This is an attempt to remove the ongoing confusion over the funkyness I have accused MT and Six Apart of perpetuating.  I hope these examples will dispell any FUD hanging over us.

NOT-FUNKY RSS FEEDS:

FUNKY RSS FEEDS:

As you can see in these examples, funky RSS feeds replace common RSS tags with RSS 1.0 extensions.

Destruction is not extension nor innovation!

MT's default template generates these sort of funky RSS feeds.  If they didn't realize the problem before, they should have fixed it by now.  All they have done so far are public silences.

After watching Dave Winer and others struggle politely, I have used nastyness as a cutting edge to rip through the FUD and harmful silences.  Some might say my post was irresponsible, but I believe it served a purpose.  This problem can easily be fixed by Six Apart so I am still hopimg for peace breaking out soon.

Sam Ruby has kicked off an effort to create new syndication and archiving formats from scratch.  I think this is a good thing and a proper outlet for the funk.  Checkout the Roadmap at Sam's Wiki.

Check out this guy's flight simulator setup with 9 PCs and 13 monitors hooked up together into an office cockpit.  I particularly like the seatbelt.  The view looks great with the lights turned down.  [via Chris Sells]

Read about Don Ulrich's adventure into HTML and CSS jungle that resulted in a client-side XSL stylesheet able to render his XML documents into fast loading HTML pages using just five tags: <div>, <span>, <a>, <img>, and <hr>.  His XSL stylesheet is here (.XSL).  Neato.

"A while back you pointed to Adventcode and myself [Fireball as a Candle]. You spoke of CSS style coflicting with CSS design. The conversation was about CSS Zen Garden and the inability to read it. I took what you said as a challange to use CSS a tool for construct while maintaining style. AdventCode now uses just 5 HTML tags and CSS to control the XML/XSL output. It is very fast. Using a minimum of HTML tags also allowed me to tighten up the content. Thank You for the encourgement. Yes CSS can do more than look pretty. It can also control content." - Don Ulrich by e-mail.

No matter which side of the fence you are on the funky issue, you will enjoy Tim Bray's I like Pie post.  It is another Tim Bray classic that leave you chuckling and nodding.  Like me, he likes Sam Ruby's effort to define a new syndication format from scratch.  Here is the bit I enjoyed the most.

"I regularly get pissed-off at Dave but I really truly do think he’s trying to Do The Right Thing; but there are many people out there who can't get past being pissed off. This is what life is like."

I will be happy to see this constructive effort gain momentum although I can only hope that Sam is wise enough to navigate around sensitive spots like RDF and Dublin Core.

While I have done my share of UNIX programming, I hate programming on UNIX/Linux.  I know the power of Emacs and so on, but terminal/command-line orientd UIs in general disturb me too much to be an effective programmer on the UNIX/Linux platforms.  Apparently Bjarke Viksoe feels the same way.  Bjarke is a talented Win32 programmer whose news page I visit once a week to see what new gadgets or tools he has written.  This week, he had a surprise in store.

He usually writes compact (read ATL/WTL) open source Win32 GUI components, but this week he wrote BVRDE (Bjarke Viksoe's Remote Development Environment), an IDE for editing, compiling, and debugging UNIX/Linux software in the comfort of an Win32 IDE.  Written in WTL, whole IDE weights only 1 meg (plus a few bytes), but it offers:

• Syntax highlighting for C/C++, Java, Makefile, HTML and XML
• Remote compilation of projects on all UNIX/Linux platforms using GNU C
• Remote debugging via GDB
• VS.NET style management of multiple remote projects

BVRDE loads fast, uses latest Win32 GUI gadgets, and is visually stunning.  Only complaint I might have is that he isn't releasing source code for BVRDE.  Since it's only version 0.1 (don't worry, it seems solid enough for playing with), I won't complain too loudly yet.  BVRDE could mature into an essential tool in my toolbox.