Ran across this article on xml.com on the builder library for Ruby. The library is for building XML documents using methods. The library looks really cool. I don't think I have seen anything so simple for doing this sort of thing. It looks good for creating XML documents from scratch, but I wonder about how well it would work for manipulating existing documents. Anyway, it a short article. Well worth the 5 or 10 minutes to read it.

Over the weekend, I found a 802.11G USB network adapter for OS X. When it comes to wifi adpaters for Mac, you either get an Airport or Airport Extreme card with your initial purchase, or pay through the nose to get one later. So after running across this note on the Net about using a DLink DWL-G122 USB adapter to hook a Mac to a wifi G network, I thought I would check it out. Well worth a try because there are pretty much zero alternatives to the Apple wifi products.

In my house, the reception with the Airport cards is not great. My eMac is the prime example, since the Airport card goes inside the drive bay with no antenna to speak of there are a lot of slow transfers and dropped signals.

As the note points out, all you need to do to get the DLink apdater to work is to download the 2500 series drivers from RALink Technology. Run the installer and restart your system. Next, hook up your USB adapter to the system. This will launch a very simple wifi utility that allows you to choose wifi networks. For me, it took a minute or two for the eMac to recognize the new adapter, but once it did, I was able to select it from the adapter options under Network System Preferences. Just enable the new adapter and disable the Airport adapter.

My Linksys wireless router is on the 2nd floor of my house and the eMac is on the main floor. There is a noticable increase in the signal strength and the speed with which web pages load. Woo hoo! Also you should know that the DWL-G122 comes with its own little hub or USB card holder. Its a weighted 1 port hub with a 4 ft cable. It basically allows you to place the adapter wherever you want on the desk. So the adapter does not hang out the side of your machine but instead looks like a cool little antenna.

If you are looking for a way to upgrade an old Mac to 802.11g, the DLink DWL-G122 looks to be the answer. If you watch for deals, you should be able to get it for a street price of about $30. Now is the time to buy as many networking companies are discontinuing plain G adapters for new specialized G adapters. (And I forgot to mention, the DWL-G122 also works great on PC's!)

Today I was listening to podcasts and heard a two week old Inside the Net episode. The podcast was about the site pandora.com which is a high tech Internet Radio site. The company has developed some scientific methods for matching your musical tastes to music. Now their system is not just based on popularity contests like Amazon. These guys actually hire musicians to analyze the music and tag it in a technical sense.

How the site works is, you go to their site and pick a group or artist like U2. Then, based on the structure, style, vocal style, etc.., of the music U2 plays, they match you to similar groups. So you end up getting a stream of music that is taylored to your own personal tastes, in theory.

Now I was very excited about this because I am into New Age and Celtic music, stuff like Vangelis, Enya, Clannad, Loreena McKinnitt, and the Chieftains. It is tough to find music in these genres because most New Age music sucks, and there is not that much Celtic music to choose from. So I was pretty excited to try this out. Finally a service to guide me to new artists. Well things didn't work out quite as I had hoped.

I went to the site and setup a Vangelis station. That was a snap. So the music starts streaming and they start sending me some really heinous crap. So to help their system out, I try to identify my "favorite" songs so I can add them to the list of my favorites. So I tried to list tracks from what I would consider Vangelis' classic CDs like the Bladerunner Soundtrack, Themes which includes the opening title from "The Bounty", and some tracks from his 1492 soundtrack. Their system could not identify a single track or CD I owned. Talk about disappointing. And it wasn't just Vangelis. No luck with any of the Irish/Celtic soundtracks like Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, etc..

I was able to setup a Celtic New Age station because they do know who Enya, Clannad, Loreena McKinnitt and Secret Garden are. But even then I got some really weird songs streamed to me. Like a Madonna track (not that she doesn't have some good songs, but its not the same vibe as Clannad) and another from Heart?

So for now I guess I'm staying with live365.com and sky.fm and the like. Guess we will have to rely on the humans to DJ for a while longer.

I just wrote a how to for splitting apart a list of values in an XML element into an element list using XSLT. This is one of those things I had to look up a couple of times in the last few months and am just tired of "refinding" examples. So now I can just grab the code any time.

It is amazing how often you will find XML applications that do not properly mark up data and just stuff data lists in an element. If your data has some meaning, say a parts list or product list, identify each item with tags. It will save you work in the long run. Trust me on this one.

Well I guess I should make an obligatory comment about the new MacBook announced yesterday at MacWorld. The first thing that comes to mind? Drool.... I gotta have one of those.

But it looks like it will be best to wait a bit. There are not that many applications ported yet. Plus, I want to see what they come up with for a new iBook. If they improve the resolution of the iBook a bit, that will be a better deal.

Anyway, I look forward to the coming product announcements from Apple.

This weekend I ran across a new product from VMWare. The VMWare player for Linux or Windows allows you to run a guest operating system on your machine for free. So for example, you can run a complete Ubuntu Linux install inside of Windows. VMWare uses virtualization techniques to do this, not emulation. This means the virtual machines perform quite well if you have enough memory.

Previously, you could only use the VMWare Workstation product to do this (which costs about $199). Of course, there are some limitations. You can't create a virtual machine from scratch, and you can't setup things like a private network on the machine (your IP address is shared, the workstation has a few other options). To use the player, you can download a number of prebuilt Linux operating systems that work great. I played around with the Ubuntu OS and had quite a bit of fun with it.

This looks like a great idea to me. By offering the free product, a lot more people will get a chance to use the software. Once they check it out, I imagine a lot of people will buy Workstation so they can create their own virtual machines. I can think of a number of uses for testing or training with the software.

Download the player and check it out. Its a great way play around with Linux with little or no fuss.

Over the break I also discovered that Circuit City allows in-store pickup for Web purchases. Your order will be ready in 24 minutes or you get a $24 gift certificate. Pretty sweet deal. (This has probably been around for years, but I just found out about it. ) Anyway, talk about a time saver. I don't know how many hours I wasted going from store to store to try and find a particular network adapter, etc... Ugh!

Anyway, my experience with the new store in Thorton, CO store at I-25 and Hwy 7 has been great. Walk in, show your ID and credit card, walk out with your stuff. I picked up some power strips from the Westminster, CO store last night and had to wait while they 'got' my order. More like wait 10 minutes while they put it together. I may write to complain and see if I get my $24. More likely I just won't shop at that store again.

More retailers should be doing this (Barnes and Noble comes to mind). Pick it out, and pick it up, it's the future.

Well I'm back from vacation. The main thing I have been working on has been migrating my Mac Mini and TiBook to OS X 10.4 Tiger. The only problem I have have run into is with Subversion on Apache 2. After importing project files, when you try to checkout project files you get an error like this:

Subversion blows chunks....

No that's not it. ;-) Its something more like:

svn: REPORT of '/path/to/repository/!svn/vcc/default': Chunk delimiter was invalid

Turns out there is a bug in Subversion and Apache on OS X 10.4 that causes it to choke trying to check out any file greater than 64k. On some systems you can keep issuing the checkout command over and over and eventually you will get everything. On other systems you are stuck. The only fix is to recompile Apache and Subversion from scratch with some obscure environment variable set (see the FAQ for more info, linked above).

Well since I don't want to get into gcc hell, I decided to learn how to use the svnserve server and just use that for the future. After about 2 hours of mucking around I think I have it figured out.

FYI: Also wanted to let you know I haven't updated all my software to handle a year rollover so there could be a few broken links and no archive links to the 2005 entries until I get it all fixed. That could take a few days.