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Tech blog: Problems with rss2html.php with Feedburner feeds

  • Posted on September 3, 2008 at 3:22 pm

Disclaimer: First of all if you don’t blog or otherwise deal with RSS feeds for your webpage, then just ignore this blog entry.  There’s nothing sexy or bitingly sarcastic here.  It’s just geeky info. 

 

So I was getting the following error displayed on my webpage when using rss2html.php with Feedburner feeds:

 

$errorCode = 2
xml_error_string() = syntax error
xml_get_current_line_number() = 2
xml_get_current_column_number() = 49
xml_get_current_byte_index() = 89

 

This was troubling as I had no problems using my current settings for almost a year, and now suddenly I was getting this error.

I searched high and low, but other than finding a lot of other webpages fuxored with the same error, I didn’t find any fixes, including the forums at Feedburner and the the ones for rss2html (feedforall.com).   It took me a lot of trial and error as I had no idea where the problem actually originated (especially since non-Feedburner RSS feeds worked fine.)

So anyway, here’s the fix:

In your rss2html.php file it says:

 

// Set the following variable useFopenURL to one if you want/need to use
// fopen() instead of CURL

 

So we change this line from:

$useFopenURL = 0;

to

$useFopenURL = 1;

and it fixed the problem!  Just like that. 

 

So hopefully anyone now searching for this problem will get this blog entry.

 

Peace,

Izabael

The Hidden Dangers of Super Mario Galaxy

  • Posted on February 12, 2008 at 12:54 pm

Never in my life have I been so thoroughly inspired to eat candy and take hallucinogens.

Why? 

I’ve been playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii.  I have discovered that Super Mario Galaxy is a highly informative game especially for children.

super_mario_galaxy

 

I, myself, have learned many new & interesting things!!  To name a few:

 

1)  Eating green mushrooms prolongs my life.

2)  Cute, little mushroom people are my friends.

3)  I can “fly” from galaxy to galaxy (in my red, white, and blue uniform).

4) Your mushroom friends travel the universe in a giant red mushroom called the STARSHROOM.  Yes, the “Starshroom.”  Can you say Jefferson Starshroom?   Er…Jefferson Starship…er Jefferson Airplane. 

5)  When you feed the star-people, who look like star-shaped Ecstasy tablets, they will eventually get fatter and fatter until they explode and give birth to more galaxies.

ecstasy_star

6)  You need to collect as many “stars” as possible.

7)  The “Sweet, Sweet Galaxy” is just that.  I gained 5 pounds playing through it.

8)  If you lose too many lives, Princess Peach will send you more mushrooms through the mail.

 

All I can say to parents: If your kids get fat and end up taking hallucinogenic drugs, you shouldn’t punish them.  After all you taught them at a very young age what is fun to do.  And don’t blame Super Mario, you can go back to Lewis Carroll (and later Disney) to complain about this one.

 

“One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall”

 super_mushroom

 

Robots Evolve And Learn How to Lie. Would they ever evolve past it?

  • Posted on January 15, 2008 at 1:43 am

A recent experiment with small robots confirmed that if left to evolve on their own that they would eventually start to lie to each other:

“By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate, by lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they had found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.” (from Discover)

The thing is I’d like to know what happens after the 100th generation or the 1000th.  I’m sure the “lying” group did not prosper as well as the other groups would soon evolve ways to exclude lying “tribes” and refuse to include them in their evolving society.  Would there always be upstarts trying to get a “quick fix” or would the greater society of the robots eventually weed out the dishonest strains of evolution completely?  Dishonesty within a system does it no good. Imagine if your computer’s memory started lying to the operating system about how much space it had left!

*iza

 

Help for the bookmark retarded: Doing more with del.icio.us

  • Posted on December 5, 2007 at 4:00 pm

The truth is most people still aren’t all that Internet savvy.  Many of my friends barely email, google search, myspace and youtube.  That’s all most people need or expect of the Internet and that’s fine really.  All those cool things like rss feeds, digg, and social bookmarking are really for the elite if we are truly talking vs. the Average Joe.  The more beautiful and social the friend and the more retarded they are online. 

One thing even n00bs should use is del.icio.us though it isn’t perfect for 100% neophyte or the extremely lazy.  Even with my Firefox plugin it’s not so hot with pulling up appropriate keywords for sites.  It always requires a lot of manual keyword additions.  Ultimately it’s time well spent when you can have an endlessly growing encyclopedia of your favorite sites on the Internet that is easy to sort though—–unlike the mess you’ll see in most people’s browsers when you go to “bookmarks.”

The old browser bookmark system is horribly obsolete.  Probably has been for 10 years, but now at least we have alternatives.  I myself just wish more people would use them.  I tried to teach my sister to use them so that her bookmarks could be accessed from any computer, in any browser, she was ever on. 

This article has some good tips and he says it better than I do.  I reprinted the tips that helped me the most.  Visit the link below for them all.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/top-10-ways-to-use-delicious.html/trackback

 

del.icio.us

 

1. Del.icio.us Firefox Extension
Del.icio.us Firefox Extension should be the number-one del.icio.us tool on your list. It allows you to quickly and easily add sites you like to del.icio.us with a bookmarklet. This tool puts a “My del.icio.us” button at the top of your browser, allowing you to view your save pages at the click of a button.

It also adds a “Tag this” button to the top of your browser, which allows you to bookmark websites while you’re browsing the Web.

If you use Internet Explorer, download this Internet Explorer Extension.

This Firefox Extension has saved me tons of keyboard time.

 

2. Increase Your Search Powers.
There are a variety of ways to search del.icio.us.

To view bookmarks tagged with a specific keyword, type in:
http://del.icio.us/tag/keyword

To view bookmarks tagged with two or more keywords, type in:
http://del.icio.us/tag/keyword+keyword

 

3. A variety of del.icio.us Uses
You can use del.icio.us in a number of exciting and interesting ways. Here are a few examples
to get you started:

  • Bookmark movies you want to see
  • Travel planning
  • Bookmark books you want to read
  • Bookmark things you want to blog about
  • Research

4. Publish Your del.icio.us Bookmarks on Your Website.
In addition to all that, you can also share your latest del.icio.us bookmarks on your websites for all of your readers to enjoy. You can do this using Linkrolls and Tagrolls.

Linkrolls display your latest del.icio.us bookmarks while tagrolls display all of your del.icio.us tags in a tag cloud.

You can see these unique features in action at this blog . His bookmarks are on the left and his tags are on the right.

 

5. Creative Tagging
My final tip is based on a bit of creative tagging. For my most important tags, I place an “@” in front of them. This moves them up to the very top of my tag list. So, for example, for books that I want to read in the future, I have a tag labeled @books. This simple trick allows me to place my most important tags at the very top of the tag list.

 

 

 

xoxoxoxo,

Izabael

 

p.s. practice del.icio.us by bookmarking my sites on it!

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