RSS 1.1 draft available now

As mentioned in few places including Sam Ruby, Miscoranda and Cafe con Leche. There is a draft version of RSS 1.1 available on a creative commons licence. The official specification is a bugfix rather than a real change. My own feelings are the same as Elliotte except of course the very end…

As if RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0 weren't enough to deal with, now there's RSS 1.1. I think the authors are missing the forest for the trees here. While there are some small improvements in RSS 1.1 relative to RSS 1.0 (which is a completely different beast than RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0), they are simply not outweighed by the cost of expanding market confusion and incompatibility. Oh well, maybe if we're lucky, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and convinces the world to just move forwad to ATOM leaving RSS in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Oh thers already a RSS Feed validator and RSS 1.0 to 1.1 converter.

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iPodder 2.0 beta vs blogmatrix

Via Adam Curry. There is a new version of iPodder lemon edition. Its in beta but looks like a massive improvement on the old classic ipodder 1.14. There are some screenshots of the windows and mac versions here. I have downloaded the beta which is a 10.5 meg by the way… I dont know if I will try it out because I have recently switched over to using blogmatrix jager for both my rss reading and podcasting. I was tempted with Sparks! too but I installed it at work and got fed up with the lack of rss reading at the time. Now maybe a good time to upgrade?

Anyway, I may see what new in ipodder 2.0 and compare the features with Jager, if Jager wins I'll donate some money for sure, specially if the delicious linkage is going to do something like AmphetaRate, smartmobs sums it up. Maybe this could kill Digg which I like but dont have time to mess with, plus I'm using del.icio.us all the time now, so I'm glad to hear blogmatrix are using del.icio.us. Talking of Blogmatrix heres somethings which i'm crying out for in rss readers generally.

Ok subscriptions! What on earth are developers thinking about? Yes you can import and export OPML 1.1 great but what about synchronisation? Jager does sync subscriptions but you only have 2 options. FTP and bloglines. I dont have a FTP server running and really really dont want to go down that route just to keep my ipaq, laptop plus workstation at home and work all sync'ed but it looks like I may have to. The other option of using bloglines is good and I'm at the moment trying to remember my password for my old bloglines account. I really dont want to loose the cubicgarden username. Anyway back to jager, please please include a webdav option so anyone with a mac and idisk can use that for storage of opml. Another thing which my pocketRSS and RSSOwl do which I have not yet found is a real subscription method. All my OPML is online and I usually add RSS feeds to the OPML directly using Webdav or locally then get pocketRSS to update the subscription which pulls in all the new RSS feeds without effecting the others already in place. This also works in RSSOWL if you set it up correctly however there thinking of removing the feature in favour of the jager ideas. Updating the OPML in Jager seems to involve unsubscribing to all the feeds which is easy but then dragging the OPML back in again. Yuk!
Another ignoying thing for me, is there any podcast software which supports RSS 1.0 enclosures? I kinda of expect with Danny Ayers post it would start to happen.

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The service at the wireless point

I was listening to Dana Blankenhorn on The Impacts of Persistent Distributed IT at Accelerating Change. He suggests that we do not have a platform for this decade and that wireless (wimax and wifi) could be it. He states the simple but actually quite obvious fact that we use wireless to access the internet. So everyone is cramming the pipe beyond the access point and not using the actual wireless in ways we are only just starting to see.

And honestly it all makes sense. Wireless has effective bandwidth from 3meg (802.11b) to 100meg (WiMax 802.16). Why not use the wireless point as a platform? Dana suggests Linux is the key for this and he's not wrong. For example, I saw this linksys wireless router ages ago which can be hacked to put linux on it. Yes thats great but wheres the use in just having linux on it? Yes I know you could install anything you like on it but besides a webserver I've seen little else. Till a while ago when the Xlink guys released Xlink Kai station for the WRT54G. Which means you can route traffic for playing multiple player games on the free xlink network with just a xbox and one of these. (yes i have talked about it before, but highlighting whats possible when you think about wireless as a platform).
Yes limited example but a interesting none the less. I would like to see zeroconf aka rendezvous better known as multicast dns services happening at the wireless level. I mean its ideal because the automatic discovery nature makes roaming around wireless points a joy. And before I go, lets not limit wireless to one point. With Mesh networking it should be simple to extend the range and the users to the service. Lets also not forget machine to machine services would benefit from mesh technologies.

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Windows 2000 reinstall list

Ok I didnt give up, I just got a point where I had to make a decision. Yep thats right, I'm back to using Windows on my main workstation. Its dual bootable with Hard drive installed Knoppix /images/emoticons/laugh.gifebian) but honestly its pretty messed up and almost unrecoverable. Anyway, I decided that I didnt want to go back to Windows XP Pro just yet so installed a old version of Windows 2000. And spent the next few days installing this huge list… Inspired by Bill de Hora

Zone Alarm
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
Windows 2000 updates
DirectX 9b
Tons of Hardware Drivers
Java 1.42_06 (was tempted to install 1.5)
AVG
PSI
Firefox
Thunderbird
Wbloggar
BlogMatrix Jager
iTunes
Winrar
Azureus
FFmpeg
VLC
ActiveSync
Audacity
Quicktime
GIMP
DVD Shrink
DVD Decrypter
Mpeg2Schnitt
Windows Mediaplayer
DrDivx
Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes
Irfanview
Nero
CCXstream
Skype
KeePass
Partition Magic
Acrobat Reader
Xlink Kai Evolution
Ad Aware
Open Office
Xmpeg
Inkscape
XMLSpy
Putty
WinSCP
Resin
Smart FTP

What I'll be installing soon…
Icecast server
Zoe
Textpad or Uedit
Opera
Winamp
Mozilla SVG build
SDP
Matroska Pack
Atomix Mp3 or Virtual DJ
BS player
Blogwave
Spike
VNC
Remote Desktop server/client

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