My friend [[Stephen Regoczei]] headed off yesterday for six weeks in France. He’ll be in and around Nantes: if you run into a Canadian speaking Hungarian-accented French on the west coast of France this summer, say hello for me.

I stumbled across this photo of Feldmarschalleutnant Georg Freiherr Rukavina today. It’s part of Austro-Hungarian Land Forces 1848-1918, a website that aims:

…to document the organisational history of the land forces of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy from just prior to the outbreak of the Great War until the collapse of the monarchy in 1918.

BBC dashboard widget:

Activate your BBC Listen Live widget to hear live radio from nine of the BBC’s national radio stations without the need to turn a switch or load a webpage. And if that’s not enough - why not pull out multiple widgets to represent different radio stations that you regularly listen to? Always present, always ready - it’s like having a radio installed in your computer.

Pointer from Ben Hammersley.

After several summers of really bad customer service from [[Cafe Diem]] it looked, this year, like they were getting things right: lots of friendly staff, free Wifi, a good selection of fresh pastries, and a renovated interior that makes the right subtle corrections to the interior space.

So I started sending people there, telling them it was safe to go back in the water again.

This morning, though, a negative report. An anonymous friend, let’s call him “Eduardo,” went along, based on my recommendation, for an early coffee and tasty chocolate croissant this morning at 8:00 a.m. only to find:

• The espresso machine “wasn’t ready yet.”
• There was only one chocolate croissant available, a day-old.

Eduardo went home and made himself a coffee.

I’m not ready to call this a return to the bad old Café Diem, but they’re obviously not firing on all cylinders if they can’t serve coffee and croissants when they open.

I welcome additional reports from the field, positive or negative.

I haven’t seen this elsewhere. The new iTunes 4.9 doesn’t support auto-syncing of podcasts to the iPod shuffle (emphasis mine):

Why not?

Last week I wrote about contacting AVShop, an Indiana-based retailer of pilot supplies, to suggest they release new product information via RSS.

Over the weekend I heard back from Jerry Richardson in their marketing department:

Thank you for your kind note. We are RSS believers. We’ve been blogging major product news and aviation news since last March. Our atom feed is available at:

http://www.avshop.com/blog/avshopatom.xml

I have plans to develop a pilot logbook application that would integrate RSS feeds later this year.

I think the idea of blogging all new products as they are activated would be a real enhancement to our offerings — I will start doing that immediately. I think that would be a valuable resource for our most loyal customers and for our suppliers and media contacts, as well. With the ease of subscribing and unsubscribing to a feed, you have the opportunity to be a “completionist” with the data you are trying to communicate, unlike email, where the opportunity to make an impression is very limited.

Kudos to Jerry for the response, and for preaching in the church of RSS.

Now all I need to do is become a pilot so I can take real advantage of the new feed.

I’ve spent the evening doing some more hacking with the way the blog uses taxonomy. Notice a “Details” link at the bottom of every post that pops out details of the post: date and time the post was made, and a list of categories (aka tags), with links to tag searches on taggy websites like Technorati and Flickr.

All of this is experimental, may not work, and probably looks uglier than it will as it matures.

Under the hood, I’ve moved further towards a tag-based method for classifying posts:

I haven’t abandoned the hierarchy, just hidden it under the surface.

Much of my work over the past 15 years has concerned fitting bits of knowledge into one taxonomy or another.

What I was working with the PEI Crafts Council on creating a database of crafts supply sources, I had to come up with a taxonomy of crafts — stained glass, weaving, pottery, and so on — to organize my suppliers.

The InfoPEI project on the Province of PEI’s website, is really just a home-brew taxonomy used to organize information about the province (and we had many debates during its development about what the taxonomy should look like).

Working with [[Yankee]] we face challenges like “astrology really isn’t astronomy, but should it go on the astronomy page?”

Here on the weblog the question is to how to best organize the 2,955 posts I’ve made. For the longest time my answer was “not at all.” Or at least “in reverse chronological order.” With RSS feeds, it became possible (and expected) to assign categories to blog posts, so I dreamed up a set of categories — my own private taxonomy. It looks like this, in part, in my weblog editor:

With my new set of categories I could select a place in my taxonomy for my new posts (and I went back and categorized a good chunk of the archival posts too).

That worked well for a while.

Now I’m running into a new problem: as the weblog world adopts tags, I’m finding my category system too limiting. I want to tag a post “davidletterman”, not just “television.” But I don’t want to lose the hierarchy of the taxonomy because I use this to organize my blog archives and the category-specific RSS feeds.

So I’ve modified the home-brew blog editor to make my category system far more flexible. For any given post I can now select an existing category for the post, or it one doesn’t exist, I can enter a new one (both a “plain english” field and a “tag” version). For example:

In this case I want the new “David Letterman” category to be a subcategory of “Television,” so I select that, enter the new category information, and the new category gets created as a child of “Television.”

The danger, of course, is that my taxonomy will lose value once it becomes a tree with hundreds of branches. But, for the time being, I have a lot more granularity at my fingertips, which is, I think, a Good Thing.

I’m filing this under “Taxonomy,” a sub-category of “Weblogs.”

Now that we’re all getting over the shock of having to travel through Montreal when flying from Charlottetown to pretty well anywhere (with Montreal replacing Halifax in this role), Air Canada’s taken it up a notch, with the cheapest fares to the U.S. now routing through Montreal and Ottawa:

Is it worth $500 to day 5 hours of flying time? Probably.

Google Maps can be very, very tiny. And the still work — zoom, pan, etc. — just fine. This demo shows my current Plazes location (or returns “offline” if there isn’t one).