22:36 < quinophex> "some say he spells with regexps, some say he uses so much alcohol as it acts as a coolant for his built in supercomputer....." 22:37 < quinophex> "all we know, is he is called iDunno"
[Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:16] | [random] | #
Just to confirm, yes, I do know of rss2email - it has the unfortunate side effect of needing an MTA configured to process the rss feeds and seperate them in to seperate maildirs, basically I wanted something that would write straight to the maildir for me because then I don't have to think about the config for the MTA on each machine that I want to use it on.
Thanks to Martin for the suggestion of pandoc, I'll take a look at that over the next few days to see if it'll make the "plain text" generation slightly neater than the current HTMLParser based code.
[Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:17] | [tech] | #
I've been looking for a decent way to read rss feeds for a bit, I've finally given in to the fact that there's actually nothing about that I feel comfortable with... so, what I've started is writting a simple rss to maildir convertor (I know there's toursst, but that appears to want a galleon bookmarks file and appears to use deprecated bits of python). At the moment it is very very basic, there's still a way to go before I'll be fully happy with it, but it's much nicer being able to read rss using mutt than Yet Another Random Program, I'll be hacking up a mutt config to make it look different to e-mail later, but for now as it's still in testing phases, I'm just testing with a bog standard mutt config.
I've made the code available through a git repository that should (when DNS has finished updating) be available with a git clone git://git.sommitrealweird.co.uk/rss2maildir.git/ before that it should be available from git clone http://miranda.sommitrealweird.co.uk/~brettp/rss2maildir.git/ .
The HTML -> Text parser still needs some work, I'm mostly aiming for it to take HTML and generate almost OK ReST which is easier to read in a text mail client. It still needs paragraph wrapping etc, but I'll work on those over time.
If anyones interested, or wants to get involved, or has some nicer ideas for how to make it work, as always I can be contacted at iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk :)
[Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:38] | [tech] | #
Just after having made the 1.1.0 release I discovered an annoying bug in that version that meant using caption files made it fail in new and interesting ways, I've now fixed the bug and released bpgallery 1.1.1 which fixes this.
[Mon, 14 May 2007 08:34] | [tech] | #
I've taken over upstream development of xmms-scrobbler, it's now hosted at http://xmms-scrobbler.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ and has a public readonly git repository for the code. Since taking over development I've dropped a lot of the tag parsing code and replaced it with taglib, found some "interesting" locking issues and am now looking at making it so that we don't need to restart it when adding username/password. It'd also be good to get it to actually report a username/password breakage at least once rather than being totally silent about it!
In other news, I've just released a new version of bpgallery, this version adds in medium sized pages - i.e. you can have the index page, the index page links to pages that have a resized image on the page, and has next/previous links. If you also generate full sized pages then the link from the image on the medium sized page goes to the full sized page, otherwise it'll go straight to the origional image.
Also thinking about making a last.fm "client" for xmms so that I can keep all my music playing in the one place (lastfmproxy appears to have stopped working for me :/)
[Sun, 13 May 2007 12:08] | [tech] | #
Been watching the snooker - Selby was playing really quite well yesterday, and started the early session this morning looking promising, he seems to have lost it this evening though, which is a shame - and at 12 to 4 down starting tomorrow, he's got a hell of a lot to make up tomorrow.
Higgins isn't playing to his best, but he's being more consistent than Selby, it'll be a hell of a final if they both dig in tomorrow.
That is all.
[Sun, 06 May 2007 23:16] | [life] | #
So, found glusterfs today, looks quite interesting, may have to play when I've got some spare tuits...
Also, I'm about to take over upstream development of xmms-scrobbler, so currently thinking of which revision control system to use... I'm very tempted to use tla because I know it and use it for everything else that I do, but I've been tempted by the evils that are git, hg and bzr... most likely going with tla because it makes the most sense to my often broken little mind, and I like the abrowse command rather too much :)
What else? Probably lots of stuff, oh, looking for a nice multiple project group type build daemon - we've got 4 main branches of a piece of software at work, and packages should be auto built for each of the branches on a commit (ish) - we're currently running 4 copies of cruise control to build the debian packages, that's a little bit on the heavy side, though - and all it'd need to make it actually work for me would be to have a project group config option, so you can assign a number of processes per project group... but it doesn't have that - I just discovered CruiseControl.rb, which is a bit lighter, but it's still not quite what I'm after. May end up writting a small python buildd to deal with it instead, and hook it in to the svn repository with some post commit hooks.
