Firefox slays Eclipse?

It's come to the point that I love Firefox for my browser of choice. If it wasn't for two very major problems. (I understand its only in a 0.8 stage of release so I'm more venting than complaining at this point.)

1) Firefox periodically kills Eclipse. I'm not sure what I click on or do, but its possibly when popping open a new window through javascript. When I switch back to my code, Eclipse crashes saying an SWT error has occurred. I can either reopen Firefox to save Eclipse (faster) or reopen Eclipse (slower and doesn't always fix problem).

2) Copying and pasting in Firefox. I've seen the bug report somewhere, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now. Essentially the copy and paste to the windows clipboard breaks sometimes. Switching tabs seems to fix it. Almost like the copy and paste gets confused between tabs.

Other than that I'm happy. Especially with the Web Developer Extension plugin that someone put on javablogs the other day. It rocks!

Spam Advertisement Apology

I feel the need to apologize to the javablogs.com community. You see, I was a user of 2rss.com. They provided (yes, thats past tense) a free atom to rss converter. With Blogger not supporting rss, I have been using 2rss.com to supply javablogs.com with updates.

Today I noticed that someone/something was posting spam to javablogs in my name! Imagine my shock! The links went to some other site than my blog, but the entries definitely looked like they were from me. After some research, I see that 2rss.com has started adding a single spam ad at the bottom of their converter feed; without any notification to the users! Of course, you can pay to remove the ads, but why would I want to pay for this???

Instantly I had to find a new converter. Thanks to
forret.com for a recommendation on feedburner.com. They even have more options than 2rss does.

So, javablogs.com, please accept my apologies for the unruly actions of 2rss.com.

Weather XML, the new frontier?

Today my quest has been to find some standards for disseminating weather data over the web. My initial reaction is, of course, that RSS would be a perfect fit! Technically we'd need to extend RSS to handle the weather data in XML format, but the basis is there. We just need to receive the weather anytime a sensor changes and display it to the user.

The National Weather Service along with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) have put up an "Experimental" XML site. From here I can grab an RSS 2.0 feed or a CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) feed. Now CAP is interesting because it was very recently approved by OASIS as a standard.

To my point... CAP seems to be a great standard for Weather Alerts, but what about normal weather data? If I just want to know the wind speed / temp / humidity / etc, then where's the Weather XML standard? I found a couple posts about WeatherML but that was from 2000 and looked abandoned. I'd like our sensors to output a standard markup, but only if we can find one. We just might have to right our own schema for this. Any ideas?

Atom to RSS converter

I noticed this morning that java.blogs was not picking up my entries. Naturally I assumed it was caused by my switch from jRoller to Blogger yesterday. I checked my configuration and it dawned on me that Blogger uses Atom while java.blogs is looking for RSS. If the differences are new to you, then do a quick google to find numerous information on the political differences.

Anyway, to fix my problem I needed an Atom to RSS converter. Google to my rescue again! I found this little gem, that takes your Atom.xml and spits out valid RSS. I'm not back on java.blogs. Try it for yourself:

atom

atom as rss

Thanks for 2rss.com for their services!

Moving in from jRoller

Finally fed up with jRoller, I have now migrated all of my blogs to Blogger. I just couldn't take the downtime any longer. And how could I pass up the new templates and comments on Blogger?!?!

My old blog is here if you're interested in seeing it. No looking back now.