Archive for January 26th, 2006
Feed43…daddy likey
I totally forget who to thank for pointing this out. I caught it in one of my feeds, but it was a couple of days ago. Anyway, I finally got my invite code to use Feed43 (Feed For Free). It’s awesome. I will say that it’s probably not for novice users. The interface requires you to know HTML and a bit about pattern matching. So it’s unlikely my mother will ever use it.
But…if you have the tools and the talent, Feed43 will let you take any feedless web page and generate a feed for it. You can find individual sections of the page or repeating segments and turn them into RSS items. This is great for me because there are several sites I find myself occasionally polling to see if there are any updates (because they don’t publish a feed). Now I can easily set up feeds for whatever and just add them to my aggregator.
It will be interesting to see how web site operators handle this. This is obviously a really simple way to screen scrape sites that use ads to generate money. You could easily set up Feed43 to scrape a site and send you back the bits you want, minus the ads. I imagine this will prompt some people to start randomizing their pages a bit or to simply ban traffic from the Feed43 systems. Hopefully there are a few smart people out there who will see this and get a hint to start generating feeds of their content. They could start generating feeds with embedded ads and it would make an easy enough route to get the data that people wouldn’t bother with Feed43.
There’s nothing I can see in the terms of service that would prevent users from generating new feeds and then sharing the URLs with others. Maybe I’ll see if I can come up with some slick ones and post them here.
Update: Reading is good for you. I found the Feed43 FAQ:
Q: Can I share my feeds with others?
A: Of course you can. Just send them a link to your feed, or even place this link on your web site.
3 comments January 26, 2006
When is a leak not a leak?
At more than one interview I’ve been asked, “can you have a memory leak in Java?” Technically the answer is, no. Truthfully the answer is, sort of. Java can’t leak memory in the classic sense that languages like C and C++ can. In those languages (and others) it’s possible to allocate memory, drop it on the floor and lose it until the process exits. You can’t do that in Java. If you drop it on the floor, the garbage collector will find it. But you can put it somewhere and forget about it…like in a list or a map. It’s technically not a leak, because your application is still “using” it. But for all intents and purposes it walks, talks and acts like a leak.
There’s an article on IBM’s developerWorks site discussing leaks in Java. It actually uses a term I think is more accurate, “loitering.” The memory hasn’t been leaked, and it’s not doing anything…but it’s still hanging around. The solution, in Java, is to use references. More specifically, weak and soft references. They allow the garbage collector to collect objects, even if they’re still referenced…as long as those references are only weak or soft references.
Fun stuff, reminds me of why I miss Java sometimes.
January 26, 2006
Possible context to Sue Decker's statements
Ken Norton fills in some possible contexts for Sue Decker’s recent statements. Some of these are funny. This one in particular is my favorite:
“Our search engineers tell me we’re shooting for No. 0.”
January 26, 2006
