With an impressive 31-17 gallop over the Colts, the Broncos clinch a wild card spot. Right now it looks like they’re headed for a rematch with the Colts in the opening round of the playoffs. It’s tough to say who will have the psychological edge in that game. The Colts will be fired up prove Sunday’s game was a fluke. But the Bronco’s enter the game knowing that they can run and score on the Colts.

Some games you just get beat and some games just slip away. And in the short NFL season, every game that slips away is like a dagger to the heart. Should’a, could’a, would’a – if the Broncos had just beaten the Bears, of if they had just kicked away from Dante Hall. But now, they’re three tough games away from the Super Bowl.

Tim Pierce comments that the Bowls can be part of a Playoff System. The problem is that the Bowl Games are all about the money, with the games a distant second.

The fact is that the bowls provide far more help to the hospitality industry than to the teams that play in them. Bowls have strict rules on how many days a team must stay in town and how many tickets the attending schools must buy.

The organizers, generally not-for-profit organizations set up with support from the business community in their home cities, are concerned enough about filling hotel rooms that many second-tier bowls would rather remain second tier than become an early round game of an 8- or 16-team playoff system. That’s true even though being part of a playoff would mean far more attention, television money and the chance to host the nation’s best teams.

In the current system, the bowl is the last game of the season and fans are in town for a blowout – planning to celebrate the season and have their winter holiday. If a bowl becomes a preliminary playoff game, then how many fans will make the trip and how much will they spend? I’m not even sure that you can sell out a 80,000+ stadium for a preliminary game without a home team to draw on – and the home town fans are definitely traveling on the cheap.

If you want to see a NCAA Division 1-A Football playoff, then you have to start by finding a replacement for the Bowl Money. Don’t forget that the Bowl Games get New Year’s Day for their own right now – the playoffs will compete with the NFL every week.

As for me, 29 bowl games mean that 29 teams will end their season on a high note. It insures that I’ve got a full slate of bowl games to watch on New Years Day. And that’s good enough for me.

The Hibern8 IDE is a quick’n’dirty interactive Hibernate Query Language (HQL) tool. And while it’s not really an IDE, it’s a pretty slick way of viewing the contents of your persistent Hibernate data store. There are basically two ways of opening up your data store with Hibern8IDE: you can interactively add hibernate properties and configuration files or you can programmatically start Hibern8IDE with a hibenate configuration object. Since I hate to constantly repeat myself, I opted for the programmatic option.

If you’ve been following my series on Hibernate, then you know that I’ve been keeping all my configuration files in the cfg directory tree. So I decided to simply traverse the cfg directory tree, adding all .hbm.xml files to a configuration object before passing the configuration object on to Hibern8IDE. And since traversing a directory is a pretty common operation, I decided to implement a general solution consisting of a simple TreeWalker class and a TreeAction interface.

14 May 04: Max Andersen from the Hibernate team comments that the load order of .hbm.xml files is important when a subclass or joined-subclass is defined in a separate file from the parent. If the parent is defined in parent.hbm.xml and the child is defined in child.hbm.xml, then parent.hbm.xml must be loaded before child.hbm.xml.

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package util; 
 
public interface TreeAction {
    public void handle( java.io.File f );
}
 package util;
 
import java.io.File;
 
public class TreeWalker {
 
    public void walk ( TreeAction actor, File root )
    {
        if ( root.exists() ) {
            if ( root.isDirectory() ) {
                File[] files = root.listFiles();
 
                for ( int i=0 ; i<files.length ; ++i ) {
                    if ( files[i].isDirectory() ) {
                        this.walk( actor, files[i] );
                    }
                    else if ( files[i].isFile() ) {
                        actor.handle( files[i] );
                    }
                }
            }
            else if ( root.isFile() ) {
                actor.handle( root );
            }
        }
    }
}

The top level Ide class treats each command line argument as a configuration root directory It contains a static inner class Action implementing TreeAction that adds each .hbm.xml file to the hibernate configuration. And we hand the configuration object to Hibern8IDE once all the configuration directories have been traversed.

Note that static inner class Action has to catch the hibernate MappingException to match the TreeAction interface. After catching the MappingException, we use it to create a RuntimeException. This trick of wrapping checked exceptions in a RuntimeException comes courtesy of Tim Bray. This is an appropriate response because our only other choice is to ignore it entirely.

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import java.io.File;
 
import net.sf.hibernate.cfg.Configuration;
import net.sf.hibernate.MappingException;
import net.sf.hibernate.HibernateException;
 
import net.sf.hibern8ide.Hibern8IDE;
 
import util.*;
 
public class Ide {
 
    static class Action implements TreeAction {
        private Configuration config;
 
        public Action ( Configuration aConfig )
        {
            config = aConfig;
        }
 
        public void handle ( File f )
        {
            String name = f.toString();
            if ( name.endsWith( ".hbm.xml" ) ) {
                try {
                    config.addFile( f );
                } catch ( MappingException e ) {
                    throw new RuntimeException( e );
                }
            }
        }
    }
 
    public static void main ( String[] args )
        throws MappingException,
               HibernateException
    {
        Configuration cfg = new Configuration();
        Action      actor = new Action( cfg );
        TreeWalker walker = new TreeWalker();
 
        for ( int i=0 ; i<args.length ; ++i ) {
            File f = new File( args[i] );
            walker.walk( actor,f );
        }
 
        Hibern8IDE.startWith( cfg );
    }
}

Finally, we add a new ide action to our build file (other minor buildfile changes not shown here). The single command line argument references our configuration directory.

