I have subtle clues when I’m procrastinating, not merely killing time, but in real, deep avoidance mode:

  • sent emails go up
  • cvs check ins go way up
  • un-read messages go down
  • my documents directory clutters up with half finished manifestos.

Not sure if I’m procrastinating from finding a house, or a job, or applying to school, or just planning whether I’m going to New York for Thanksgiving, when life is up in the air, there are so many choices. ### XML::RSS, a bug, a patch

All the alarms are ringing today, but the one that might be interesting to anyone but me is I wrote a patch for XML::RSS 0.97. XML::RSS was the gold standard when it came out, an easy to use, complete, relatively intuitive XML tool that parsed, and generated RSS cleanly. Times change, XML::RSS hasn’t since March of last year, and what once seemed all golden and shiny, feels like a hack. (which is why the maintainers are no longer maintaining it, in favor of the mythical clean re-write) Its an abandoned house, complete with broken windows.

While attempting to parse Kevin Burton’s baroque RSS feed I ran into a bug with XML::RSS. It reasonably enough assumes that the RSS namespace (e.g. http://purl.org/rss/1.0/) will always be the default namespace for the document. Reasonable, but unfortunately incorrect. My XML::RSS namespace patch is a relatively simple fix for that assumption.

Note: for some reason search.cpan.org is showing XML::RSS 0.96 as the most recently version, it isn’t, and I have not tested if the patch applies cleanly to it.

Todo

Depending on how grim things get, other features which XML::RSS might sprout would be: - support for attribute based tags, like <admin:GeneratorAgent>, and mod_link

On Broken Windows

Broken windows was a term I stumbled upon over at the Portland Pattern repository. Its a pattern (an anti-pattern really) describing how buggy code, accumulates more bugs as the perception of of the code as being buggy lowers peoples’ standards. Last night Jasmine and I went and watched an excellent film, Boom: the Sound of Eviction at the equally excellent Milky Way, in Jamacia Plains.

I was horrified to find the Manhattan Policy Institute, the ultra right-wing fiscal conservatives that provided the intellectual framework and moral justification for Giuliani’s rein of terror, taking credit for popularizing the term. I’m not sure if I can go on using it, at least without washing my hands.