Before I lose it again here are the links to downloadable files of place names and coordinates in many countries.
The Geographic Names Information System(GNIS), developed by the USGS in cooperation with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), contains information about almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features in the United States.
This site is the database of the official repository of foreign place-name approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (US BGN). Approximately 20,000 of the database's features are updated monthly.
Downloadable of CSV files of the names of places in selected countries:
Snappy logo is required: Here's something new Roland Tanglao made an RSS Business card. If my friends and acquaintances had these I would subscribe. All we need now is a snappy logo like the orange XML RSS logo for the idea to catch
Later: Oops that's what the kunekt logo was about.
Someone must have done this before. I want to print some Java source code in order to study it but I want to pretty print the Javadoc that is in the source in a way that I can read them together. I don't want to print the source and the JavaDoc separately. I want them together on one page printed prettily.
How to Defeat Bad Web Robots With Apache is a very thorough explanation of how to block bots that do not honour your robots.txt file. I like thi s quote:
Several people have tried accessing /robots.txt on this server after reading this page. If you do, you will be automatically and instantly blocked from reading any pages on this site. Don't risk it!!! Try these methods on your own server, if you need convincing.
OK, what I think I want is:
A program that given a set of URLs of RSS feeds makes a set of simply formated HTML files containg the content of the RSS feed.
The program should be intelligent not to get a feed too many times so it will have to decide when to use a cache and when to retrieve the feed again.
The program will have to gracefully handle not being able to connect or other network problems.
The program will have to handle any kind of junk that could occur in an RSS badly formed RSS feed.
You are now in Shibuya Station: Nearby is: 1: Hachiko 2: Yamanote Line Platform 3: Toyoko Line Platform
3
You are now in the Toyoko Line Platform in Shibuya Station: Nearby is: 1: The Toyoko Line Train People: 2: Stuart 3: Toyoko Line Platform - PicturesLater: Thousands off people are thinking about this right now c.f. Location-Aware Thumb Ratings
I found just what I need over at DECAFBAD's project page an RSS->HTML for SSI converter written in Perl. I was going to hack one together in Python for inclusion on my soon to be completed™ dynamic homepage. Now the dilemma is, do I use this perfectly functional piece of Perl code or do I rewrite it in Python.
The biggest problem up until now has how to handle these dynamic parts that need constant updating without having my own 24x7 server. I'm thinking that if I have a terminal open on my work machine to my ISPs command line. I can run it from there. This means that writing it in Java might also be practical. I could even run it from my desktop but I have the impression that running a Java process would slow my development machine down.
Thinking about it, maybe many people could benefit from that fragment of HTML. I could get the script to post it to a mailing list and people could update their pages when the mail comes in ala publish and subscribe. It would also mean that I could get the latest news sent to my phone when the feed changes.
A Microcontent news article shows how the emergent behaviour of bloggers resemble those of ants leading people back to juicy items with their pheromone trails. This explains why Kasia is finding it difficult to predict "How the traffic flows".
It's always useful to consult or use someone else's checklists to augment or as a starting point for your own checklists. Cardboard Nu has a good selection of checklists comprising of Weekly, Planning, Start Of Project, End Of Project, Development Environment and New Team Member Project Management Checklists. The post important point though is to actually stick to using them!
A Japanese mobile phone developer has made a page of tips (in Japanese) about web development for Japanese mobile phones including Docomo, Au and J-Phone.
It seem like Microsoft is seriously researching developing the idea of making SPAM costly : The Penny Black Project. Interesting as it will have to be a mulitplatform solution to be taken seriously.
Did I dream it or can you legally mix two XML schemas in one XML document? The reason I ask is I want to have a legal XHTML document augmented with my own tags that indicate the geographical location of the blog entry.
Later: I think what I am talking about is XML Namespaces. Now to study how these are parsed and whether a validating parser validates them or ignores them.
In answer to some questions by Darren Cook I wrote on TokyoPC programming newsgroup the following:
In a fairly large project there are some files I'd like to rename as
the focus of the functions has changed over time. Similarly there is a
directory I'd like to move one level deeper into the tree.
AFAIK if I want to do this I need to cvs remove then cvs add. But if I
do that I lose all the history of changes up until then.
Is there a way around this?
This is a real pain with CVS. If you move something you have to recheck
it in and delete the old copy. The old copy remains "in the attic" so it
is possible to see it's history but the new copy starts a completely new
history. This is a limitation of CVS and apart from some voodoo
techniques like moving and renaming stuff on the server there is no easy
solution. I think Subversion addresses this problem.
On a similar theme I use CVS during development, checking in code that
I later realize is redundant or badly in need of major changes. So I
end with a lot of junk comments in cvs:
Added f()
Bug fix in f()
Radical edit of f() and parameters
Deleted f(): functionality now in f2() and f3().
This looks fine...
With bugfixes I like to just include the Bugzilla number, then someone
can go and look at Bugzilla to see what the problem is.
OK, it can be interesting to see the design trial and error, but IMHO
that is better handled with @internal comments (*).
Unless historical comments are really pertinent to the understanding of
the program or a dire warning to a future developer, they should be
relegated to CVS. After a year or so nobody really wants to know the
history of method or class.
Anyone got any thoughts on this? Should I use a local CVS server and
then add to the main project as a batch (using cvs log on my local
copy to decide what commit message to write)?
The IDEA Java IDE is really cool in that it has in built version control.
You can go back to the source between any compile and diff the versions
locally. CVS is also built in so it is painless to add files and update
files from the IDE. I think it is almost better than WinCVS.
Version control really comes into it's own with a team. It's great to do
an update and get the latest code and see that CVS has merged your
yet-to-be-checked-in changes with some changes that were made to your
file after you started changing it. It's hell though when someone's
changes clash with yours and you have to figure out how to manually
merge the changes. It's then that you wish you had real file checkout
and locking...
My goal is always to be able to produce an release notes file after a
build from the CVS check history for whole project. Something that you
could give to the customer or the testers. Inevitably you have to edit
it a bit but if you write good CVS comments you can keep most of them as
is.
I know that Java VMs support optimization but I wonder when they do it. I know that some classes run faster after their first invocation but does the VM do optimization when it is idling? Excuse my loose use of the terminology, I'm just thinking out loud here...
My Japanese colleague just bought this Japanese book IT English that nobody taught me (my translation).
A lot of English used in the Software Engineering world will never make it into normal English study books so this book seems to aim to cover those phrases and situations that are particularly useful for English/Japanese communication in the IT world. It looks good. I am planning to read it sometime soon.
An even simplier way of doing RSS syndicatation of any web page by marking certain div or span tags with a special class and then processing it with a tool. Clever!
Project Management checklists and templates
"The Referrers System lets you list the sites that sent visitors from their page to your page. [T]his service allows you to create the list of referrers using a single JavaScript command."
Oh great Lazyweb I summon thee to give me a URL to return Slashdot search results as an RSS feed for a given search query. I command this in the name of Progress!
(I would like to comment on everything Japan related on Slashdot but I don't want to read the depths of every thread to find Japan related posts.)