Raphael Mudge's Blog

Raphael Mudge is a former military scientist working on a tech startup. His open source includes the scripting language Sleep and the IRC client jIRCii. He still believes rxvt is a fine IDE. Research interests include interpreters, formal methods, and distributed systems.

Unmarketable Innovators?

I have a friend. He wrote his own programming language. Then he proceeded to embed said language into his own webserver. He found someone crazy enough to host his mishmash. Now he does all types of server side application development in this stack he cobbled together.

I know building things to understand them motivates my friend. In fact, I think his motto is "certum quod factum". We believe it, if we build it. Except this friend gets very invested into his tools. Its understandable isn't it? If you build something you have to eat your own dog food for awhile. Then, oh then, :) you start to like the dog food. It tastes so yummy.

That is what has happened to my friend. He built his entire stack and he is very productive with it. He explains that most common stacks are unnecessarily complex (although much less work than inventing a new one from the ground up!) and so he is unwilling to switch.

I worry for my friend. Isn't he hurting his marketability? There aren't many jobs advertising "We need a developer familiar with Bob's Stack". Of course Bob could open source his stack, market it a little, and if it survives peer review maybe he'll become a rockstar. (I prefer ninjas).

I'm directing this at the Bob's out there. Do you ever experience an unmarketable innovator's dilemma? Is the unmarketable innovator a myth? Does your proven ability to take things apart show you could learn anything you needed to? Or are you doomed to keep hacking, waiting for the day you can market your brand of dog food?

I suspect my friend doesn't really care. He just loves learning.

The Need to Feed

I'm reading Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran. Excellent book. The book is a very practical introduction to machine learning and data mining techniques. All the examples are in Python which isn't a real problem. However I am eager to try them out in Java which means I am hunting for Java equivalents of the Python libraries used in the book.

Currently, I'm looking for a decent "universal" feed parser. I'm actually planning to apply this to a real project. Something forgiving of broken XML is important.

Here is what I've found so far:

Jakarta Commons Feed Parser

I had so much hope for this library. It is SAX based and forgiving of broken XML. It is dependent on 6 other external libraries which means I get to download and organize my jar files. This is a great way to feel productive when I want to avoid organizing my sock drawer. Except, there is no download link and the SVN link is broken as well. Actually all sarcasm aside, I think this would be my first choice if I could get to it.

Eddie RSS and Atom Parser for Java

From the page: "Eddie is a liberal RSS and Atom feed parsing library for Java. It is a SAX based parser and as a result is capable of parsing a significant number of broken feeds. It was written after discovering that the well-known ROME feed parser is implemented using DOM and therefore incapable of dealing with ill formed XML. It also failed to parse some well formed feeds too." -- When I get a chance I plan to look into this one. Its my second choice for now.

Rome

Of course there is the popular Rome feed parser. I like what I see on the java.net webpage. A minimal external library dependency!! The only thing I fear is broken feeds. I assume if its that big of a deal they have probably done something about it by now. This one uses a DOM model and this article looks like a helpful start.

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October 2008

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