ryou.com seems like very cool screenscraping hack. We could use something like this for the US. Some of it is available I think but AFAIK not everything.

The Miami U campus library has a New spiffy website they’re prototyping. Complete with rss feeds I emailed in a comment which suggested these earlier today at roughly the time it was modified so maybe I had an effect, doubtful. All uni calendars should be downloadable in iCal format so that I can integrate them with mine. And everyone else likewise.

Oh and I helped add WebDAV support to a FTP based “Bookmarks Synchronizer (FTP)” for Mozilla Firefox. Now it is secure (via HTTPS) and easier to configure on a large scale. (You only need an .htaccess/.htpasswd file config’d and the DAV apache extension running on the server)

I cc’d the author the code from the Mozilla Calendar app which does iCal syncronization. It was originally from the Mozilla Composer app. Fun. He had support drilled in there within 24hrs. Try it and if it works for you add a WFM (works for me) comment so Torisugar i can add WebDAV to the extension’s title. Now the mozilla suite can do everything .Mac can. And I don’t have to sit around after my bookmarks get hosed anymore wishing I had made backups or wishing that I had this or that bookmark on the particular terminal I’m using.

• 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.

• 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.

The pen isn’t about handwriting recognition. That’s completely wrong. That’s like taking a sound card and viewing the sound card by how well it does voice recognition–rather than the fact that I can now do voice over IP, and rip MP3s and play back MP3s, and do learning at a distance with Flash movies, and view streaming video with audio.”

Succinct point for Pen/Tabet PCs. Computers arn’t particularly good pattern recognition devices (unlike the brain). And in any case handwriting is inescapably slow.

Just added his blog to my rss feed reader yesterday when I heard his name in the news and remembered he was a tablet proponent from way back.

On the one hand, I’m glad that the movie industry is actually adopting the online movie model which has been around for a while now, without their participation. On the other, the restrictive Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) stuff sucks. As the blogger I linked to noted, you are allowed to watch up to 30 days after you download…BUT once you start you have to finish in 24hrs. Oops. Double timed. You download the file but despite the fact you paid for it, it will still fizzle after 30 days, even though theres no technical reason to .

Hard DRM, on both occasions which I’ve encounted it on WMP have failed, it looks like Loren had a similiar bombing. Oops. And what if your hard disk dies, yada ya.

I seem to recall every one of these foul DRM systems for music failing until the kinder DRM’d iTunes MS came around. Part of me would love to see the same thing happen for this. Are movies different though? The large files are typically a pita to download if you don’t have a vibrant college campus LAN handy, unlike music. You rent movies, you don’t rent music. People are used to not having rights when it comes to movies.

Hah, I like the college.movielink.com bit, down to the animal house-esque font. They ‘get’ where the people who know all about downloading movies are and that they’re a worthy target, and a harder sell. Still $3.75 for one viewing might be a little high.

Heh, maybe if dormies got together and pooled for it. Oops, thats violating the TOS. Ah well. Walls walls, everywhere.

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.

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. ]]> http://thadk.net/wp/2004/06/01/misc/feed/ 1