With local number portability just two weeks away, it’s time for stupid cellular service stories.

• No one can help you now – from AT&T Wireless after the second wasted call in 24 hours. They are very efficient in sending out payment delinquincy notices. If they could only keep their computers working long enough to find out why a direct bank payment wasn’t credited.
• That will require a new service contract – from Sprint PCS when trying to change the billing address. It was a New York number, an invalid Virginia address, and a valid Connecticut address. Who cares about the billing address on a nationwide plan with no roaming and no long distance fees? Since the bill was paid electronically, it was easier not to correct the billing address.
• Maybe you should change your provider – to my old boss when he called to get a replacement phone. With a $1000/month cell phone habit, I would have thought that they would bend over backwards. He had to call back to talk to a supervisor before getting a new phone.

I moved Take the First Step off the Radio Community Server to get my own domain name. And I selected Page-Zone to get better readership data – many services don’t provide access to the raw server logs. So I am reasonably confident that I have 9 RSS subscribers. That about 5% of requests and 2.5% of my bandwidth are for my RSS feed. And that a little over 90% of the requests for my RSS feed return code 304. So if Scoble wants more readership data, then he should think about moving to a hosting service.

Moving off the Radio Community Server was easy. I only had half a years of posts to examine for broken links, and those were easy to find by grepping through the local backup (Radio preference) of the upstreamed files. The hard part is getting the rest of the world to update your links. I modified many of the pages on the RCS to do a meta-refresh to the new site, but the search engines are full of pages to the old site.

Of course, my bandwidth needs are minimal. Scoble’s index page is over 4 times as large as mine, his rss feed is over 5 times as large, and he gets over 7 times my page reads. So I don’t think $5/month is going to cover his bandwidth. But I’m happy with the value I get from my $5/month.

Well, I thought that I had trackback working, but it turned out that I had a bit more work to do. The default trackback ping url was causing trouble – it worked as a GET and failed as a POST. And since Radio does a POST, I was unable to ping my own weblog.

While I was inside Radio, I also redefined the meaning of the trackback.flEnabled and trackback.flAddTrackbackLinks preferences. As Radio ships, flAddTrackbackLinks is ignored if flEnabled is false. With my modification the flags are independent – flEnabled specifies outbound behavior and flAddTrackbackLinks specifies inbound behavior. I’m biased, but I think this makes much more sense.

Unfortunately, I was forced to modify existing functions and I’m sure this will break at some point in the future. So here is the list of modified functions, where I have a chance of finding it again:

• system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.render
• system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.getTrackbackLink
• system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.getTrackbackPingUrl

Panther is out and I think that I’ll wait. Panther is $129.99 and a new 800 MHz G4 iBook is $1099 – so holding off on Panther puts me 12% along the way to a G4 iBook. My 700 MHz G3 iBook has done yeoman work this past year and I’d like to get another year out of it before I upgrade. And I suspect that Apple will refresh the hardware again for next year’s Xmas shopping season. So unless a killer Panther only Application comes out, I’ll sit tight for a hardware upgrade in about a year.

After last night’s loss, the Broncos are 5-4 heading into a bye week. And the bye week came just in time. Danny Kanell gave a game effort, but it will be good to see Jake Plummer and the full offensive playbook back on the field. They need to go 5-2 to reach 10 wins and they’ve still got games with Oakland, Kansas City, Indianapolis and Green Bay.

Deltha O’Neal seems to be the designated goat – he misplayed a kickoff with 2:49 left to play and he was beat for the winning touchdown. But he also had the punt return TD that put the Broncos ahead. And I’ll always remember the 1999 Big Game – Stanford dominated play, but O’Neal scored two TDs on special teams before Stanford started kicking away from him.

I’ve switched over to my home brew trackback and everything seems okay. I can manually ping from the Kalsey Computing Group’s Simpletracks and the RDF auto-discovery appears correct. Feel free to send some gratuitous pings to shakedown the new code.

They say that programming in a language is just like riding a bicycle – once you master it, you never forget it. But they say a lot of things that aren’t true. So I’ll confess to having a doubt or two about my perl prowess when I took a look inside Standalone Trackback. Because there were an awful lot of punctuation marks in there.

I started by refactoring the code. There was a big case statement at the top and I made each case action an independent subroutine. Not truly necessary, but a good way of establishing familiarity with the control flow. I had just read Charles Miller’s post on the Noun-Verb naming pattern, so I gave it a whirl (renaming some existing routines along the way). I typically use Verb-Noun, but I have to say that Noun-Verb grows on you. Definitely worth considering on your next project.

The next order of business was to enable the Trackback Counter. I just modified the code to save the number of trackback pings and added an action to return a snippet of javascript to perform the lookup. Then I modified the code to recognize the Radio Userland url parameter pattern. I was just about to put it into place when I realized that I needed to sanitize the trackback html for safety.

After searching about the internet, I decided to borrow some code from Brad Choate’s Movable Type Sanitize Plugin. Fortunately, the code was available as a perl module and easy to add. The sanitize module experience was so nice that I decided to move some of the trackback code into a module as well. And right about then I realized that the perl portion of my brain was back – the punctuation marks all made sense.

I expect to have trackback up and going in a few more days. Drop me a line if you’re interested in checking it out.

Somedays I think that Radio Userland can’t buy respect. The latest Business 2.0 includes a short article on SixApart and mentions that Blogger and Six Apart duke it out [link to first paragraph] for the weblog market – with no mention of Radio Userland. I’ve used both TypePad and Radio Userland. And I’ve voted for Radio with my wallet. But I just don’t understand why Radio is so frequently passed over.

Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong about Jack McKeon. I criticized the Marlins for selecting a 72-year old Jack McKeon to rescue a floundering franchise five months ago. I thought it was just another case of the baseball old boys network taking care of an old boy. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And by leading the Marlins to the World Championship, McKeon proved that he knew what he was doing.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the Marlins. They had a great post-season, going through the Giants, the Cubs and the Yankees before walking away with the Championship. And they won those series – no one gave them anything. But I just wasn’t able to get into the World Series this year.

Maybe it was because both the NLCS and the ALCS were so good this year. Maybe it was because we ended up with a relatively unappealing matchup given the options present at the beginning of the playoffs. And maybe I’m still not used to the late starts now that I’m on the East Coast. But I never got into the World Series and didn’t stay up for the finish of a single game.