Also got a whole lot of Nagios configuration to finish off to monitor a bunch of servers.
So, that's a small brain dump... more when I remember what the hell it was that I was supposed to be doing - been a hectic day!
[Thu, 19 Apr 2007 18:04] | [tech] | #
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 has been released - congratulations to all those involved in the release process, you've all done a fantastic job (as always ;). Now I've just got to test the upgrade for the NFS root desktop machines at work (that's going to be *sooo* much fun!) and make sure that nothing obvious breaks - I'm not expecting many problems, it *should* go quite smoothly (probably!).
Might also use the "official" non-free packages for the sun j2sdk rather than using java-package, haven't decided yet (and actually, as we also use sun-j2sdk1.4, I'm going to have to use java-package for that anyways!).
Hmmm, I suppose I should update all of my various build chroots and set up all the scripts that I'm going to need also - feh - that can wait for a bit.
Ahh - and I'm going to need to compile an etch version of ion3 from unstable, can't be having my workstation running one of those dodgy window managers that makes it almost impossible to get anything done without using the mouse, afterall!
Right - anyways - I think I shall just go faint, that was *far* too quick between sarge and etch!
[Sun, 08 Apr 2007 14:59] | [tech] | #
Holger, Don't be silly!, of course computers are 100% secure, and they'd (of course) use very stringent access methods to the system... you know, something like telnet with a banner saying "please don't hax0r us, we will trace you and sue you" or something ;)
[Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:02] | [random] | #
MJ Ray said in Bad Tech: CGI Scripts and Line Endings, "Problem: CGI scripts uploaded with the MS Windows version of FileZilla over SFTP don't work until converted. Either there's some FileZilla settings wrong by default, or it just doesn't work." - the problem is that unlike with traditional FTP, which in ASCII mode would automagically translate line endings in to a sane format, SFTP (as far as I can tell) will always send them as binary, and thus if they were in DOS format before the transfer, they'll be in DOS format after the transfer. So, your choices are (other than the evil perl^M symlink)...
Teach users about line endings - get them to do the equivalent of a :set fileformat=unix in vim before saving ;) (I'm not sure which editors out there let you set what line endings to use - might be worth finding out what the users use and looking it up)
When they upload, rather than them uploading directly in to FTP space it hits an area that is checked every x minutes - that area is then copied to the right area with the transformation being done server side
Something else.
[Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:04] | [tech] | #
So, in light of Sven's Platform, I think I'll just not bother reading his platform when he does get off his arse and publish it (must get round to finishing off NM, must find time from somewhere).
On the offchance that you're reading this after he actually publishes it, here's what it said (single line): "As protest against my unfair banning from debian mailing lists, i will not publish any platform until the weekend after the end of the ban."
Isn't he clever? Isn't that a fantastic way to process - don't publish your platform (that might actually help your case, if you've got any actually reasonable ideas), just whine (again) about your "unfair" banning. *sigh*. Somedays I do just wonder about humanity.
[Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:27] | [random] | #
Now, this isn't actually a post about Mac vs PC, it's a post about the general use of the term "Mac vs PC", why is it that the term "PC" is equivelent to "x86 based windows running computer"? The Mac itself is a PC, dammit, and actually, now that it is just another x86 based product and can run windows... ho hum. Anyways - yes, just mostly pissed off by the fact that "Mac" -> Mac OS, and "PC" -> Windows... now, of the two "PC"s that I use most frequently (err, personal ones, not my workstation, though that also...) there is no freaking Windows on 'em, they're Debian GNU/Linux boxes through and through.
So, can the not-entirely-thick people that should know better stop using the term "Mac vs PC" and instead use "Mac OS X vs Windows [version]" or similar if they're just picking on OS.
Anyways, yes, err, I just read some other blog entry that set this off, I'll, err, grab my coat.
[Sat, 17 Feb 2007 10:51] | [tech] | #
Woo! I've been looking for a lucene index inspection tool for the command line for about 6 months or so, ever since first trying to use luke over a forwarded X11 over ssh connection to a machine in the colo with a large(ish) (300,000 document) index... a couple of months ago I stumbled upon PyLucene - a python library that can play with lucene indexes, of course the first thing I did with it was package it (can't have random unpackaged software laying around the system after all, can you!), and then played for a bit, and joined the pylucene-dev mailing list. So, imagine my glee today when on that mailing list there's a post about plush - a Python LUcene SHell - fantasticness! Quickly threw that in to a package and tested it out against a lucene index laying around on my workstation, it worked nicely (couple of small bugs, but they've now been fixed in the trunk version), so, now that I had it packaged, straight off I went to the main indexing server and threw it at a large lucene index, it just worked. Fantastic.
