Good news! Necho support has been hacked into the current version of nntprss. I’ve just added the hack to my version and it works perfectly.

The nntprss necho hack comes from Semantic Web. Good job, that man!

The Mars Volta brought us the experimental Tremulant EP as a statement of intentions for their debut album. They spoke big words through layers of noise orchestrated to perfection: and the album lives up the to promise.

While “Deloused In the Comatorium” borrows much from the bands partial instantiation as the defining moment in rock known as At The Drive-In, they’ve taken their previous band’s work and gone off in a tangent as fast as possible.

The result is eclectic, but compelling. You’ll never notice that the majority of the songs break the 6 minute mark (most still going at full pace), it’s that immersing.

Tim Bray makes some interesting points about the abstraction of Nations. I can generally agree with him on most of it.

But there’s one thing that I think is important: just because our families and friends are more important to us than our countries, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t contribute to our country as a whole. We should help to make it as good a place as we can, since it is within our reach.

From there, our country (government and national organisations) should help other countries. The notion of “doing good” could potentially be distributed well across this abstraction.

Of course, that’s never the way it works. Maybe it’s late and I’m tired, maybe I’m just dreaming, but maybe we could use these arbitary systems to help others in other arbitary systems.

It’s not that Bruce Almighty is a particularly bad film, it’s not. It’s not even that Jim Carrey places the same character that he has in every other film he’s been in (barring The Truman Show). It’s not even that the assumptious preachy content is overt and irritating… Actually, maybe it is.

As with all slapstick comedy, it’s funny in places and sure to make most people smile at some point. But you won’t be quoting lines from this in a years time, or even a week. Comedy-lite: As a sandwich, compared to something like Wayne’s World‘s steaky goodness.

I’ve added a few new syndication formats today, thanks largely to the fact that the generic feed creation script I wrote last week actually works. So what are these fun new flavours of syndication?

First up is my ESF feed. This is a very simple format: date, title and link all in plain text. And that’s it. The ESF spec explains everything you need to know.

Secondly, is my CDF feed for IE users only (after the enhancements users of better browsers get, it’s the least I could do for those poor people still suffering a slow bloated browser). Click on the link to the feed and it’ll try to add itself to your favourites. Let it. This will then give you a list of all the current items.

A little bit more difficult to implement. I basically copied the format used by Sam and Aquarionics and did my best to get it to work. The only thing that wasn’t fairly obvious was that it must be served with a MIME type of application/cdf.

Both feeds, and others, can be found on the syndication page.