Coding In Paradise

FuturePundit: Monster Waves Major Cause Of Large Ship Sinkings: "Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins.

Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in many such cases.

Mariners who survived similar encounters have had remarkable stories to tell. In February 1995 the cruiser liner Queen Elizabeth II met a 29-metre high rogue wave during a hurricane in the North Atlantic that Captain Ronald Warwick described as "a great wall of water… it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover." "

WikiMl: "WikiMl (for Wiki MarkupLanguage) is a non XML markup language similar to the formats used by WikiWikiWeb systems for user entry.

WikiMl does a fair attempt to be compatible by the common practices of WikiWikiWeb systems, however since there is not a complete compatibility and interoperability between these formats, it can't claim to be compatible with them either...

The goal behind the definition of this format as a MarkupLanguage is to take WikiMl out of the sphere of WikiWikiWeb systems to use it as a full class MarkupLanguage easy to edit and able to replace a subset of XHTML in XML based applications."

This looks cool; I need to look at this some more when I get time.

Scripting News: 7/22/2004: "Note to aggregator developers: I'm doing a special aggregator for these feeds. But the list is open and will be maintained, so you can use it. It's a subtly different kind of subscription list, because it will change, you should subscribe to the OPML not to the feeds contained in the OPML. It's a chance to do a little upgrade among the aggregators for the DNC. I did it this way on purpose. It's the "neat net tricks" part of the barn-raising. There should always be a developer angle, imho."

Dave, this is a fascinating idea. I work for an aggregator but I'm not sure exactly how to implement this. When I go to that link I get an OPML file; how would I modify my aggregator to be able to get updates from an OPML file? I love that idea of OPML files being able to represent an aggregator for a specific subject. Can you flesh this out some more?

Apache Codec - Commons Codec: "Commons Codec provides implementations of common encoders and decoders such as Base64, Hex, various phonetic encodings, and URLs." This is great; its full of all sorts of interesting encoders and decoders that I need alot, like base 64 encoding and more exotic ones like Soundex and Metaphone encoding, which can match words that sound similar but which aren't spelt the same.

The 9/11 Commission Report: "In October 1993, Somali tribesmen shot down U. S. hel-icopters, killing 18 and wounding 73 in an incident that came to be known as "Black Hawk down." Years later it would be learned that those Somali tribes-men had received help from al Qaeda." Wow, I didn't know that al Qaeda was involved in bringing down the helicopters in Somalia.

Informa: RSS Library for Java: "The goal of the Informa Project is to provide a news aggregation library based on the Java Platform. The idea was born by the authors of two Java news reader applications (HotSheet and Risotto). We intended to unify the common parts into a library which can be used by any developer who needs to address those issues in their application." I need to take a look at this.