Mad Props!

I left this as a comment over on BrownBot, but I thought it was worth repeating here.

To prove that mathematical induction is useless:

1. Prove that if you don’t need it on day (x), then you also won’t need it on day (x + 1)
2. Prove that you don’t need it today

Crucible has graciously submitted an entry to digg about Comicster. If you have an account there, feel free to digg it and we'll see if we can generate a bit of publicity.

I found out yesterday that the Australian government has contributed $75M to fund the largest solar energy plant in the world, to be built near Mildura in north-west Victoria.

The plant will power something like 45,000 homes, and cost around $420M.

On LateLine last night, Tony Jones speculated to the minister for the environment that we could power our entire country with fewer than 200 of these plants, at a cost to taxpayers of around $13B.

This really sparked my imagination. Imagine if the entire country were powered by solar plants. We could still invest in nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric power, but it would all be surplus energy for us. Then we export that energy in the form of chemical batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.

Australia could become the biggest exporter of power in the world.

Could it happen? Maybe. The minister last night dodged the question (as politicians so often do) about building a whole bunch of these plants, so who knows what he's thinking? It's an exciting prospect, anyway.

Keith and co over at the PowerShell Community Extensions project has released an alpha version, which gives you some neat new commands like "get-clipboard" and "set-filedate" in PowerShell.

The next version will include my Common Feed Store provider!

So anyway, head on over to CodePlex and download the first alpha - the guys have done a great job with the install and the cmdlets so far are worthwhile.

The oddest thing happened today. Droplets of liquid began to fall from the sky. On closer inspection it turned out to be water, so I decided to find out more about it. According to wikipedia, it's called rain, and it's actually a common occurrence in other parts of the world. Amazing!

In case you're wondering, we're going through a bit of a dry spell in Australia right now - particularly in my neck of the woods.

Care of Jason Haley's Interesting Finds, here's a great blog post from Christoph Richter about some common mistakes made in code. I agree with all of these, and it's nice to see them all in one place.

I'm going nuts coming up with new and exciting command-lines to interrogate the common feed store using my new PowerShell provider. Check this one out:

cd feed:
dir -rec |
   where {$_.Author.Length -gt 0} |
   group Author |
   sort Count -desc |
   select -first 20 Name, Count |
   ft -au 

That'll get you the top 20 authors across your entire feed list. Note that this is not looking for the feeds with the most items - it's the authors, so if one author posts to more than one feed then he's counted in both places. That said, in my feeds at work Robert Scoble is winning by a mile:

 Name Count
 ---- -----
 Robert Scoble 156
 Zonk 63
 mabster 60
 Michael S. Kaplan 53
 daveburke 52
 Jason Haley 44
 Cyrus Farivar 44
 kdawson 42
 crucible 42
 Mitch Denny 40
 Leon Bambrick 36
 Paul Miller 33
 bsimser 32
 GregLow 31
 ieblog 31
 oldnewthing 31
 Long Zheng 31
 Darren Murph 30
 Carl Franklin 29
 Daniel Moth 28

This is very cool. Microsoft have added a "Create Your Own" form to their Add Search Providers page. This means that you can quickly add any site that has a search engine to IE7's search bar.

All you have to do is search for the word 'TEST' (in capitals) on the site you're interested in.

As an example, type in these values and click Install:

URL: http://images.google.com/images?q=TEST
Name: Google Images

Now you have a quick way to search for an image on Google!

The latest stuff I've been playing with in my PowerShell FeedStoreProvider is the ability to create and delete items within the store.

So now you can do this:

 # create a new folder called "Mad Props" new-item -name "Mad Props" -type folder # create a new feed withing that folder cd "Mad Props" new-item -name Mabsterama -type feed -value http://www.madprops.org/cs/blogs/mabster/rss.aspx 

Similarly, "remove-item" works too. You can delete a feed or folder like this:

 remove-item Mabsterama

Next thing I want to get working is support for the "-whatif" parameter. In PowerShell you can pass "-whatif" to any command that might do something dangerous (like remove-item) and it'll inform you of what it would have done without actually doing anything. Nice.

Late last night I made a small but important change to Comicster's three RSS feeds.

For those that weren't aware, Comicster provides (and subscribes to) three feeds from its online database:

• Recently-updated Characters
• Recently-updated Creators
• Recently-updated Issues

These feeds give you the last 100 items to have been modified in Comicster's online database. They make it easy to see if something has been added that you might like to pull down into your own collection.

Anyway, last night I modified all three feeds so that they implement Microsoft's Simple List Extensions (SLE) to RSS. This is an open standard that flags each feed as a "list", so that RSS clients that subscribe to them can treat them differently. By definition, a "list" feed is a feed that doesn't grow over time (like a blog does), but instead always publishes a fixed number of items. So an RSS client that subscribes to any of the above feeds will know that it only needs to worry about the 100 items in the feed, and needn't keep any kind of history.

The SLE specification also allows for defining custom sorting and grouping in your feed, but that wasn't necessary for me feeds.

For more info about SLE, I recommend Microsoft's Team RSS Blog! In particular, Simple List Extensions Explained and Simple List Extensions in action.