David Ruppert

Firefox lately has been throwing me into a complete fit. It seems two or three times a day my laptop locks up and is totally unusable. Once I can get the Task Manager to finally load. I see the culprit. The same one every time. Firefox.

I never hear any complaints from my cohorts here in the office, so I assumed it was something specific to my machine, setup, extension selection . . . something. But after doing a little searching this morning, it appears I’m not the only one with a problem. This thread started in 2004 with version 1 of the product, but is currently 23 pages long and has had a post as recent as a few hours ago.

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After coming across this story on a local news site, it reminded me of an experience I had while planning for our upcoming trip to Cozumel.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to sit in the local passport office for 45 minutes to get my passport processed. One of the things my keen, “always-on” mind noticed while waiting was a sign taped to the top of each teller stating, very clearly, “We do not take credit cards”.

No problem, I had just gone to the ATM machine in anticipation of this beating and had 10 crisp $20 bills on hand. After waiting patiently, my number was called and I strutted up to the window, ready to get my passport on.

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Over the past few weeks at the office I’ve had a need for a couple of different XML Parsers; one for traditional ASP and one PHP. I’ve found a couple that seem to work well and thought I’d make a note of them before I lost them for good.

ASP XML Parser

Buster Collings only has one source code example out there, but it’s a good one. This code was used to bring in an RSS newsfeed from Thomson and display it on one of our clients’ home page. Fairly straightforward, but requires MSXML2 so you might need to upgrade your server if you’re running an older OS.

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