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...
<target name="ide" depends="compile,setup-run">
  <java classname="Ide"
        fork="true">
    <classpath refid="classpath.ide" />
    <arg value="${cfg-dir}" />

    <sysproperty key="log4j.configuration" value="${LOG4J_OUT}" />
  </java>
</target>
...

Now we can launch the Hibern8IDE query tool by simply typing “ant ide”. Here’s the source for adding a Hibern8IDE query tool to your Hibernate project.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim to be an expert on hibernate. Please send comments and corrections.

We like to think that RSS uses bandwidth efficiently because it only contains content – and it’s all relatively new content at that. But while retrieving the RSS feed may be more efficient than retrieving the corresponding web site, not may people are polling the web site for changes every 30 minutes either. And in that light, the real question is whether it could be more efficient.

My weblog is configured to have seven days of posts on the home page and a maximum of 25 items in my RSS feed. With my posting frequency, that means that my feed will usually have 7 or 8 items. More importantly, only one of those items is likely to be new to one of my regular readers – more than 80% of my RSS feed is wasted. I’ve got a handful of subscribers, so it’s not a big deal. But if I had more subscribers or I ran a weblog hosting service, than I’d try to get some more efficiency out of my feed.

If we’re willing to sacrifice simplicity, then we can improve the efficiency by splitting the feed into several parts. Suppose we split the feed contents into daily chunks (more prolific bloggers would split each day as well) with the main feed pointing towards the relevent chunks. Then subscribers wouldn’t need to download 6 days of old posts to find the single new post.

I doubt that the added efficiency is worth the added complexity. And RSS bandwidth costs are only an issue for the most popular sites. But it doesn’t hurt to have something in our back pocket.

Is Standalone Trackback safe? I obviously think so, but that and a buck-fifty might buy you a cup of coffee. Here are some reasons to consider giving it a chance.

1. The development version runs with the perl taint checks turned on. And the modification to untaint the variable is completely superfluous (this variable is used to generate a filename).

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   $tb_id =~ tr/a-zA-Z0-9/_/cs; #untaint the id if ( $tb_id =~ /(\w+)/ ) { return $1; } else { return ''; }

2. User input is sanitized to remove harmful html code before it is stored.
3. If I can get your eyeballs to scrutinize the code, then we can make it that much safer.

After a painful home loss to da Bears two weeks ago, the Bronco’s post season hopes had to be put on life support. And even after yesterday’s 218 yards and 5 TD effort by Clinton Portis and the white-hot Patriots shutout of the Dolphins, the Broncos only have a tenuous grasp on the final AFC playoff berth.

The Broncos remaining opponents are the Browns, Colts and Packers (home, road, road); while the Dolphins take on the Eagles, Bills and Jets (home, road, home). The tie-breaker (conference record) favors the Broncos. But I think that the schedule favors the Dolphins. It’s going to be a tight race to the wire.

Not content to leave good enough alone, I’ve been refactoring my Standalone Trackback implementation to add support for Standalone Comments. And while it’s nothing fancy, it seems to be getting the job done. So I thought that I would take it out for a spin.

BTW, my motivation for this foray into standalone trackback and standalone comments was to move functionality off the Radio Community Servers onto my hosted space. The community servers sometimes slow down, making Ideoplex appear to slow down in turn. With this latest update, I minimize my dependence upon the community servers.

And just in case I need to switch back, the old comments server was http://radiocomments2.userland.com/comments.

I suspect this puts me in the minority, but I don’t want Division 1 College Football Playoffs. I actually like the current Bowl system – fans get a nice holiday in a warm Southern city, lots of teams get to play and lots of people get to argue about who’s better. And since I have no real expectation that my team[s] will ever be Number One, I can live with the ambiguity.

Fortunately for me, this is a rare case when I’m on the same side as the big money. Because the Bowl games are all about money and switching to a single elimination playoff is just too much like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Suppose we had an 8 team playoff tournment. That would require 7 games over 3 weeks. Exactly which fans are going to which games? And how much are they going to spend?

It’s relatively easy to go to a single New Year’s Day Bowl game – you’re already on holiday. But suppose there were three weeks of games. If you play the games on weekends, then you go head-to-head with the NFL. But if you play the games during the week, then who’s going to travel to the games and how much can they afford to spend?

Nope, I think the Bowl System is safe until they figure out how to make more money with a playoff.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of a standalone trackback server implementation for Radio Userland. The trackback implementation is derived from Ben Trott’s Standalone Trackback and adds the html sanitization code from Brad Choate’s Sanitize Plug-in for Movable Type. It allows users who are hosting their own Radio Userland weblog to host their own trackback server as well.

Requirements

• Web Server capable of running cgi scripts
• Perl with the following Perl Modules:
  • File::Spec
  • Storable
  • CGI
  • CGI::Cookie I believe that these are core modules as of Perl 5.6.0.

PS: If you’ve been following my Trackback Adventures, then you know that I eventually ended up modifying my installation of Radio Userland. This implementation requires no changes to your installation.

A nice piece outlining how some small musicians are making a reasonable living off live performance, direct album sales, and merchandise [via winterspeak.com].

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years. A few months ago, I wrote that Music costs too much and that’s all right with me. Because the obscene profit margins on CD sales are what let these small artists make a decent living. I think that online music sales will take a good sized bite out of those margins. I just hope that the small artist still finds a way to prosper.

PS: While Zimran hasn’t heard of any of the artists profiled in the article, Ellis Paul has been a favorite of mine since seeing him at at Camp California house concert. A house concert is just about the best way to hear music ever invented – 20-40 people listening in a small, intimate venue.