Last Saturday the check engine light came on in our Subaru. The last time a check engine light came on in one of our vehicles the vehicle ran so poorly I had to have it towed. Since we have multiple vehicles we opted to drive the other vehicles until we could get the Subaru looked at. On Sunday night I saw that a local television station was gone to do an expose on repair shops taking advantage of customers with a check engine light problem. Yesterday my wife and I drove over to the Subaru dealer to drop it off. This looked like a problem that would not get fixed for a few days and it looked expensive. I thought a sensor had failed or possibly the engine computer had become flaky. When I got there the customer service manager grabbed a portable analyzer and ran a diagnostic on the car. He turned and smiled at me. He said he had reset the error message, “Misfire on piston 2”, and I should come back if it reappears. He left me and went off to tend to other customers.

While I was doing a little research on RSS I ran into the SpamBayes port for Outlook by Mark Hammond. You can find more info on SpamBayes at spambayes.sourceforge.net/. Mark's installer is at starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/spambayes/. I am running it with ActiveState Python and Outlook 2002.

On Friday I decided to go ahead and code up an RSS manually for legacy farm. While I was at it I coded up both a 1.0 and 2.0 version. I started out with the RSS from the Legacy Farm category and stripped out the Userland specific stuff. I verified the feeds with the RSS Validator. I added the feed to subscriptions to check out. I will probably look briefly at using Python to generate the RSS and xhtml snippets.

Jon Lithgow. “Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.” [Quotes of the Day]

William Goldman. “Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.” [Quotes of the Day]

Jason Cook: Sharing Your Site with RSS

Nice article with good links to other tutorials on RSS. I did not find my magic bullet but I have a couple more ideas. I tested out my other website to see which version of PHP it had installed and found out that it did not have php installed. My ISP is willing to upgrade my service to the “Advanced” for an extra $30/month. Although I am only paying about $17/month for web hosting, there are plenty of web hosting programs that offer many more features for a lower monthly cost.

Allan Goldfein. “Only exceptionally rational men can afford to be absurd.” [Quotes of the Day]

Yesterday I took a little detour and played with Jedit. Jedit is an open source text editor with a variety of plugins. I was checking out the tidy and xml plugins. It is cheaper alternative to topstyle but with a lot less features. I reread the Udell post a couple of times to figure out exactly what he was trying to do and what he accomplished. Jedit is nice but I think that htmlarea and htmltidy is the direction I should pursue.

The subject of the post is xhtml is RSS feeds but the meat of the post is producting valid XHTML in a weblog. This is a subject I have been interested in for several months. It really is a couple of subjects which revolve around creating XHTML in Radio. The MSHTML editor in the IE browser is at the core of the problem. It is easy to use but it creates non-xhtml html code in wyswig mode and their is no way to modify its behavior. Htmlarea is a partial solution. This post talks about using TIDY to transform a post to XHTML. Everything is migrating to a lightweight wyswig editor that produces valid xhtml.

Cincinnati got drenched today. We had a lot of flooding and the area remains under a flood watch since we are due for more rain. I guess we should be grateful. So many places have suffered from tornadoes. It took me a couple of hours to pick up my son at his sleep over. The rode was flooded going to the house. It reminded of the rains we would get when we lived in Houston.