Feed Validator has moved. The Feed Validator, previously located at feeds.archive.org/validator/, now has its own domain: http://feedvalidator.org. If you have any scripts, templates, or applications that point to the Feed Validator, now would be a good time to update them. (204 words) [dive into mark]

Hey, thanks for telling everyone…finally. I ended up using the Redland RSS 1.0 Validator yesterday when my favorite validator was not found. I thought they probably took the server down for maintenance. Today I find out its moved. I checked both feeds and my 1.0 feed failed because the channel description used dublin core. I took the dc: out and the feed validated. I then updated the footer in my dreamweaver templates for the new url to the validator.

I was playing with RSSOwl recently and saw what I thought were some problems in my rss feed for legacy farm. I cleaned up the date errors. Since the feed looked ugly in RSSOwl, I started to wonder about what the feed would look like if it was transformed into RSS 1.0. I eventually ended up at http://ideagraph.net/xmlns/ssr/modules.htm. I took the rss2rdf.xsl (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher) and ran it on my feed. Using XSLT to transform the feed is pretty cool! I validated the new feed on the Redland RSS 1.0 Validator. It had a couple of errors: title, link, and dates. The validator complained about the missing required fields: title and link. The title field was there but it used the Dublin core. My date fields had a different format and were being extracted incorrectly. I modified the xsl file and I now have a valid and correct RSS V1.0(i.e. RDF) feed. It still doesn't look good in RSSOwl but it is less ugly. Oh well! You can see the final product at http://www.legacyfarmltd.com/rss1.xml.

Iwas trying to pay bills today and got  a little distracted today with my T-Mobile bill. When I called T-Mobile to complain about roaming charges appearing on my bill, the representitive said that I did not have nationwide roaming. I knew I had signed up for it and had not been charged for roaming until recently. So I pulled out all of my T-Mobile bills and spread them accross the dining room table. My wife could see I was not happy so she did not bug me about the mess I had just created. After a little hunting I figured out the month they started charging me for roaming. When I called them back and pointed out the problem month, they apologized. They accidentally removed nationwide roaming when they added international roaming on my wife's phone. Oh well!

Eric Hoffer. “Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.” [Quotes of the Day]

qotd september 4. Patricia Neal: “A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Amen!

I re-installed WinPT & GnuPG today. I got a bunch of M$ security announcements today. I know M$ has problems but this was quite a bunch so I decided to spot check the validity. I had uninstalled WinPT & GnuPG awhile back since I needed to upgrade. The new versions are not much different than the previous versions. I had one bug that took me a little time to recognize. Outlook 2002 suppresses blank lines. If you copy the text of the security announcement to the clipboard with the suppressed lines it won't verify. Stop suppressing blank lines and the text copied to the clipboard will verify.

I had wondered about this for awhile but I think that I finally have it figured out. When you change your domain password on WinXP you need to logoff to change the cached credentials. Otherwise you will nagged into changing the password a second time.

I spent part of this Labor Day trying to update my “Friends List” in Mailtrust Pro. As I have mentioned earlier in “Spam Management”, Mailtrust is my first line of defense for my email addresses against spam and viruses. Mailtrust uses a combination of spam lookup, regexp filtering, blacklist, and whitelist to filter my mailboxes. What I knew but ignored until today was that I was behind in updating my friends list. An important email got deleted today. It had failed one of the filters and had been marked for deletion. After I read it I forgot to remove the delete checkmark and add it as a friend. My valid email addresses are in Outlook and I did not have an automatic approach to updating this list. Today I searched and found a temporary fix. I found an Outlook VBA macro found on spampal.org that dumps the email addresses to a text file. Since I have two contact folders I modified the macro to dump the emails from both folders. Then I copied and pasted the resulting file into the Mailtrust whitelist file. Mailtrust found and removed the duplicates. It would be nice if I could run this macro automatically each day and automatically update Mailtrust but Outlook is pretty fussy about running any macro. Since I do not add email addresses very often, I should probably be safe for a long time.