I’m co-leading an easy kayak trip with the AMC this Sunday, June 27. It’s a combination Young Members/Kayak Committee event.

Easy Paddling on Pawtuxet River: One of RI’s major rivers with an abundance of wildlife and history. Pontiac Mills in Warwick to Rhodes on the Pawtuxet.

Some rental boats may still be available. AMC membership isn’t strictly required, though participants should consider it. Contact me if you’d like to come.

See also: pictures from past AMC trips and past kayaking trips.

The AMC Boston hike/bike and young members committees use trip rating codes such as “B3B” to indicate difficulty. Recently there’s been some discussion of how hard this makes the listings to understand for newcomers. Here’s a workaround for users, and the core of a script that would help the authors automate a solution.

This tool translates the codes to English text. To try it out, click the link below and enter a code such as A2C.

Decode AMC Rating

To use this on any trip listing page, drag the Decode link up into your links toolbar, or open your Bookmarks or Favorites window and drag it in. You won’t even have to type the codes anymore; it can work on any text you’ve selected. Go to the AMC Boston YM trip listings, double-click any trip rating to select it, and choose the Decode AMC Rating bookmark.

This is part of a proposal to provide English tooltips for trip rating codes in announcement web pages and emails. Here’s an example of a trip rating with a tooltip. Move your mouse pointer over the following code and hold it still for a few seconds: AA1B.

Broken Windows: With viruses, worms, and vulnerabilities in the news, John Gruber wrote an excellent piece. “Here’ s a billion-dollar question: Why are Windows users besieged by security exploits, but Mac users are not?”

And, like clockwork, here comes the latest Windows vulnerability:

Internet Explorer Carved Up By Zero-Day Hole:
“Two new vulnerabilities have been discovered in Internet Explorer which allow a complete bypass of security and provide system access to a computer, including the installation of files on someone’s hard disk without their knowledge, through a single click.

Worse, the holes have been discovered from analysis of an existing link on the Internet and a fully functional demonstration of the exploit have been produced and been shown to affect even fully patched versions of Explorer.

It has been rated ‘extremely critical’ by security company Secunia, and the only advice is to disable Active Scripting support for all but trusted websites.”

The article goes on to say that the code exploits three holes in Internet Explorer for Windows, including one that has been known since August 2003, and there’s no patch available for any of them. (You could turn off Active Scripting, which breaks functionality on many sites, or stop browsing web sites you don’t trust completely. If that’s not acceptable, you have to switch another browser such as Mozilla , or switch to a Mac.)

WordPress 1.2 now has an its own RSS import feature. However, it’s based on a different technique (regular expressions) than the code I contributed in January (which uses a true XML SAX parser). So I’m posting the code here as open source under the GPL license. This code has some additional features:

• It can import single files from either your local drive or from a URL you specify, or it can import entire folder hierarchies of RSS files (blogBrowser-style: one folder per year, one file per month), making it a general-purpose weblog batch import tool using RSS as the exchange format.
• It aggregates RSS feeds, if you point one or more copies of it at feeds on the web and set it to run regularly. (Even when run frequently, it won’t import the same item twice.) You can also use this to maintain more than one WordPress site that shares the same content, such as a test site and a production site.
• It handles time zones in a sophisticated way, preserving the timezone offset so that each item can appear on your weblog under the author’s original local time, while using GMT for all date comparisons.
• It respects and stores modification dates if given in the RSS file.
• If modification dates are given in the RSS file, it can optionally import only new or changed posts, leaving posts alone that haven’t been changed or that have been changed more recently on the local machine.
• Using the above feature and two copies of WordPress, it can synchronize two or more weblogs, bidirectionally or multi-directionally. New and changed posts on any one weblog will automatically show up on the others.
• It complies with the XML specification, for correct behavior with XML namespaces with arbitrary prefixes and CDATA sections in arbitrary locations, both of which can trip up a regular-expression-based parser.

As long as your RSS feed passes the XML well-formedness test (which it probably does, even if it doesn’t validate according to the RSS Validator), you can use this RSS Import filter. If it’s not well-formed XML, you’re better off with the RSS import filter built into WordPress.

Versions are available for WordPress 0.9 through 1.2.

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