News You Can Bruise for 2008 December 23

Tue Dec 23 2008 18:49 Everybody Loves Dirt Candy: A few days ago we had dinner at Dirt Candy, a tiny fancy restaurant in the East Village. It was great! And instead of being a horrible Flash monstrosity, the restaurant's website is a weblog! Where owner Amanda Cohen talks about the dishes she invented and links to BoogaBooga.

We had a great time with the spinach soup, mushroom cube, crispy tofu, popcorn pudding, etc. And it'll probably get even better once they have gas. I guess waiting for the gas to get turned on is the restaurant equivalent of waiting for Internet access after you move.

Tue Dec 23 2008 21:02 Beautiful Soup Progress: I spent some time today trying to get BS in shape to run under Python 3. Here's the branch I'm working on.

sgmllib doesn't exist in Python 3, so I switched to HTMLParser, which has gotten a lot better at parsing bad HTML. With my hacks in place, only 3 of my unit tests pass under sgmllib but fail under HTMLParser. That's acceptable given that my switching to HTMLParser creates part of the framework I'll use so that you can write a plugin for lxml, html5lib (not as slow as I'd thought), or some other parser. Eventually I'll get rid of the HTMLParser plugin, or at least strip it down so that it doesn't know anything about HTML, making my life easier.

What's left is some minor syntax problems and some huge problems dealing with the way strings work in Python 3 as they go in and out of encodings. At this point I need to stop hacking on BS and do some experiments to get a good understanding of the string changes.

Tue Dec 23 2008 21:24 Best Of Bookmarks, January-February: You may or may not know that Sumana and I keep a pile o' bookmarks on del.icio.us (actually in my personal notebook and mirrored to del.icio.us, but close enough). I don't put them on the front page of Crummy with a fancy Javascript widget or anything, because it is part of my personal notebook and I often use it to talk to myself in an invented language while doing research for something I'm writing.

But I don't mind you looking at our bookmarks, so long as you don't consider it a "publication" of mine, and there's so much interesting stuff that didn't make it into NYCB I thought I'd do a series of posts highlighting the most interesting bookmarks from 2008 that are still interesting and whose links still work. Here are the best links from January and February of 2008. I'll post one of these a day.

• Fractal sculpture and fractal cookies. I await the Mandelbrot set rug.
• An official copy of "As We May Think".
• Real-time "strategy" games are actually tactics games, because the fighting is divorced from political context.
• The papers of Benjamin Franklin, made available under an oppressive "personal study" click-through license. Is that legit?
• Coveted LeGo sets of yore, of which I had five. (#3-#7)
• An excerpt from Born Standing Up, the best book Steve Martin has ever written. Contemporaneous comment: "Analyzing a joke kills it, but Steve Martin kills jokes as a matter of course, so it works out."
• The first ninety days in a new job.
• "Apologies All Around", the first story sold by my VP buddy Jeff Soesbe.
• Build your own magazine box.