File.new("foo.txt") { | f |
  # do something with f
} # f gets automatically closed

This is an interesting use of blocks. I don't recall seeing this before, but it's very nice. Maybe one day I'll have some time to go play with Ruby. I know a few people who are into it, but Python seems to be the bomb at the moment. And I'm still trying to pry my cold dead fingers off of my parentheses, I mean, Lisp/Scheme code.

One other comment in the whole beautiful code/source code as literature thread. My conception of the source code as literature idea was to look more at big programs that were worthy of study, not snippets. I guess if we wanted to take the analogy further, we should be looking at novel, short story, and poem equivalent sized programs.

On my blog, the non-gzipping aggregators with the most hits are:

1. SharpReader
2. NetNewsWire
3. Radio Userland
4. AmphetaDesk
5. RSSBandit

• Aggie 1.0 RC5 - supported
• AmphetaDesk - no support planned until after 1.0
• Bottom Feeder - supported
• Channel Buddy - not supported - but private in-house aggregator used by "a total of two people in the world"
• effnews - supported
• FeedReader - unsupported
• Hep - supported in 0.4
• java.blogs aggregator - no plans to implement GZip support
• Magpie RSS - supported as of 0.5
• NetNewsWire - added to feature request list
• Newsgator - support as of 1.2 beta.
• Newzcrawler - not supported
• nntp//rss - supported in 0.3
• ping.blog.gs - awaiting a reply
• Radio Userland - unsupported but Andre Radke has written a plugin supporting gzip.
• RSS Bandit - being worked on
• SharpReader - being worked on
• Straw - supported
• Syndirella - Simon Fell has released a version supporting gzip.
• Wildgrape NewsDesk - support in an unspecified future release