Month: August 2006

FeedDemon helps you manage your feeds

Just noticed a (new) feature in FeedDemon (I’m running version 2.0.0.24) that allows you to automatically unsubscribe from a feed if there are no updated within the defined number of days. That’s really cool for comment feeds which is becoming increasingly popular. Nice! If only I would be able to set this on entire feed folders and/or have feeds added to a specific folder automatically inherit the setting. See – that would be totally cool! At present I have to remember setting the flag on all comment feeds I subscribe to.

Security threats of syndicated content

There are a number of interesting discussions going on at the moment about the inherent threats of syndicated content sparked by a presentation at the Black Hat 2006 event. I like the way Don Park puts it in his “Comment on Microsoft Embracing RSS“-post:

"If you subscribe to 1000 feeds, you are hanging on a chain with 1000 links. Each of those 1000 links (feeds) are potential targets for hackers to attack to gain control over its content. All they need is one vulnerable feed hosting server to change what is delivered to your desktop."

Something to think about – especially when thinking about how Notes/Domino 7.0.2 will be able to deliver RSS feeds to your employees. I recommend the above post or the Dons other post (Syndicated Vulnerability) to get started.

Technote 1188789: Supported versions of Java with IBM Lotus Products

Apart from the fact that the table looks like it was put together by someone high on drugs it contains some nice-to-know information about the different JVM versions across IBM Lotus products. One of those technotes it is nice to know when in doubt…

Via the Lotus Domino Support RSS feed: Supported versions of Java with IBM Lotus Products

Ahhh – there is of cause the Microsoft (proprietary) solution

As mentioned
yeasterday I have been reinventing the wheel and (re)writing XPath 2.0 functions as named XSLT templates since the MSXML 3 in Internet Explorer 6 isn’t XPath 2.0 compliant. As always there is however a Microsoft proprietary solution using the urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt namespace. This namespace adds support for a number of utility functions as mentioned in the “Microsoft XPath Extension Functions“-article over at Microsoft Developer Network.

You have to be running MSXML 4 for this namespace to work however which means that even the proprietary solution isn’t workable for me since MSXML 3 is the default for Internet Explorer 6.

While researching this subject I found that MSXML 3 (or 4) isn’t the newest version. There is a MSXML 5 (only used with Office 2003) and a MSXML 6 (supplied with Visual Studio 2005). Even the newest MSXML 6 doesn’t however support XPath 2.0. The supported API’s in MSXML 6 is:

  • XML 1.0 (DOM & SAX2 APIs)
  • XML Schema (XSD) 1.0
  • XPath 1.0
  • XSLT 1.0

Come on already – please implement the standards!

How I hate reinventing the wheel

I’m doing quite a lot of work at the moment defining XML document “languages” and associated XML schemas (why I’m happy for the great XML and XML Schema (XSD) support in Callisto) at the moment. In that connection I’m also doing XSLT stylesheets for end-user presentation in Internet Explorer (version 6 or higher). We have to make Internet Explorer a requirement for user-presentation since Firefox doesn’t support resolving entity references when using XSLT which we need for content reuse.

Once this was settled it was all well and good until I yesterday discovered that Internet Explorer 6 (and hence MSXML 3.0) doesn’t support XPath 2.0 which means that all the nifty XSLT functions defined in XPath 2.0 such as the date/time functions cannot be used. Bummer!

So here I am back at reinventing the wheel rewriting all the date/time functions as named templates using the substring XPath 1.0 substring function. Even more bummer!

Need XSLT support in Callisto?

For some reason I fail to understand the recently released collection of plugins from the Eclipse Foundation (also referred to as Callisto) doesn’t include support for XSLT even though it has editors for XML, DTD’s and XML Schema (XSD). Support to XSLT is however very easy to add since you can use the EclipseXSLT plugin.

Installing is as easy as creating a new remote update site under “HelpSoftware UpdatesFind and Install” and installing it from there. The address to the update site is http://eclipsexslt.sourceforge.net/update-site. Took me 5 minutes or so. Easy. It does however require that you already installed the XML part of the Callisto release.