You may recall that the blogroll disappeared from the right-hand side of this website a couple of weeks ago.

After some struggling with french accents, I’ve wrestled it back, this time on a page all its own.

As detailed here, I’m using NetNewsWire to maintain my blogroll now. One side-effect of this is that blogs that used to appear in the blogroll that don’t have an RSS feed are no longer there.

And because I use NetNewsWire to read all the blogs on the blogroll, it only contains blogs that I check in on regularly; I’ve pared off some links that were there but never read. As such, you’re seeing exactly the same sites on the blogroll that I’ve reading every day.

I’ve added a handy link to the blogroll page on the top-right.

Enjoy.

Earlier in this space, I detailed a problem I ran into with accented characters when trying to set up a system to use NetNewsWire to maintain blogroll for my weblog.

At long last, I’ve cracked the accented character problem, and so, if only to assist others who find themselves in the same boat, I present the final results here.

My goal was to export my list of RSS subscriptions in NetNewsWire to a text file, transfer that text file to my webserver, and then post-process it in PHP, loading it into a MySQL database where I could manipulate it at will, including using it to draw this blogroll page on the fly.

The first step is to use AppleScript to export the subscription list as a text file:

tell application “NetNewsWire”
    set c to “”
    set linefeed to “\n”
    repeat with thisSub in subscriptions
        set s to “” as Unicode text
        set s to s & (is group of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (inGroup of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (display name of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenName of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenDescription of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (home URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (RSS URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (icon URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set t to TECConvertText s 
            fromCode “UNICODE-2-0” toCode “ISO-8859-1”
        set c to c & t
    end repeat
end tell

set blogroll to “blogroll.txt”
set f to (POSIX path of blogroll)
set n to open for access file f with write permission
write c to n
close access n

This script loops through each of my subscriptions in NetNewsWire, gathers the relevant parts to export as a Unicode string called s, and then converts that string to ISO-8859-1 (aka ISO Latin-1) using a scripting addition called TEC OSAX.

To download and install TEC OSAX, simply follow the download link on this page, and then copy the file called TEX.osax to /Library/ScriptingAdditions (you may need to create that folder if it doesn’t exist already; note that there’s no space in the folder name).

Once the conversion to ISO-8859-1 is complete, the resulting string t is added to a string c which will later be written to a file.

Once all the information is gathered about each subscription, the string c, which contains a linefeed-separated list of attributes for each subscription, is written to a file called blogroll.txt.

This file is then copied to my webserver, using SCP, by a shell script, which then post-processes the file using a PHP script, the important part of which is this:

$string =  htmlentities($string);

This line, which appears in the loop that reads in and parses the blogroll text file, converts the accented characters in the ISO-8859-1 character set to HTML entities.

The end result is that the ç that started out in NetNewsWire as a MacRoman 0x8D, gets converted to Unicode U+00E7, then gets converted to the ISO-8859-1 character 0xB8, and finally to the HTML entity ç.

And so accents get preserved and François Nonnenmacher comes out as François Nonnenmacher.

There’s a companion book to the Fueling the Future series I mentioned earlier.

Here’s the weirdness: the publisher’s price for the book is $37.95. That’s also what it’s selling for at the local Indigo store in Charlottetown.

However, on Indigo.ca, the store’s website, the book is listed at $34.95 regular price, with a sale price of $24.46. That means that even with shipping charges added on (for a total of $30.36), the online price is cheaper than the store price.

While I suppose this may make sense on some macro level, it does seem somewhat absurd that the same company will charge me $7 more to get in my car to drive to their store to purchase a book than they will to hand-deliver it to my door.

The final irony, given the nature of the title, is that shipping lots of books to a central location is undoubtedly more energy efficient than hand-delivery by mail to individual consumers.

The CBC’s Fueling the Future project is interesting. I watched the CBC Newsworld Special on Sunday: it was basically “reality TV meets energy policy dicussion.” Leaving out that the hour-long format caused much of the richness of what started out as an all-day session to be lost, it was compelling television, with an interesting cast of energy experts.

You can watch a repeat of the program on December 7 on CBC News Sunday (both on Newsworld and on the main network); there are also segments on CBC Radio’s Ideas on Wednesday evenings until December 10th.

From the CRTC (via Angus TeleManagement Group) comes the news that Eastlink now has 10.5% of the market in local residential lines in Charlottetown.

