November, 24, 2002 archives

machack's call for papers is out, with a submission deadline of february 2003. i need to get up to speed with this cocoa stuff.

brent has been working with the blogger and metaweblog apis in implementing the weblog client part of netnewswire. making the interface discoverable via the main weblog page is a good idea.

to get into a little gui programming, i've been thinking about implementing a standalone blogging client, which means i'll be walking down much the same path as brent eventually (since i also have a homegrown weblog system to which i'll have to add api support). but i actually have server-side implementation of the blogger api in php sitting around, so that part shouldn't be a big deal.

i wonder how easy it would be to add a toolbar button to chimera to fire off something (an applescript?) that could pass the current url, path to cached html, and other page particulars to another application. that would be nice for a blog-this button. you could probably do something along those lines with a javascript bookmark/toolbar-button that passed the info to a server-side script that returned a document with the information with a mime content-type that the application was configured to handle. (does that even work with chimera? i've never noticed it firing up any helper applications.)

a related thought i had on my walk today: to avoid sending passwords in the clear, these apis should have used a hash of the password and the blog entry instead of a plain-text password. then the worst someone could do by sniffing the password is post that entry again. (and send a timestamp and include that in the hash, and you could lock out replays after some amount of time.)

as usual, there are problems with the latest atkins diet study. i really like the advice given by dr. stanley rockson (chief of consultative cardiology at stanford university school of medicine): it gets back to what grandmothers said. do everything in moderation.

for me, the key has always been exercise. between my two previous jobs, i lost weight by walking every day. then i got a job, stopped walking, and gained it all back. then i quit that job, started walking again, and lost it all and more. my diet has been lower-fat during the periods i've lost weight vs. when i've gained, but not low-fat.

the new york times reports on the rising foreclosure rate. bad news for investors in those lenders. (and for the rest of us paying taxes that will end up bailing out those lenders.)

the motley fool critiques the content-free ceo letters to shareholders from a small-cap company. a good example of a company operating counter to cluetrain principles.