I'll add some links to my repository for pylucene and plush later, when I'm feeling slightly better, feel a little under the weather at the moment.
[Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:35] | [tech] | #
We're at 5 minutes to midnight, and it appears that Joost is the new TV - it appears to be getting some reaonable coverage at the moment, but looks far too much like another closed app using proprietary protocols - the world has gone DRM crazy - someone stop it, I want to get off. DRM is a myth, if you can play it, you can copy it (not neccessarily easily, but it's still possible). The NewScientist article is quite interesting in the claim of "piracy-proof"... if you can play the video, you can capture it, if you can listen to music you can record it, when is the media industry going to realise that DRM is a very dumb idea that shouldn't have been allowed to get this far - pirates can (and always will) find a way, how about going back to trusting your users rather than tarring them all with the "you're a pirate" brush. The Register 's article appears to have a typo in it... well, unless you really do need a 500mbps line in order to use Joost - seems unlikely, I think they meant 500kbps. Anyways - nice idea, not sure that it's better than anything else though, I'll continue buying DVDs that let me play back when I have no interweb connection.
Back to being at 5 minutes to midnight, eeep! We're all going to die! Maybe it's the introduction of DRM that's led to so much terrorism, or maybe just that the media industry appears to be out to shaft everyone. Bah.
Only one other article has caught my attention this morning, it's another look at the iPhone, it appears that no one is actually getting a reasonable amount of time to play and review this device, and it brings up a number of my issues with the iPhone.
So, yes, that's the morning covered - maybe more this evening.
[Thu, 18 Jan 2007 10:17] | [life] | #
iPhone news
So, looking around at what's happening in the media we seem to be getting a fair few non-overly impressive insights in to the iPhone (not least of all the fact that Apple haven't secured the name, and that Linksys have had the iPhone name for a while now - see http://www.linksys.com/iphone/ for the real iPhone, the one that does exist, the one that's already in the market place...)
So, back to Apple, people (being people, and therefore incredibably fallable ;) have created iPhone themes for current mobiles, and they're being hunted down by Apple's lawyers, that can't be good publicity, surely? I thought imitation was the sincerest form of flattery... tut, bad evil corporate giant! According to Matthew Lynn on Bloomberg's opinion pages, """To its many fans, Apple is more of a religious cult than a company. An iToaster that downloads music while toasting bread would probably get the same kind of worldwide attention.""", which seems about true to me - the rest of the article is worth reading, gives more insite in to why he thinks it will fail, and is quite an interesting article.
Health
There's a story in the Guardian about Low cholesterol levels linked with higher risk of Parkinson's disease - so we'll continue the Monday trip to the Cafe then, and have us a nice lunch of bacon and eggs, in the name of health, obviously.
From NewScientist, we get the news that being bilingual delays the onset of dementia, so maybe it's time I got round to learning a language that isn't English... I wonder if knowing a reasonable number of programming languages and their syntax works... Someone should do a study in to that.
Random Tech
And just for more fun, lets just have a bunch of interesting links Miniature jet engines could power cellphones, Silicon 'Lego bricks' used to build 3D chips, Gravity gets a quantum boost.
And that's that...
So, we'll end that there, tonight is, as with every Monday, the pub quiz over in the Hop Poles in Brighton. Should be very silly, and fun.
[Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:35] | [random] | #
Clive, the Trolltech Greenphone certainly looks interesting, and has the key ingrediant that the iPhone and Neo1973 are both missing. Yes, you got it, it's actually got buttons!
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I like the fact that pushing a button gives physical feedback, also, you can move your thumb around on a keypad and know what button is under your hand, and that you're not overlapping 2 different buttons at the same time - can you do that with a touchscreen? I'm thinking not. So, you have a shiny phone, it lets you do all sorts of crap that you don't really want to do, but when you're using it, that's *all* you're doing, seems a waste to me.
[Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:58] | [tech] | #
So, the Apple iPhone has been launched, it was brought to my attention as actually being announced by the MD at work, who appears to have become a complete apple freak (poor bastard... or is that rich bastard to be able to afford apple's mediocre offerings and be happy about it?). Anyways - from reading the story from BBC News and the official website, here's my conclusions.
First off, when marketing a phone, how about you actually mention it's phone capabilities as the number one priority? I'd like to know about the sound capabilities, the battery life, the overall user feel for it as a phone... maybe I'm odd, but a phone has a purpose, it should make and receive calls, and it should do that job *well*, with good quality voice, a decent (filtering) microphone (it's a mobile, you'll be walking whilst speaking on it, reducing the background noise is a selling point), but apple appear to have mostly avoided talking about this. Instead, the first thing that you're told about from the news story is the unique user interface - great, so we have a touchscreen "whoop, de, do!". Worse still, from the official site, the first thing that springs out is that it's a "Wide Screen iPod" - it's a phone, if I wanted an iPod I'd buy a damned iPod - as it stands, for my music needs I have an iAudio M3 which suits my portable music experience really rather well. I choose that on the basis that it provided ogg support out of the box, didn't require any magical software (I run linux on my machines, it presenting itself as nothing more than a USB hard disk was fantastic, and means that I can use it for other things when needs arise). For a phone I want something that actually behaves like a phone, looking at the iPhone it's primary purpose appears to actually be a media player - that's not good.
With the iPhone only having a touch screen interface, and from everything that I've read there's no stylus and the "finger is the ultimate pointing device", I'm just expecting that within the first 2 weeks you're going to have a scratched or smudged screen from usage alone, add in the fact that it's a mobile phone, and therefore generally treated with contempt (neccessity rather than luxery), and that most people carry mobiles in their pockets without any form of protection (easy and fast access) and you've got a recipe for disaster! The touch screen is going to be hit (wether you like it or not) whilst the phone is in your pocket, it will wear - there's no question in my mind about it. Touchscreens aren't designed to be smacked around 24/7, they're touchscreens - they respond to touch! So, assuming that you're shiny new iPhone is sitting in your pocket a lot of the time that's a lot of usage of the touchscreen - they're not designed for constant pressure (think about what happens to pockets in trousers when you sit down...), so I don't think that, overall, the sensitivity of the screen is going to last very long. It's only got a fairly narrow screen too, so what about those of us with not entirely slender fingers? When composing SMS messages on it with the on screen qwerty keyboard, do you really think that you're going to get the right keys every time? Small, on screen, buttons and pubs do not mix - and I'd hasten a bet there's a fair number of SMS messages sent from, or on the way back from, the pub, with a predictive text system at least you can almost work out what the heck the person was trying to say - this is a whole new ball game.
The iPhone also makes the phone functionality only available after you've hit the part of the screen that says "Phone", now, I don't know about other people, but if I'm being given a number, I tend to just start hitting the right buttons on the phone, I can store the number later (via the call register or whatever) and hit call, now there's an extra step to getting in touch with people.
From the official site we have the words """ iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. """" - now, err, just when did a phone require you to use anything other than your fingers? Please tell me, I'm dying to know - I've never yet needed to use my feet to operate my phone, have you? This is marketing gone insane - and what worries me is that people actually believe this bullshit.
Apple may have "revolutionised" the computer industry with "Mac OS X" (this is actually not something that I believe, and OS X actually makes me more frustrated than being sat infront of a windows desktop - and believe me, that's difficult), but this is a phone, how about they try making it about the phone first, and the next generation tart audio player second?
I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I definately won't be going out of my way to aquire an iPhone just because the marketing spiel looks good.
[Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:14] | [tech] | #
Just finally got round to watching cars (bought it earlier in the week, just watched it, damned glad I bought it). I'm a pixar film fan, so when cars was announced as the last film last year before moving to another distributor I was a little pessamistic as to what the quality of the film was going to be, I must say, I'm still very happy with pixar - now, let's see what happens now that they're owned by the evil giant that is Disney - hopefully they'll still leave the pixar team as is and we'll get lots more quality films with lots of imagination behind them. (Yes, OK - I'm a big kid, and I also like most of the stuff that comes out of dreamworks studios, though they tend to have less story line - shrek is rather good though).
