"In Nokogiri  's are converted to whitespace, but they are not a normal space and aren't removed with the standard String#strip and friends." Needless to say, this is somewhat annoying. Thanks for fixing it, internet!

Andrew Plotkin on some of the design of Inform 7, and rule-based programming as it applies to IF. Long story short: everything is exceptional, and designing systems to support the kind of stories IF authors want to tell is hard.

"I gave a presentation on Treetop last night at lrug - seemed to go down well. There aren’t many examples of treetop grammars I’ve seen, so it might be useful if you find the main site’s documentation a bit impeneterable." Roland drops some Treetop science, and it looks very useful. Good stuff!

"FeedTools is a simple Ruby library for handling rss, atom, and cdf parsing, generation, and translation as well as caching. It attempts to adhere to Postel’s law—i.e. a liberal parsing and conservative generation policy." Wasn't aware of this until now, remarkably.

"The technology will probably improve, but in lieu of the promised emergent web AI, we need to build more small tools, more games to bootstrap datasets, and more simple ways of encouraging people to play their part in the semantic web without ever having to explain what it is." tt++.

"If the API you are using does not yet offer JSON output you can take advantage of Python's excellent XML support." Going to need this too, I think