As of Monday, Google News now offers Atom and RSS feeds. If you’ve visited Google News this week you probably have already seen the Atom/RSS links on news pages. To roll your own, just add an “output=rss” or “output=atom” parameter to your request. Goodbye, scrapers.

I have little to add to this but I’m sure glad it’s being said somewhere as visible as The Washington Post:

Either Palm should – finally! – update its Mac software so it talks directly to Address Book and iCal, instead of relying on the obsolete Palm Desktop for contacts and calendar management, or Apple should put some more effort into iSync so it doesn’t have this habit of dropping data on the floor at random times.

If my scanty coverage of the 2005 O’Reilly Open Source Convention wasn’t enough for you, check out these excellent, thorough post-show wrapups from Andy Oram at O’Reilly and Slashdot (though I recommend setting your score threshold to 5 as always, in this case to boil down a “Ruby On Rails Doesn’t Scale” thrash).

The above were my two favorites from O’Reilly’s general OSCON wrapup page; it also includes links to Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, and Delicious tag searches if you want to read every last bit of prose posted about the convention. Also, you may find some of the presentation files interesting or useful, especially if you’re an attendee with spotty notes.

A couple older pages here that you may find entertaining (or horrifying) if you are a PowerBook user: my titanium and aluminum PowerBook adventures. I sanded the paint off the former; my body chemistry ate the surface of the latter.

I’ve been called a destroyer of PowerBooks, but my PB 100 from 1992 still boots, so I can’t be that bad. I promise I’ll be nicer to my new 15".

One technical interest I haven’t written much about here is spam. I have a fairly aggressive anti-spam setup, and I have a simple spam statistics page that gives hourly breakdowns. But what I’ve wanted for a long while is some way to aggregate spam stats from other servers into a sort of spam weather report. There are all sorts of reasons why this is impossible to do perfectly – people have different criteria for what constitutes spam, for one – but I still think a useful model for sharing data could be worked out. People who are already generating spam stats could publish their data in a microformat, for example. Alternatively, they could submit periodic automatic reports to a central server, which would then make the stats available in machine-readable form. The key would be to make it easy for people to make their data available.

A lot of people who want to switch from Safari choose Firefox. There are some great reasons to do that, like the web developer toolbar. But ironically, I think a lot of Firefox’s Mac mindshare is a side effect of the gains it’s making (for good reasons) on Windows IE. Clearly it’s the best choice for most Windows users and most Linux/Unix desktops as well. But on the Mac there are other good ones.

Now that OSCON is over I’m going to be taking off for a bit of vacation, so there won’t be much action here for the next ten days or so. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you when I return.