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Some things I’ve been reading lately:

Where is Raed is a blog belonging to a young guy living in Baghdad. “air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now.”

Kevin Sites is a CNN reporter who’s blogging from Northern Iraq; the blog is not affiliated with CNN.

Christopher Allbritton is on his way to Iraq. Throw him ten bucks if you’ve got it; his series for NPR on his travels in Northern Iraq was very interesting and he needs the cash to get back there. Yay independent journalism.

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Really, it's like fish in a barrel.

Via A Whole Lotta Nothing.

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Because I think it’s worth highlighting the extremes of human dignity, I link to the speech Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins delivered before battle. This type of man is one reason why I wish both our soldiers and British soldiers well.

“We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.” And:

“I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts, I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.”

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My little RSS project has foundered on the shoals of RSS parsing woes. If you have a raw apostrophe in your RSS feed, well-behaved RSS parsers will fail. Isn’t that fun? Amphetadesk works around this by just using XML::Simple directly, which I suppose I could do, but I’m kind of lazy. Mark Pilgrim wrote a nice ultra-liberal RSS parser but it’s in Python. Learning enough Python to make use of it would be easier than writing my own code using XML::Simple, I think. Maybe not. Not tonight, anyhow, either way.

Actually, what would be ideal is if everyone redid their tools to provide me with valid RSS… no? Well, OK.

Hm. (You can tell, perhaps, that I am talking out loud here. You may wish to cross to the other side of the street.) You know, somewhere in my parsing process something is unescaping the escaped apostrophes. Oh. OK, so upgrading to the current version of the XML::RSS module does help a lot. Perhaps I’ll write some HTML generating code to go around it. There’s hope yet.

Also: I am slowly experimenting with using Brad Chote’s Textile adaptation as a text filter. It’s pretty cool so far, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. I’d need to hack MT a little so that links showed up in the proper format when using the bookmarklet. It’d be healthy for me. But not tonight.