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I’m still having to use two Bluetooth adapters - the one that came with the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop for Bluetooth (for my mouse) and my TDK Systems Bluetooth PC Card (for everything else).

As I’ve mentioned before, the Widcomm 1.3.7.x drivers don’t support the HID profile needed for the mouse, but there are still no sign of the 1.4 drivers for the TDK card. They were promised in June and we’re now just over an hour away from September.

I emailed TDK Systems technical support (twice) asking about the availability of the drivers (even in beta form) and each time I received only the automated response saying that I’d get a reply within 24 hours, which I didn’t. After making positive noises back in July, they seem to have dried up on the newsgroups as well.

Shame on you, TDK Systems!

The RSS 2.0 spec says the channel element can optionally have skipDays and/or skipHours elements. Here’s what it says for skipDays:

skipDays
An XML element that contains up to seven sub-elements whose value is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Aggregators may not read the channel during days listed in the skipDays element.

As I understand it, the motivation behind these elements it to let aggregators know that they needn’t bother updating the channel at the given times or on the given days, because the author will be asleep (or otherwise occupied) and the content won’t change.

However, this assumes that the aggregator is updating at other times. What if, for example, a feed exists for a weekly newsletter published every Tuesday. The feed author could add a skipDays element to the channel to tell aggregators not to bother updating on any day but Tuesday, thus saving a lot of bandwidth through the rest of the week. But that won’t work. Anyone who doesn’t fire up their aggregator on a Tuesday (e.g. somebody who doesn’t work Tuesdays) won’t get the newsletter.

Similarly, if you were to use the skipHours element to say to aggregators “don’t update outside of my office hours”, you’ll be cutting out everyone who doesn’t use their aggregator during your office hours. Extrapolating further, for every hour or day you put in skipHours/skipDays you’ll be losing all the subscribers who happen to use their aggregators only at those times/on those days.

Perhaps this hasn’t been an issue due to the types of people who are using RSS at the moment, but this will change as RSS hits the big time and reaches consumers desktops. For example, my parents tend to use their computer for around 30 minutes in the evening, so once they start using RSS they could easily miss out on entire feeds skipping just one hour.

So, I think that skipHours and skipDays are useless in their current form. Far more useful would be a redefinition from “don’t read this channel at these times” to “the channel will not be updated at these times.” Aggregators can then use that information to save bandwidth whilst not missing anything, no matter when they’re run.

Brilliant story about a postman who couldn’t be bothered to deliver all the letters people keep sending. He ended up with 61,000 of them in his basement.

“He said he had too many letters to deliver on his round,” said Bernd Lottes, spokesman for the court in the western town of Neuss on Wednesday. “He was hoping to deliver the other stuff when he had a bit of breathing space.”

Classic.

Apparently BITS is included in Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, so that’s what you’ll need to enable enclosure support in PopHeadlines on Windows 2000.

I dropped James and Declan off at Stunt Camp this morning. They had some scary looking equipment, including one of those huge inflatable landing pads you see in the “making of” programmes. Next to that stood an enormous scaffolding tower.

I made myself scarce…

You know you’re tired when you read “Priceless Da Vinci work stolen” as “Princess Di Vice work stolen”. [yawn]

Priceless Da Vinci work stolen

A gang steals a valuable painting by Leonardo da Vinci from the home of a Scottish laird.

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Open Item | Powered by PopHeadlines

This release of PopHeadlines introduces support for enclosures (requires Windows XP/2003), and also includes some bug fixes. Visit the PopHeadlines page for the details, or just download now!

Using Microsoft’s BITS service, PopHeadlines monitors how busy the network connection is and adjusts the download speed so as not to interfere with web browsing and other internet usage. Enclosures are downloaded in the background and passed on to your email client when complete.

Here’s looking forward to finding more enclosures in feeds… I plan to add a new feed to my site which will help subscribers keep up-to-date with the latest PopHeadlines version.

Last week we managed to get rid of all the kids, so I spent most of my time looking around the house and thinking “isn’t it quiet?”

This weekend we went to my parents for a brief visit, so I took the opportunity to add a cool new feature to PopHeadlines. I’m just doing a bit more testing before making it generally available.

If you know of any feeds that have enclosures let me know, that would help with my testing… Oh no! I’ve given the game away!

Here’s one way to get that security hole fixed if you can’t be bothered to visit Windows Update now and again… In fact, you could install this one to sort out your entire network