real value is when you need a publishing API and feed in your system. (The more powerful case for the Atom effort is the Blogger API vs. MetaWeblog API vs. Atom.) If all you need is a one-way syndication format then one of the RSS formats will suffice. That is why Google, SixApart and more recently Nokia are signing on to Atom.

As someone developing software for these syndication formats, I believe the eventual benefit of the Atom feed to the average Joe/Jane user will be that their aggregator software will provide a more reliable and consistent experience. Because of the extremely loose specs, (many) multiple versions, and the large number of optional and overlapping tags with similar meanings, it requires a lot of work, independent research and trial-and-error to reliably present any and all feeds to the average user. I've also found it requires on-going tweaking as new patterns emerge. (I wince when someone refers to RSS as simple. I realize that its the part of me that is a developer doing the wincing though.) Given the effort and care going into the Atom feed format and its pending submission to the IETF as a formal standard, I'm fairly optimistic that Atom will be an improvement in this regard.

I too will use both and let users decide.