Juicy, juicy mangoes!

I used to like mangoes okay.  They were good, but a little over-sweet and a little stringy.

It turns out... I really, really like mangoes.  It's just that I hadn't had a very good one until this week.

My wife orders a box of organic produce every other week, and we got two slender, yellow mangoes.  These are from Mexico, are organic (obviously), but I don't know the name.  They are INCREDIBLE.  Juicy, smooth-as-silk, and sweet with a little bit of limey tartness.

I just cut one up for lunches tomorrow, and I'm already obsessing over how to get more.

If you have any recommendations, please send them to me! 

Recreating XML files from fragments

I'm working on an interesting problem right now.  Occasionally I acquire fragments of files that I would like to re-create as much as possible.  Many of these are Microsoft Word 2007 files.  MS Word 2007 uses an XML format, so it would seem possible to parse the file to detect tags that were ended, but don't have a matching opening (because the beginning was cut off).

I figured that I'm probably not the first one to think about this problem, so I went trolling the intertubes for ready-made solutions.  Since perl is my glueware language of choice, I searched until I found the following handy snippet from prlmnks.org:

use XML::LibXML;
my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();
$parser->recover(1);
my $doc = $parser->parse_file($ARGV[0]);
print $doc->toString(1);

Very, very nice!  Now I am part of the way there.  Next, I took a pre-existing MS Word document of similar make and model, and prepended it.  With a little manual massaging, I got the script above to parse it, and even pretty-print it (a nice bonus).  Unfortunately, Microsoft Word still doesn't like the resultant "document."

I'm still working on this problem, but that's decent progress for an hour of work.

Ubiquity

At first I was stunned at just how much I liked my iPod Touch. I just wanted a replacement for my 5th gen iPod, that stopped working when it mysteriously acquired a dent in its formerly pristine stainless steel back.

It didn't take long for it to turn into my most indispensible tool. Place to eat? UrbanSpoon. Reservation? OpenTable. And the list goes on: calculators, converters, levels, action games, puzzles, wikipedia apps, ebook readers, and even a way to read books from my Safari account.

If the kid is bored... a bit of Shrek. Long flight?A pithy podcast is the trick. Can't sleep? Ambient noise generator FTW!

In short, this little glass and steel box has become utterly indispensible.

This post, of course... composed, in bed, one thumb at a time.