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RSS wankery

Published on 2004/6/8 in 'log. 0 Comments
  • MBOX to RSS converter I am thinking of setting up for listservs I hardly check because Thunderbird frustratingly doesn’t notify when new messages come into folders other than the Inbox.
  • Via Boing Boing I found Life Hacks>, in the same vein as Google Hacks and Digital Photog Hacks from O’Reilly. Mr. Craphound (aka Cory Doctorow) went around to lots of Alpha geeks including my personal notables, JWZ and Ward Cunningham. I just did some googling and it looks like there was a previous edition of Life Hacks. fun. He should have linked to it too I think.
    • One of their hacks is use RSS and screen scraping to bring things to you. Wonder how much of this came from JWZ (see last week’s cheesegrater entry)
    • “He read from the cards and then threw them like shuriken into the audience” I heard about someone who did this in 2003 Western Senior Presentations via Mr. Duncan who judged it as kind of melodramatic. Was the Westerner copying with the idea that no one would *ever* notice? Ha, really makes me think. You wonder if you “borrow” something from the web or more generally, be it a web design, a few phrases from a billboard advertisment, ideas, or mannerisms, what are the odds someone will track it back to the source?
    • “Download your banking info and graph it” Considered doing this during finals week but not enough time, checked CPAN to see if US Bank had any script for scraping, they don’t although others do. I need to learn Perl/Python and I need projects to start on, I have time, I’ll probably do this. I wonder if I should just not learn Perl 5, considering 6 and do Python now. Not very familiar with these for all my linux use, meh.
  • Seb Paquet, another internet notable of mine who just keeps showing up with great things (he created the K5‘s Ko4ting
     wiki which I quickly took to and added a much needed K5 article directory) also has a personal “thoughts” wiki. Mine is at wh.thadk.net. It’s great productivity wise, I think it should make the next Alpha geek Life Hacks.
  • Utilizing subdomains are another of my Life Hacks…wn.thadk.net goes directly to my notes page, wh.thadk.net/Subpage goes to a subpage of my homepage and wp.thadk.net/Subpage takes you to a subpage of my projects page: a particular project’s homepage, or generally wp.thadk.net takes you to the project index.
    • The added nimbility of Asterixes for lists and brackets for links sure beats this hard code html
    • I wish everyone could have 2 letter subdomains for their user pages on wikis. Makes it easy to sit down at any terminal and get cracking on work.
    • Of course, long ago I started my own todo.txt as well, which is still in more or less constant use for things that don’t really need to be on the wiki.
  • Thad’s Life Hack 3, don’t do without IMAP.
  • 4: Use Bullets.

Misc.

Published on 2004/6/1 in 'log. 1 Comment
  1. Wikipedia gets a nice makeover.

    2. I wonder what took someone so long to come up with a nice skin that had consensus. I also wonder if I should adopt it for my Mediawiki. Maybe a tint to the background like the current version’s icon and header. Is this sleezy? I mean Wikipedia is FDL, the code is GPL so it’s legal at least.

  2. Lots of RSS stuff
    1. I updated Carnage4Life’s .NET Screenscraping code for K5–see here (K5Diary2RSS.cs). Something isn’t quite right with the titles (lots of extra spaces in my reader) but I only read a couple K5 diaries and what I got it to produce is good enough for now. Also, only updated rss v1.0, 0.91 should be same though. I’m sorta doubting anyone else will use it.
      1. Couldn’t get it to run on .26 version of Mono which is the only version which was to be found for Debian Stable. Wonder if a newer version would work or if it’s gliched somehow. The error reporting wasn’t very good.
      2. Ended up having to do a hack were the CLI binary runs on windows with a shortcut under cygwin and rcp’s my feeds up to my serve. Yay hacks.
    2. Also discovered jwz‘s screenscraper-to-rss called cheesegrater and set that up for a few of the feeds it supports.
    3. Found XANGA does RSS afterall even if they don’t have it in their header: http://xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=(username) is the format.
    4. DiaryLand doesn’t appear to after much searching–I can only say: fascists!

    Life itself is good. Calculus isn’t too bad, the new professor–Kullman (we changed at chain rule) reminds me of what Richard Feynman must have been like (only listened to his lectures) . Uses good strategies for lecture–repetitious problems with a main common thread all on the board at once I noticed today. Seemed very effective at reminding me of the content, though none of it is new to me (had Calc in HS).

    Spent less at the amazing Jungle Jim‘s uber-grociery (2-3x Sam Club size with more or less all Int’l foods) than at the local Oxford Kroger on pretty much the same amount of food. This supports the idea that the local Kroger is the third most expensive Kroger in the country.

    PBase (Photography Base) is pretty cool, visited again. Never any shortage of well photographed albums at high resolution suitable for wallpapering. Now that I have a camera and have taken pictures (esp like the Nature 2,3) to use as backgrounds, not so much of a big deal.

    I still can’t get over this rainbow from last years vacation to Denali. Google found it recently and My server’s been treating users of Google Image Search to at least one picture of actual quality.

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