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But because an Atom feed must include a guid element, the client has a way of uniquely identifying an item. This means that when you subscribe to an atom feed, you're not going to see duplicate articles the way you do with RSS when the RSS feed doesn't include a guid or any unique identifier (which is legal) and the client has to make one up by hashing the content.

I wrote a bit about this here.

Very cool shell; if you don't know anything about it, don't assume it's just a bash or ksh clone.. it's actually something fairly unique.

Seriously, I've seen some awfully lame attempts at describing online chat slang.

"It's important to remember that the leetspeek community encourages new forms and awards individual creativity, resulting in a dynamic written language that eludes conformity or consistency."

It's like they actually kinda get it.

Compared to, say, http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,88686,p g,2,00.asp, where they include 'kiss' as 'keep it simple stupid'. Have you ever seen anyone actually use that in chat?

fysbigtbabn = Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night

Yeah right.
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http://www.stevex.org/longtail

I had this bad habit of checking a bunch of websites constantly.. so a few years ago I set up a little bookmark site that I use as my homepage.

http://www.stevex.org/linky

What's just slightly unique about it (or was in 1999) is it lets you specify a timeout for sites you add, and sites whose timeout has expired are shown in bold.

So when I bring up Firefox, I right-click on the links that are bold (to open them all in tabs), read 'em, and I'm back to work. The various timeouts mean I spend less time looking at sites that I just looked at 5 minutes ago.. (yes, I used to do that. And you probably do too, don't you?)

I put together this site a while ago that tracks blog postings (for all major services that ping blo.gs), tries to parse out nouns, and then displays the top 100 nouns encountered in the last hour scaled by frequency.

Google is almost always a big one.

http://www.stevex.org/longtail/hottopics.aspx

Larger companies generally have more process and more overhead, but they also have more people who are in it for the long haul, and thus aren't working overtime every day.

There's always periods where you need to put in time, but in a small company those are the norm; in a big company (I'm talking 10k or more people here) it's more normal to work something close to a regular work day.

Think IBM, government, HP, Kodak..
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http://www.stevex.org/longtail

I joined about two years ago that had just completed the transition from everyone having their own copy of the source, to using CVS.

Funny thing is, some of the developers missed the old ways, and would occasionally slip back into old habits. A customer would have a problem, and one of the developers make a copy of the entire source tree, fix the problem, build it, send it to the customer, and that'd be it.

People would send modules to other people to merge with their copy...

It seems bizarre but it happens.

Also I wonder if the stat isn't skewed by the number of solo developers working on small projects... You don't really need revision control until your project reaches a certain size. Not a big size mind you - if you've spent a week on a project it's probably big enough to merit cvs - but I think a lot of projects are smaller than that.

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http://www.stevex.org/longtail

Here's some of my experiences buying an LCD monitor. If you're not picky, it's easy to buy one; if you're picky, well, it's not so easy.

Looks like the streaming data is back; the site is a lot more interesting now that new items are coming in.

Unfortunately my data provider (http://ping.blo.gs), who has streaming interface to blog updates (telnet ping.blo.gs 9999) isn't providing any data at the moment so the updates are a little out of date..

But, the folks involved with RSS / Atom are "wire protocols should be xml" types who like the idea of using an XML-RPC call too much to give it up easily.

It's too bad, since it doesn't really need to be death to a site to have too many people subscribe. If I post an article on Usenet, 100 million people could read it tomorrow and it wouldn't cost me a cent. There are some problems with it, but problems that could have been solved in a lot less work than what it's going to take to fix syndication now.

Here is some more of my ranting about this.

Read this for some more thoughts on this..