So long CIPDTF ! For three years I have offered the CIPDTF free anonymous hosting in the name of the freedom of speech. There have been fun moments and wild ones - it has been quite an experience working with such an unusual partner. I deplore that the CIPDTF has chronically adopted an attitude of prickly ignorance of many of the conditions we set for our collaboration. Compartimentalization of activities, operational security and demarcation of responsibilities have all remained appalling in spite of my insistent advice. Six weeks ago after many warnings I set a deadline for some improvements, and that deadline has consequently been arrogantly dismissed. Time is up, I am fed up and I believe it is time to move on. So good bye and good luck with another host (and good luck for finding one as patient as me). And to those who believe that the CIPDTF has been vindicated, think again : the CIPDTF really is as crazy as its prose suggests and I would be surprised if it did not resurface somewhere else.

As you can read from My Pet Jawa, Howie’s Moisture Farm and The Dread Pundit Bluto, some stupid spammer has apparently taken upon himself to promote the increasingly dubious prose of the CIPDTF. As I am providing anonymous hosting services to the CIPDTF, I am as usually taking some heat for anything related to them. So once again I have some explaining to do. The few last times I had to do that chore the controversy involved mostly French speakers so I wrote my CIPDTF disclaimers in my French speaking blog. Now it seems that time has come to make things clear in English too…

It is really a pity that I have to add another categorical denial to the already thickening pile, but here it is… Once again I want to make clear that I have never participated directly or indirectly in the content of the CIPDTF nor in any action aimed at promoting it by any means, especially the obnoxious and illegal ones.

In the name of the freedom of speech that was under very strong pressure during the heights of the Ivorian civil war, I am providing free anonymous hosting services to an Ivorian collective. My contact with that collective goes through a person I know under the pseudonym “Jacques Koulibaly”. I handle hosting services and that is all - I have nothing whatsoever to do with contents, nor with the actions of the CIPDTF or its sympathisers.

With the Ivorian crisis settling down, maybe the time for the CIPDTF’s radical, provocative and plain bizarre humor has passed. That is my opinion, but that is not my problem. The CIPDTF is becoming ever stranger, I believe that the quality of its publications has sharply declined and my problem is that I wish to make clear that I am not associated with the CIPDTF in any way.

As you may know I am an extremely patient person and I will remain faithful to my past commitment to provide hosting unless unethical content appears on the site. But I am quite fed up with issuing disclaimers. So as a first step in making the demarcation of responsibilities more clear I have asked the CIPDTF to register their own domain name.

In fact I asked them long ago, but I did not follow up. Lending a sub-domain to those impecuniary people was supposed to be a temporary measure but I let it go on way past its expiration date. So two weeks ago I gave them a deadline : register your own domain before the 14th July or I shall discontinue hosting your site. The recents events reported by the aforementioned blogs have only confirmed my determination on this matter.

I hope that my position is now clearer for everyone involved. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask them here so that the debate can enlighten everyone.

Those among you who pay attention may have wondered about the meaning of “serendipity”. You shall soon wonder no more - here is an extract from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology explaining salient elements of the etymology of the term “Serendipity” :

The “Tale of the Three Princes of Serendip” is [a] literary framework of ancient Indo-Persian origin. [..] Renaissance brought this collection of Oriental legends of travels, riddles, sagacity in solving them, to the European stage. The Tramezzini of Venice, brother-editors, used a fictional author to offer it to the public in 1557. Horace Walpole (1717–1797), son of the famous British prime minister, sitting in his estate in Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Middlesex, translated the sagacity of the three princes into a concept which he labeled “serendipity” in a letter to Horace Mann, British envoy at the Florentine Court, dated January 28, 1754. Literally, he wrote of the three princes: “they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. [..] Semantically, the referral points to the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon of yesteryear). (Serendip) is the historical Arabo-Persian- form of Sri Lanka, a word with Sanskrit (Pali) origin, naming the island of Singhalese (Sinhala dvipa) and kept alive in folk tales and legends of this area.

How that relates with Investigative Dermatology is anybody’s guess but I would bet that the author has made a lame attempt at making it topical by putting it on account of serendipity. Anyway…

“The Three Princes of Serendip” by Richard Boyle explains the story in more details and the dissertation continues in “Serendipity: How the Vogue word became Vague“.

Now that I have delivered those extensive explanations, my problem now is that the term is no longer obscure enough to be fit for a trendy title… But maybe I’m old enough to stop caring about that…

Aggregated RSS feeds presented as HTML and Javascript by Lilina are very sweet. The more we used them, the more we missed having them served as RSS. After much research it seemed to us that there is no nice and easy PHP code capable of mixing RSS as RSS. There are plenty of feed mixers offered as a service but very few offered as a product.

On the fetching and parsing side, Lilina had everything I wanted. All I needed was to make it generate RSS instead of HTML.

I went foraging for RSS creation libraries. The first one I found was XML-RSS-Aggregate . I liked it because the example provided with XML-RSS-Aggregate is an RSS agregator that ouptuts RSS - exactly what I was looking for. But Shlomi Fish mentioned that “this module is unmaintained and no longer works very well. The author (and I) recommend that you use XML::Feed now“. So I took a look at XML-Feed and found it too complex for my meagre skills. And I’m not that hot with Perl anyway. So I went looking somewhere else.

I found my salvation in Feedcreator. Feedcreator creates valid feeds in various formats, features configurable caching, reasonnable documentation and readable code. I found it quite easy to use. All it needs is an array of RSS elements, and that is exactly what Lilina provides.

I took Lilina’s index.php, cleaned up the HTML generation, spliced in the example code from Feedcreator, mapped input to output and lo and behold I had a reasonably valid RSS output by Lilina. Very sweet !

Source code of the modified Lilina with Feedreactor hybridation is available here.

I even added a cute RSS icon to Lilina’s default layout…

Looking for a way to fetch multiple RSS news feeds and present them as a single HTML page I found the wonderful Lilina.

“Lilina is a simple but powerful news aggregator written in PHP. No database is needed, RSS/ATOM parsing is done by the excellent MagpieRSS library”.

That piece of advertisement is all true : Lilina is dead simple to set up, requires no special dependancies and produce very nice aggregated news feeds. This was love at the first sight !

I immediately set up a couple of aggregated news feeds :

• Grabeuh planet shows articles and news items published by my fellow geek friends and myself.
• Jean-Marc’s little corner of the world shows all photos, articles and news items by me.

Next will be a personal feed gathering all my favorite places that publish irregularily. That page will save me quite a lot of clicking around checking for updates.

Since you asked… Yes I am the author of the ostrich picture featured on this page’s header. I shot it at Cape Point, South Africa in 2004. The whole picture of the two ostriches strolling on the beach is available here along with many others.

Even with some CSS and some hand crafted PHP, maintaining heaps of static HTML was beginning to be a chore, especially with my increasingly busy schedules. Posting stuff into my favorite IRC channel was painless, but the audience was a bit narrow : I really wanted to share with the wider world, whatever I may have to share… So I finally took the plunge and set up a blog. As the tagline says : “highly random experience capitalization, just in case”. Yes - that is a decidedly fuzzy editorial line, but that is the whole point of the exercise : I intend this place as my personal random brain dump, a place where to publish whatever I have on my hands in the hope that some day some poor soul using a search engine will stumble upon it and find it somewhat useful… So there : serendipitous altruism !