Live from Tokyo: Tech Blog

TAR GZ

Why does this happen? It must be something to do with Mime types somewhere. When I download a tar.gz file in Opera it thinks that it is a .tar file and then renames the extension to just .tar. Then, Winzip launches and says it can't handle the file since it is now confused by trying to open the .tar.gz file with the a .tar extension. So then, I have to close Winzip, find the file on the file system and rename it. Renaming it in Opera's Transfers screen just confuses Opera. Does the problem lie in Opera's Mime type handling...

New Approach to Photo Galleries

Now this just makes sense to me. Embed the explanation once and for all in the picture and let the CMS organize the pages containing the photos: photo gallery for Pyblosxom using RDFPIC...

Information mining and archaic texts

[via Matt Payne] Regardless of whether you are interested in the contents or not there is 2-3000 years of experience in labelling, indexing, annotating and organizing the contents of the information in the Bible. leobard beat me to writing about this topic and it's application to mining information from large document collections today. I should write up my own ideas about sometime... More links Torah Study as Hypertext Joel on Software: Reading code is like reading the Talmud...

New business model for newspapers

I just saw an interesting article on the New York times about Qmail that I wanted to link to but I have no idea how long that link is going to be current. My suggestion is that newspapers guarantee that their articles won't go away or be moved to another URL with the intention that people will link to them. Then they can rent the advertising space on those pages to the highest bidder....

MT-To-LJ Syndication

I have been looking for something like this for a long time. A MovableType to LiveJournal sydnication script!...

Dave Winer defines Funky

As you may know, recently the blogging devleopment community has been going wild over RSS and have decided to make a new syndication format. I thought that this had started because Dave Winer had got upset and declared some people's feeds "funky" but now that I read this definition of "funky" and Don Parks examples of "funky" I can see what he was getting at....

RSS + ICBM

This looks like what I was looking for some time back: Adding ICBM coordinates to RSS entries: "We have two elements which can be applied either to the or elements. If applied to the element, it is assumed that the entire feed can be assumed to be about or originating from that specific location. If applied to the individual (the cool way to do it), the specific item can be considered originating from or about that geolocation."...

Upgrade to MT 2.63

I just upgraded to MT 2.63. Boy was that scary!...

SharpReader works with Japanese

SharpReader is a 3 panel RSS viewer for Windows with filtering capability. Note that this requires that you have .NET runtime support installed. I'm still looking for a Japanese RSS reader to show to my colleagues. It subscribed to a few Japanese feeds which seemed to work. See this Image of SharpReader with Japanese RSS feeds The filtering also works except that the Filter text area needs to have the same font as font selected in the options so is currently suffering from mojibake....

WBloggar

I tried WBloggar and I think I had some problem with it and I didn't persevere to get it working. UltraBob of the Dynamic Duo mentioned that he was using it the other day so I downloaded it again and tried it. Wow! What a great looking piece of software! It's so much more feature rich than the LiveJournal client. I'm impressed!...

DIY Blog

Sajjad is valiantly blogging using his own Python scripts to maintain his blog. Everyday I bug him about adding in some feature to his blog like permalinks, rss etc. and the next day it's there....

Photo Album

Right now I need a photo album script that can be run periodically to regenerate an HTML page of images. Files will magically appear in the data directory and I want to be able to view them in chronological order and also by daily and monthly archives. This is going to take about a hour to write in Python but I suspect that someone has one kicking around somewhere. This request is truely lazy....

Is Blogging a Fad?

Great article to show your boss: Is Blogging a Fad?...

RSS->HTML for use in SSI - 2

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....

RSS->HTML for use in SSI

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....