Dave talks about nobody having done a translator for Atom. It wasn’t obvious before (I didn’t mention it on the page itself) but my [[Feed Normalizer]] will do this quite nicely.

It’s easy for me to do at least, because I’m programming in Python, which means I get to use Mark Pilgrim’s code to do the parsing. Atom’s a moving target, but Mark has a pretty strong interest in tracking it, so all I need to do is periodically download new copies of his parser.

Here’s Mark in RSS 2.0, by the way.

For the record, I don’t understand why Google has ditched RSS. If they’re generating RSS for some of their users, it couldn’t be that hard to generate it for the rest of them.

Update: it’s open source. See the source. Set up a mirror, if you like. The code is not complex at all.

Went to the auction house today to look at some cars. First, an auto Levin XZ, which looked very nice and drove well, although wasn’t as quick as the BZ-Gs I test-drove the other day, due to its 4A-FE engine.

It’s interesting to see how much space there is under the Levin’s bonnet compared to my 1989 Mitsubishi Lancer SZ. Perhaps this car might be in for a 20V 4A-GE or 4A-GZE conversion one day, if I get it …

Notes:

• Talk on gearboxes.

• Toyota engines and gearboxes.

• Matti from Finland apparently has lots of info available. Can’t get to it right now but the archive has a copy. Toyota Gearboxes.

• Transplanting a 20V 4A-GE into an AW11 MR2 (including a note from someone who can get the 20V engines into New Zealand for US$500).