Indelible Stamp

My favourite search engine recently released a way to create and add plugins to their zeroclick info box. There are some good examples and a starting guide in the DuckDuckHack website. I checked out their Ideas page and picked up something that looked useful and fairly easy to implement: parsing a crontab into a human readable output.

Implementing it took about a day, and showed me how insanely useful CPAN is. The DDG folks were nice enough to add unit tests and tweak the code a bit, and have now released it on their website. Searching for a cron entry with the crontab prefix now gives a decent output like this:

Related articles

• Introducing DuckDuckHack (gabrielweinberg.com)
• Cron (wiki.archlinux.org)
• 5 reasons why DuckDuckGo is an awesome search engine (indeliblestamp.com)

There are some very good blogs and newsletters that post (somewhat) weekly summaries of interesting links. Here are the ones I follow regularly:

• The Command Line's feed|grep links - General Linux/Free Software/Tech roundup.
• Not Exactly Rocket Science's 'I've Got Your Missing Links Right Here' - Excellent roundup of science, journalism, and weird links.
• Perlbuzz's news roundup - Perl news around the web.
• Perlweekly - A weekly perl newsletter, obviously.
• Trivium - Programming/Computer Science links.
• H-online - Security, Tech, Open Source news.
• Brainpickings - Beautifully made newsletter on art, literature, and generally interesting things.
• The Browser - Long form articles from around the web.
• Critical Distance's 'This week in videogame blogging' - What it says on the cover.
  

That should be enough for now. Sign up, subscribe and have fun!

So. I'm learning Perl and needed a simple project to test out. My rss2email list has more than a 100 feeds that are checked hourly. Unfortunately I have no way of knowing which feeds are broken, or no longer being updated. That seemed like a simple enough thing to test out. Enter check_feeds.pl. This simple script accepts a single file as input (the file contains rss feeds, one per line). Running it gives a list of broken feeds, and those that have not been updated in the past two months.

I used XML::Feed to fetch and parse the feeds. It did crash on at least a dozen feeds in my list, so I regrettably had to comment them out for now. Future versions should fix this to make it more usable. Here is what a sample run looks like:

thaum ~/code/perl$ ./check_feeds.pl feedlist.txt
Feeds older than60 days  are:
http://teddziuba.com/atom.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/emacsblog
http://emacs.wordpress.com/feed/
http://www.24in60.com/feed
http://acmel.wordpress.com/feed/
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/LinuxSystemAdminsBlog
<snip>

Dead feeds that could not be read are:
 #bad#http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/dwn.en.rdf
#bad#http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?atom
#bad#http://www.nintendolife.com/feeds/reviews
<snip>

And here is the actual file itself.
Update: Ok, I finally signed up on GitHub, so the script is available there as well. Hopefully a few months down the line the quality of my code will improve :)

Related articles

• My Email Client is my RSS Reader (indeliblestamp.com)
• perl hacks: XML::Feed (perlhacks.com)

The folks at the Guardian released a Firefox addon recently. Called Collusion, it silently tracks third party sites that track users across multiple sites. I've run it for something like two days so far, and its depressing how I've littered my trail all over the web. The UI is very nicely done, and highlighting an icon shows all the sites it connects to and greys out the rest.

Look at google's spindly web around the sites I have accessed:

I've not found a satisfactory cookie managing solution so far, but I'm making a start. I've been using Better Privacy to delete Flash cookies for some time. I've now also installed Cookie Culler, which allows a whitelist to be defined. As next steps, I'll try fine tuning between either wiping out everything else at exit, or installing a 3rd-party blacklisting addon.

Related articles

• Research To "Reveal the Unseen World of Cookies" (yro.slashdot.org)
• Introducing Collusion: Discover who's tracking you online (mozilla.org)

rss2email is a kick-ass RSS solution that I've been using for quite awhile now. It works exactly the way it sounds: You provide it a list of feeds, and it mails you hourly when one or more of them get updated. I now have 100+ feeds added to it. Every morning I log in and skim through the 30-40 emails that come straight to my 'alerts' folder. Here is what a random day's email looks like for me:

I hit 10000 mails in this folder last week. Here is what I've learnt:

Huh, Wordpress didn't last long either. Movable Type was easy to install and configure. Apart from some initial confusion about the main web site installation and the individual blogs you can create for each web site, I feel like I've settled pretty comfortably into it.

Some changes are immediately apparent. A service called Zemanta has plugged itself into my New Post page. It looks nice but will need quite a bit more research before I use it regularly. For now, it is responsible for inserting the Related Articles section at the bottom of this post.

Changing the theme was a bit different too. There were 2 default themes. But the themes have their own 'styles', which themselves are pretty equivalent to a lot of wordpress themes.

Related articles

• Same great Movable Type; now with a dash of Zemanta! (zemanta.com)

When an entity exists in an ecosystem, and acts within that ecosystem in a way that is short-sighted, behaving in a way that is actively destructive to the healthy functioning of that ecosystem and the other entities in it (including, in the long term, themselves) -- yes, I believe that that is evil.

from Gamasutra - News - Turning down Zynga: Why I left after the $210M Omgpop buy.

I've wanted something like this for some time, so I'm glad I met this beautiful project called ownCloud. It is an open source cloud storage service that has some pretty neat features.

The installation was laughably easy: I just ftp'd and extracted the zip file to my www root and provided a username and password in the install page that came up. That was it. It took me quite a bit longer to get webdav working in my stupid windows pc. Anyway I wasn't too keen on the synchronization aspect so I didn't bother with it too much. FTP'ing some music and pictures directly to my account's data directory was sufficient for my purposes.

 

This is where the project starts to shine. An in-built media player allows music to be streamed automatically. It even persists when navigating to other sections in the ownCloud page (there's just a momentary skip between page loads). Similarly, uploaded pictures show up automatically in a gallery. For text files, there's an in-built text editor that refused to work for me (saving a file ended up in a 0 byte file.. maybe a permission problem?) That's not the end of it, so far I can see that it has facilities for bookmarks, calendaring, address books, sharing, and so on. Although it occasionally feels buggy, it does a fine job on the whole.

I got a nice gift from my wife yesterday :)

 

thaum ~$ vrms

No non-free or contrib packages installed on <snip>!  rms would be proud.
thaum ~$

More here.