News You Can Bruise for 2004 September 9

(1) Thu Sep 09 2004 08:53 PST: Today's my day for publicity, as Beautiful Soup gets a favorable mention in Uche Ogbuji's xml.com column, which is actually about converting HTML into XML. Beautiful Soup tries to reduce the number of times you have to convert HTML into XML, but if you do have to there are tools for it.

libxml2's tree object looks like something I could use as a model for a future version of Beautiful Soup (I do need to rewrite a big chunk of it; I'm painfully aware of numerous embarassing flaws, but it's still the best screen-scraping library IMO).

(1) Thu Sep 09 2004 21:35 PST Now Boarding The Sleep Train: But first, the official word from Ryan North about the Dinosaur Comics/The Diamond Age connection first noted here in January:

People have mentioned this to me before, but I haven't read the book yet. It's on my list, because it's an incredible coincidence. Especially with the Utahraptor: it's such an obscure dinosaur! The dinosaurs were actually picked because I liked the way they looked. I had to go back and look up what they were when it came time to name them.

There you have it. Most amazing coincidence I've seen in a while. I left my copy of The Diamond Age in Arkansas (actually I gave it to Geoff, which means it's probably in San Francisco but I don't know where), so I can't go back and check, but my half-recollection is that it's really very similar to the archetypal plot of Dinosaur Comics.

(4) Thu Sep 09 2004 21:37 PST: Can someone please go to Japan and find out what the Hakone 3D Space Dinosaur World/Fairy Tale Aquarium is? Sumana went near enough to it to get a brochure that mentions it in a big list of attractions, but not near enough to it to find out if it really is the most awesome thing in the world, or just a bunch of meaningless words strung together.