I just wrote a simple application that can read single meshes from a collada file into a tri file.
This could be cool for the "not artists" like me because i just look into the google 3d warehouse site for assets for my games and convert them into a tri file and... voilĂ lots of cool stuff in my game world.
You can pick it up from
http://www.scratchydreams.com/projects/collada.7z
The app is a simple java (don't hate

) application without any dependencies except the core JVM.
The code is simple, maybe easy to port to C or C++ but them you need a XML parser library which is standard with the JVM.
Cheers,
Paulo