Don't Laugh, It's Paid For
I've never owned a car that could be considered anything remotely sexy, or even saggy in all the right places. I learned to drive in my Dad's 1972 LTD station wagon. One day about a year ago I saw a similar model in a parking garage and had to stand and gawk for a minute, remembering what it felt like to drive a car that had a 351 engine under the hood.
When I actually got a job where I could afford a car, for some odd reason I picked out a 1985 Chevy Cavalier. It was a hatchback, which was helpful, because I moved across the country, then halfway back, and then made another road trip that took me the other half and back again. Unfortunately, those experiences were nothing like On the Road. There's a reason that none of the great road novels involve a Cavalier. I will say this in the Cavalier's favor: I used it to deliver pizza for 2 years. At one point, I was putting 1,000 miles a week on the road, mostly city miles. I was doing my own maintenance then, and learned important lessons like the one where a torque wrench will lie about how much pressure you're really applying to those nuts on the gasket cover, and that the head of said nut will pop off if over-torqued. It died an ignominious death, stolen and torched outside Denton, TX in 1993.
I graduated college 6 months later and my first act upon getting a new job was to purchase a 1994 Saturn SL2. That's right, I bought into the hype... America really can build a decent car! The unfortunate thing about the Saturn is that ultimately, it's still a GM. That car had a new set of rings at 35,000 miles, and a habit of going through alternators every few years. I did put 120,000 miles on it, so it wasn't entirely lousy. For all I know, it's still on the road. I sold it to a guy whose daughter was heading off to college.
My wife never liked the Saturn, or probably more correctly, she never liked the way I drove it. The Saturn was a manual transmission and I drove it the way anybody who spent their early driving years delivering pizzas in Los Angeles would drive a stick shift. She's susceptible to motion sickness. It wasn't a happy combination.
So I bought a used 1999 Camry. I was sick of crummy American engineering and I wanted something that wouldn't require much maintenance. The Camry's been pretty good on that front; most of the problems have been cosmetic or nuisances - like the spring that pops the gas cover when you pull the release lever. The Camry has one significant problem: it's dead boring. Seriously. There's something to be said for a car that breaks down every so often, in that you get to tear it apart. If that's not adventure, I don't know what is. I figure that now that I'm 40, I should have a legitimate mid-life crisis, and going out and buying a ridiculously impractical car would qualify. I've been settling for crisis lite, by downloading music from my misspent youth off of iTunes. It's a lot cheaper than a car payment.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Encrypting Syndicated Content
It's good to see some of the action around signing feeds. Bill de hÓra (along with a project at work) got me to thinking about other problems with hiding data in feeds. What if I had an Atom feed where I wanted the content to remain confidential? Currently, the best solution is HTTP auth with SSL, which is pretty well supported among aggregators. As Bill points out, SSL scales poorly.
Nicholas Chase has an example of using Abdera to produce an XML encrypted feed. This seems like a really good technical solution, with the main problem being that, well, I don't think that there's an aggregator out there that can read this. More in the direction of a useful implementation, Joe Gregorio has a proof of concept for using a microformat along with a GreaseMonkey extension to support encrypted content. The advantage of Joe's solution is that there's at least one aggregator it'll work with.
In lieu of an actual solution, it might be enough to put generic content into each entry, something like "there's new activity in your bank account, click here to log in". But that's worse than a partial content feed, it's a nearly content-free feed. Not much value there.
It seems like you could potentially support this in your aggregator of choice via a plugin, though that's mostly in theory. I'm trying to remember how NewsGator Inbox worked, and I think that about all you'd get is a chance to apply a stylesheet. Certainly, the online aggregators would have difficulty with this. An online could possibly apply Joe's solution (or something like it) by prompting for a password and tries to use that to decrypt the encrypted content. This assumes that you can either support XML-ENC in Javascript, or one could settle on a microformat to support.
Now that Joe is at Google, maybe we'll see Google Reader and iGoogle supporting this kind of thing. Of course, you'd need some compelling content to encourage aggregator vendors to do this. If it's encrypted, how would you know it's compelling? I'm beginning to see the problem here.