Laughing Meme

I missed it, I’d even seen the inimitable Wilfredo on the lists and it went right by me, but I ran into Nat last night at Buzz’s WWDC party, and he rather riveted my attention (as I think he knew he would), that iCalServer announced yesterday? Turns out its an open source CalDav server, written in Python (Twisted), Apache 2.0 license, with great unit test coverage. (which bodes well for the trial by fire known as interop)

Btw. Collaboration’s homepage seems to be a Trac install which is sputtering, and crying. Under load?

update: Um, and how long as Cyrus Daboo been signing his emails “Apple Software Engineer”? Yup, I was asleep.

update 2: wsz confirms trac unhappiness (and my Twisted inside observation), I guess I just got in in time, if you email me, I’ll send you a tarball of the src.

James Holderness (check the comments)

Do you ever think maybe the Apple guys are just winding you up? Nobody could possibly be that stupid.

Maybe, though I tend to share Phil’s skepticism. Lets start the with the name, “photocasting”. Worst name I’ve heard since “MacBook”. I’d speculate that Apple’s marketing department recently started outsourcing to Engineering, except I’d be slandering my own profession. That’s a minor thing, aesthetic really, but dear god, how could they screw up the RSS? Again? (especially as I know people at Apple who are not only smart and clueful, but get XML)

I mean the iTunes name space was a train wreck. (though truth be told podcasting for some reason produces the scariest, wackiest feeds on the planet, at one point roughly 1/3 of the feeds Odeo was crawling had serious errors)

User agent detection? Of RSS? In 2006?!? Come again?

Embedded CSS? Misformatted dates? Random, namespace-less new elements (PhotoDate?) A new standard for including comments within an item.

See Phil’s comment, Sam, Dave Winer

Hey Apple, consider hiring someone who knows something about syndication, it’s worth it.

Take a look (unless of course you’re using Firefox).

update: [2005/01/18] MarkP on “photocasting”. It’s not just bad, it’s spectaculary bad. (via)

I realized recently that I had given up on Fink months ago, and have been building everything from source for a while now. I’m comfortable with apt-pinning and regularly scare my sysadmin friends by running frankenstein Debian systems, but I’ve never figured out Fink, and it never seems to have the package I want in the release I’m using.

Woke up this morning and realized that I had a long todo list for the weekend, and so of course I decided to switch over to using DarwinPorts.

So far, so good.