<@quidity> Surely you're meant to write your own blog software?
< Twofish> quidity - using blosxom is basically writing your own blog software

So true. I noticed blosxom wasn't adding a pubDate entity to the default rss field, which made the LJ feed think all my posts were yesterday. And the amount of hassle it's been trying to get a valid RSS feed has been quite astounding. I thought this was the stuff the blogsphere ran on?

Firstly, I had issues with paragraphs. I'd been marking them up myself with <p>...</p>, which seemed the wise thing to do, but was a bit annoying over just having a blank line between them. So I found blox which seems to make it a bit easier.

Then to dealing with the aforementiond pubDate problem. slarti and David pointed me at a couple of patches to add the correct entity (which is already done by the Debian packages, but of course I didn't think of looking there). However although that seems to work, I end up with non-escaped HTML in the XML output, which isn't right.

So. Further searching. Several different RSS/ATOM plugins. And I eventually find Andrew Cowie's page on having the same problems, and his rss20 plugin. Which seems to basically Just Work. Or at least, Feed Validator is happy. Let's see if it makes LJ pick up the correct dates too.

So, within only a few minutes of #keble discovering I had an ickle blog, I was syndicated on LJ as noodlesblog. I feel so dirty, but it's touching to think chrisvenus would rather read what I'm up to on the web than just ask me on IRC.

Ok. Every now and then I get asked about this and people don't like "It's not particularly interesting" as an answer. It's not, so don't say you weren't warned.

Many moons ago I went on holiday to Crete with Kathy, Derek and Jane. They'd just finished their A-Levels, I was just about to start my final year of them. We got a very cheap deal for 2 weeks. During the course of these 2 weeks we found the only thing we all ate that we could easily get hold of and cook in the very basic self catering were noodles. At some point I said to Kathy that if I ever got round to running a BBS (which I'd been talking about for a while), then I'd call it Noodles.

As it happened I did end up running a BBS, and lo it was called Noodles (I've just tried to find a suitable Fidonet nodelist to indicate this, but failed. I was 2:443/21 from some time in 1997 until 2000 or so though). And eventually it got to the point where I got email gating to the BBS, so I used a subdomain of noodles. Note at this point I wasn't anywhere near using Noodles as a nick. I was j@ as an email address.

More time passes, I'm getting ready to go to university. My college "father", Jon Chin, writes to me and offers me an account on his machine in college. I suggest jonmcd (which was my Nortel username) or noodles (as I'd used that as an ISP account name for the BBS). Jon decides he likes silly usernames and so I get noodles. Fair enough.

Note I'm still not actually known as Noodles. However when Compsoc ask me for an account name, I choose noodles, rather than having to remember multiple account names. This continues, until I'm noodles most places I have accounts. And then OxIRC starts. And I type "irc" at a bash prompt and magically I become noodles on IRC. And that's really where it started. I think my downfall was the day I failed to turn round when someone shouted "jon" in a lecture theatre, but did turn round when they shouted "noodles".

There. Sorry you asked now?

Meh. Still feeling run down after Debconf. Am sure I didn't feel this bad after the last one. I'm such a crock.

Not up to a lot; mainly been dealing with customer support requests and moving one of Black Cat's secondary nameservers around. Also been looking at various smart card specifications since I obtained a reader from Simon Richter last week. There doesn't seem to be a lot of useful Linux code out there. Although pcscd works with the reader ok I haven't found anything that can usefully deal with the two examples of smartcard I currently possess - a Chip&Pin credit card and a GSM SIM card. However I've found specs for both, so hoepfully I'll be able to knock something up.

So, last day at Debconf. And I've got sick. Bah. That's what I get for not sleeping enough. Too many late night saunas (well, only 2, so perhaps not enough?). It's been good to put some more faces to names, and also to see the people I met for the first time last year again! I'm not quite sure I was as productive at hacking on stuff as I was last year, but then that's never the main point in these things for me. I did manage to get CACert assured while here and can now assure other people which is cool. JD will no doubt laugh at me for this. Plus I've been pointed at some groovy looking GnuPG compatible smartcards which I'll have to look into more closely. Is it wrong to see them and immediately wonder about whether the code is available and if the key size can be upped?

My flight's too damn early tomorrow morning, so I think I'll be spending the night in the airport. Less hassle than getting 2 or 3 hours sleep and waking everyone else in the room up when I'm getting ready to go.

Oh, and Robot101 rocks.