So, yeah - just thought I'd post to say... If you haven't seen Cars, go get a copy, watch it, it's fun :)
In case I totally avoid mentioning it tomorrow (quite likely), Merry Christmas peeps. Have a good one, don't drink too much :)
[Sun, 24 Dec 2006 23:38] | [life] | #
Fantastic beginning to the weekend - was in Norwich from Thursday, saw the Dave and the Becca on thursday night - many many thanks to them for floor space thurs and fri and for generally just being fantastic people (with tea *and* coffee, no less - and a silly beepy tivo box for even more fun - and for introducing me to the american chopper type show thingummy - and for letting me watch the a-team!)
Then, serious amounts of thanks to Noodles and Kathy (who I appear to not be able to find a link for :( ) for inviting me to the wedding and the reception - was fantastic - you're both such absolutely lovely people! Pictures so far appear to be available from Becca and Dave, Burly and Steve McIntyre - hopefully more soon... specially from Dave Noble (can't find him *bah* he needs more google juice the damned slacker ;) which should be cool! Saturday was absolutely brilliant - including talking about atmosperic physics, failing a-levels, and random universities doing questions (hey, I can't entirely remembere - someone bought a half barrel of nero and some port, and lots of red wine... I wasn't *entirely* sober ;).
Saturday morning was a bit of a blur - I remember watching the A-Team and then food in the Glass House with Dave and Becca (thanks guys, you rock!) then I wandered to the Fat Cat and met with Eli and Dave Noble, a while later Rob and James and Kaz arrived and we played Munchkin, which was a very very silly game but quite fun (thanks James and Kaz - you're both mildly insane - but it's always fun when you come to the pub!).
Went home with Eli, tried to escape because of the annoying giggly evil students from hell, started wandering back towards the train station and a random bench to sleep on, then got emotional black mail and ended up back at Eli's - ho hum.
Went to catch train at around 10am Sunday morning - discovered trains from Norwich weren't running - replacement bus service from Norwich to Diss left Norwich at around 10:25am, got to Diss, had a 10 to 15 minute wait there (mmmmm, bacon roll and a coffee!) then straight to Liverpool Street, wandered straight off to the underground and got the circle line to Victoria, got to Victoria around 13:40 ish, wandered to look at the boards and saw a 14:17 from Victoria round half the planet to Brighton - thought to myself "not in any rush" and wandered off and found food and then wandered round the WHSmith in Victoria station.... got out of there, glanced at the board again, Victoria to Brighton train had been cancelled - wondered what to do - announcement over the tannoy that to get to Brighton the best idea was to travel to East Croyden and the train would meet us there. So, grabbed that train, got to East Croyden, jumped on the train (first 8 carriages Brighton, back four Plymouth... so, jumped on somewhere around the 7th carriage from what I thought was the front - turned out to be the back - wasn't entirely sure what was going on so when it stopped at Gatwick wandered further to the front of the train a lot, found an empty pair of seats and sat down. Got to Three Bridges and there was a delay, it was announced on the train as "We're waiting for the conductor, he's missed a train and is currently in a taxi, there's at least a 10 minute delay before he gets here", so a load of us bundled out of the train on the basis that that was very much long enough for a cigarette break - just as we were finishing the conductor turned up, so we all got back on the train for the "scenic" route to Brighton (yay for going round the coast), finally got in to Brighton at 17:05, so wasn't too bad, only about 6 and a half hours for a 3 and a half or 4 hour train journey ;). Grabbed chinese on the way home, watched some Morse - all was well with the world.
Lots of beeping this morning around 8.30am, ignored it, finally re-woke up at about 10:30am (ish) - watched some more Morse, grabbed some lunch and then watched more Morse until going to the pub quiz tonight.
Charly, Julius and Pieter turned up for a quick drink and then all left me to fend for my self at the quiz - I came in my usual place - very last (by over 20 points, no less ;) - but had fun, so who cares :)
Anyways - it's now tuesday morning, so probably time for some good ol' fashioned sleep type stuff... might put on the next episode of Morse for the hell of it (might even manage to stay awake through it!).
Tomorrow is probably more Morse, some work on the django packages (just got the first bug report in for those) and possibly applying some of the patches to the scrobbler packages to close some of those bug reports too. It appears that upstream for xmms-scrobbler has disappeared a bit, so might have to look at that a lot closer over the next few months - have some time off work soon - last day this year being the 15th (also happens to be when work are planning the "christmas do").
Wow - that was a ridiculously longer post than I though it was going to be! Night all!
[Tue, 05 Dec 2006 01:17] | [life] | #