Over the course of our trip I kept seeing all sort of strange and interesting things Baltimore is famous for, but the nagging overall feeling I kept getting is that while the city overall has tried to attract people to visit, there were a lot of small “finishing touches” that just weren’t there, and made the overall experience good, but not great. It felt like there is a small step that remains to be taken and no one thought about taking it.

Some of the things that concerned me:

• At the Light Rail station, no instructions were provided as to how to use the Charm Card (I happened to have a WMATA SmarTrip card left over from a trip to DC which works the same way). I eventually found the instructions online and even then, it turns out that you cannot use one card to pay for two adults. For a visiting tourist, that is a major issue. To make the whole thing even funnier, they have instructions inside the light rail car itself, at which point it is too late to get a ticket.
• While there is handicap access, there aren’t any details on strollers.
• At the Light Rail stations, inside the cars and online, there is no mention of the Charm City Circulator - a free bus downtown. We ended up walking about 7 blocks to the Inner Harbor, and would not have done that even we knew the bus was available. While I understand that the CCC is a city project and Light Rail is state operated, but a little cooperation would go a long way.
• The signage pointing to the Inner Harbor on the street corners is ambiguous - we weren’t sure we were heading in the right direction until we got very close to the Harbor.
• We tried to use the skywalk at the convention center because my kids wanted to see it and went to use the handicap elevator to go up with a stroller. The elevator worked and opened, but lo and behold there were two homeless guys sleeping inside! We decided it was best not to disturb them and have them nap in their cozy place. For a tourist that could be somewhat jarring.
• In the Harbor itself, there is very little signage regarding the public transportation available near by aside from generic signs pointing how blocks it is to the closest station in which direction. I remember seeing downtown maps in NYC when visiting.
• On the way back, we took a skywalk across Pratt street. While the elevator on the Harbor side worked perfectly without any sleeping people in it, the other side had no working elevators, so we ended up going down three floors of parking ramps to get the floor.
• We wanted to hitch a ride on the CCC on the way back, but the mobile app did not have prediction times for the bus, the station pole did not have time estimates on it and the regular website claimed it would be another 10 minutes. So we started walking only to get passed by a bus 2 minutes later. If you go out of your way to make sure the buses are tracked, you should also make sure that the website for tracking works! We eventually caught another one half way through.
• On the way back, we took a Light Rail car only to discover later on that it was going to the wrong destination (Light Rail has three lines). It would have been much easier if when the car came, it was clearly indicated and announced that this was the wrong car.

Some notes on CM7:

• CM7 installation instructions fail to mention that a separate file containing Google’s stock apps such as gMail, Market, etc. is available.
• I followed the instructions provided and it took about 5 mins for the whole process to run.
• Other than an occasional Market crash, I haven’t see any problems. It runs faster and better than the WebOS software. I also like the dual boot functionality.

Or not.

Time will tell.

This standard covers the way ISPs report spam and other abuse messages to each other and is currently in used by companies like AOL, Yahoo, etc. Becoming an official IETF standard is a big deal since it will finally put into final shape what this standard looks like.

Congratulations to the MARF co-chairs for leading the process and all of the participants.

My document repository will be updated some time tonight with the new information as well as all of the drafts.

So he called McAfee’s customer service and guess what? They can fix the problem for a low fee of $90!!!!! They did not tell him to go online and lookup the instructions, or send him to Towson’s helpdesk since it is a corporate version – instead they are looking to make a quick buck because of a problem they themselves have caused.

This is shameful and they should be investigated.

UPDATE: McAfee posted that they will reimburse their customers for “reasonable expenses” incurred in fixing their computers. No details just yet.

The best one so far that I found is BitDefender’s RescueCD which can be downloaded here. A nice feature is that if you plugin a network cable, the CD will download the latest virus definitions before scanning.

You can check this Russian site for full instructions and tools, or use this tool.

For the technical among you – there seems to be an issue with the statically linked package for Ubuntu. The dynamic package for Debian seems to work better.

A groundhog has been attacking our garden for the past few weeks. After a call to the exterminator he has been finally caught. You can see it in the picture waiting to be transported out of the city.

It seems that while officially Google Base supports Unicode and utf-8 encoding in XML feeds as stated here. they don’t support it fully. Apparently it seems that instead of taking plain UTF-8 text, Google Base requires it to be encoded at Unicode entities like &xxxx; where xxxx is the Unicode codepoint. This was originally found by this blogger.

The solution in XSLT at least is to use us-ascii encoding which forces entity creation. In Perl you can probably use Encode.pm or iconv.

Many thanks to Michael Fourman of the Mac Tips blog for this.

1and1 (fails running PHP 4, but works with PHP 5. Add the line: AddType x-mapp-php5 .php to the file .htaccess in your main wordpress directory to enable PHP 5. This also appears to not only affect Core updates but some Plugin updates as well.)

(Something about many eyeballs and bugs rings a bill here)

A creepy crawler recently sighted. Otherwise known as the house centipede or Scutigera coleoptrata.

2. ShafTag.com – a metasearch engine for tags using javascript and Google’s Feed API, over 2 years old, is losing its domain and moving to a subdomain.

use JSON::Any;
use XML::Simple;

my $convertor = JSON::Any->new();
my $data = $convertor->decode($json);
my $xml = XMLout($data);

UPDATE: it has been re-enabled with a new plugin.

HOWEVER, a related bug report (# 407213) has an interesting workaround which actually points to an undocumented feature in Firefox. By default, the property document.characterSet is ready only, however if you parse a new XML file with the encoding processing instruction set to a different character set, it will change the internal character set in the resulting XML DOM document even if that encoding is different than the parent document. Here is what the workaround in the bug report looks like:

var domDocument = new DOMParser().parseFromString("<?xml version='1.0'
encoding='UTF-8'?><dummy/>","application/xml");

It relies on the DOMParser object which is Firefox specific. For cross browser support, you can use Sarissa, which is a cross browser XML library for Javascript.

1. Letter from Cavalier – cavalier.pdf.

2. Reply from the FCC appears below:

This is in response to your inquiry, 08-XXXXXXXXXXX.  Detariffing became effective August 1, 2001.  A “tariff” is a legal document that a company files with a regulatory agency describing the rates, terms, and conditions of the services it provides.  Carriers no longer file a tariff with the FCC.  Detariffing makes it easier for you to find out what you are paying for your service and what other interstate long distance companies are charging for their services because under “de-tariffing” they now need to inform their customers of their rates for services. Now, you can compare the terms of your service to the terms offered by other companies.  This gives companies a greater incentive to reduce prices and improve their terms in order to remain competitive.  Some carriers may still be required to file tariffs with their states or to the state they are providing service to consumers.  You may review the News Release regarding detariffing at:
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/News_Releases/2001/nrcc0115.html.

The Energy Recovery fee is not regulated by the FCC.  Cavalier clearly states, “…the charge is not a tax but is a fee added by Cavalier to recover additional costs due to increasing energy charges.”

a. Cover comparison tool – gets book covers by ISBN from four public services (LibraryThing, OpenLibrary, Amazon and Google).

b. Book API comparison tool – gets book information by ISBN from 7 public book APIs (Amazon, Google, ISBNDB, LibraryThing, Library of Congress, OpenLibrary and WorldCat).

c. ISBN Analysis tool – compares xISBN-like services side by side.

Comments are werlcome to code /at/ shaftek [dot] org.