Atom 0.3 Feed

I just added an Atom 0.3 feed to this site (in addition to the RSS 2.0 feed which I'll keep as well). Following the example template from Mark Pilgrim, it was quite simple. The template uses a couple of MovableType plugins (UTCDate and MTEntryModified, both from Staggernation.com). For now, I didn't take the additional step of serving the file up as MIME type “application/atom+xml”, instead just sticking with xml type until aggregators better support the subscription model. My current news reader of choice (Bloglines) now reads Atom 0.3 feeds without a problem. So does the latest Feed Validator. It will…

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100 Years of Flight

Today's San Jose Mercury had a story describing the Bay Area's contributions to aviation in conjunction with the 100 year anniversary of the Wright Brother's first flight. I was surprised to see connections to my alma matter (Santa Clara University: John J. Montgomery, a Santa Clara University professor, gets credit for the first controlled piloted flight, in a glider he called the Gull, off the bluffs near San Diego 20 years before the Wright brothers' first powered flight. There was also mention of the founding of Lockheed (Lockheed History): So Allen Loughead, a Santa Clara University student, and his brother…

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New PC

Previously I wrote about rebuilding my home server. With the server’s failed hard drive crisis under control, it was time to update the main family PC which has been showing its age and whose hard drive was starting to fail. Here’s the short story on the new PC in the family…

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Z600

StickyC seems to be looking at the new Sony Ericsson Z600 phone. Earlier today I was reading a series on the new T630 which led to Sony Ericsson Z600: Diary of a Switcher. The Z600 looks quite cool. They seem to be selling the personalization of the phone (changeable panels, etc.), but I like idea of a small bluetooth phone in the clamshell design.

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Cruft-free URLs

I just reconfigured my Movable Type blog to use cruft-free URLs. The basic premise is to clean up your URL scheme by removing non-essential information, thus ensuring that your links will live on in the future as you evolve with different web publishing tools and technologies. In my case, I also wanted to change from my old method of daily archives (one file per calendar day, including one or more posts) to individual archives (one post per file). Among other benefits, this should help with search ability of the site because the entry post will be the same as the…

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