Whisker browser with SVI

Ng Pheng Siong has a post on how to make the Smalltalk Whisker browser use SVI instead of the built in editor here. Loving this. Loving Smalltalk. I gotta' lotta' love, man.

Smalltalk OPML Parser Progress

I was fortunately able to take over a week off for Thanksgiving. The break from work was just what I needed to clear my head. It also gave me an opportunity to do some more Squeak hacking.

I worked on the OPML parser I'm writing. I was able to use Chronos to parse the RFC 822 time format dictated in the OPML specification. I used Chronos to parse the RFC822 time into a DateTime and stored that in my OPMLHead class. Beautiful. Easy. Love it.

What's left? Not much. I need to add more tests. I've got two OPML sources that I'm testing against. I'm using an OPML example I found on the web and the OPML that lists my Google Reader subscriptions. I'm going to try to find some other OMPL test data and get a few more documents to test.

I've decided not to do any custom exception handling. This seems appropriate since the parser will be consumed as a component in other custom applications. So, I'm not going to wrap exceptions from Chronos in some kind of OPMLParser exception.

I'm planning to release the OPML parser as OSS and put it in SqueakSource. I'm not entirely sure how to do that or if I'm even doing my work "correctly", but we'll figure it out. You and me. Together. Love ya', Mr. Internet.

Superbug blows up your defenses

It's news like this about these "superbug" type microbes that put me in a philosophical tail spin. It goes something like this - if superbug's are caused by microbes that have acquired an immunity to antibiotics (or antivirals), then should we be using the drugs? Do/did we know what we are doing by using them or are we just taking stabs in the dark to try and treat causes we don't understand? If so, then what else are we doing that we don't understand the long term effect of? We have plenty of hindsight about stupid things we (as humans) have done in the past. What will be the hindsight in 50 years about what we're doing now?

It's about this point where I start thinking about my happy place and fight the urge to put my thumb in my mouth.

Innovative Ham Soda

My friend Thanh was complaining that there have been no innovations in candy for decades. He contends it's a pretty boring food group. He also says that the Asian companies lead the pack in candy innovation.

Well, Thanh, check out the ham soda story on CNN...

Finally found a useful Vista widget

In my current role I have to interact with people around the world on a daily basis. I’m usually wondering what time it is in their particular area of the world. I was using a nifty world clock widget for the Yahoo widget engine. I’ve recently received a new laptop running Vista, and I’m trying to stay pure and avoid installing applications that I don’t absolutely need. So, I decided I would use Vista sidebar for my widgets. Today I found a great world time widget from WORLDTIMESERVER.COM. There’s also a 12-hour version of the widget, if you can’t handle the 24 hour dial.

Dallas