Here’s the chart in the CRTC report that breaks the numbers down. Charlottetown is second only to Halifax in the country in terms of the market share of local residential telephone competitors.

This reflects my own anecdotal evidence: in the past three or four days, I’ve had two friends mentioned their recent switch to Eastlink. In both cases they were proud to be “Aliant-free.”

Perhaps this explains the recent rash of Aliant television commercials featuring a series of vignettes of Aliant employees talking about the competition. Only time will tell whether Aliant can advertise itself out of the legacy of so many years of arrogant monopoly.

How is it that ITAP, the putative trade organization of the IT industry on PEI, can so effectively take an interesting idea like open source and make it sound completely dreadful?

I ask this only partly rhetorically: I really would like to know whether ITAP purposely sets out to forward a bunged up world view, or whether they’re trying really, really hard to be relevant and interesting but just can’t seem to manage to pull it together.

I mean, really, here’s a movement that has radical and interesting ideas at its core, and ITAP’s plan for open source evangelizing involves importing someone whose job title is “Manager, Enterprise Architecture IT Standards, Architecture and Security Sector, Telecommunications and Informatics Program, PWGSC.”

If that isn’t bad enough, the formal proceedings are followed by “an hour-long ‘visioning’ exercise that would begin to establish the industry objectives for an Open Systems Centre of Excellence.”

Yah, that sounds like fun.

I can’t for the life of me figure this out; it seems a lot like trying to capture butterflies in a bottle, and sucking all the freedom and beauty out in the process.

You would think that life in outer space would be all fun and games: staring out the window at the moon, staring out the window at earth, playing fun anti-gravity tricks with drops of water and the like. Apparently, however, life in outer space is a lot like life on earth, at least according to NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 29 Nov 2003:

Taking to the air and flying to and fro in their voluminous residence after wake-up at the regular 1:00am EST, morning inspection, hygiene and breakfast, CDR/SO Michael Foale and FE Alexander Kaleri performed the regular weekly 3-hr. housecleaning. [The “uborka stantsii” focuses on removal of food waste products, cleaning of compartments with vacuum cleaner, wet cleaning of the Service Module (SM) dining table and other surfaces with disinfectants (“Fungistat”) and cleaning of fan screens to avoid temperature rises.]

Yee haw!

Of course things did perk up later in the day:

Working off the Russian task list, the FE conducted another brief session of the Russian Uragan earth imaging program, using the LIV Betacam video system and the Kodak 760 DSC (digital still camera) from SM window #9, now available again in LVLH attitude. [Today’s targets were the city of Abudja, Central America in the direction of the Panama Canal, the Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, Cuba and the Sargasso Sea.]

Where do I sign up?

While we’re talking about accents, here’s a revelation that I had last week in Montreal: when native French-language speakers speak, they’re not trying to “sound French,” that’s just the way they speak. This is a key difference between my speaking French (which perhaps suffers from my trying to “sound French”) and theirs. Somehow this hadn’t occured to me before. Probably another instance of Americentrism.

Another thing I realized: the French bonjour combines the word for “good,” bon with the word for “day,” jour and thus must mean, roughly, “good day.” This is why cashiers in Montreal say “bon soir” in the evening: they’re saying “have a good night.”

As you can see, I’m not one for understanding things that are no doubt so immediately obvious as to be unremarkable to others.

My “Montreal as a mostly non-French speaker” weekend with Oliver was buffered by the presence, at important junctures, of the almost bilingual Brother Steve. My big failure was asking, at Ikea, for the “manager’s special” in the restaurant, which was spelled out in French right there on the menu board. Somehow I came out sounding like “erspeckel du deeratrur” and was greeted with blank looks from the cook. I was saved by the English-speaking directeur.

My one success was saying, in French, “is it possible to open the door for the baby” to the subway toll collector when I wanted him to unlock the special door that allows for strollers. I often find myself lapsing into very obtuse ways of asking for things in stores: “is it possible to obtain a device with which I can prevent the water of my small child here from making his clothes wet?” and the like.

Speaking of the subway: Montreal gets failing marks on rolling access to the trains. We didn’t see one elevator in a station the entire weekend; for us this meant a lot of “out of the stroller, onto the escalator, in the stroller” gymnastics; I imagine for people in wheelchairs it simply means not taking the subway. This is in contrast to, say, Bilbao, which had elevators at every stop, or Barcelona, which had them at many.