While playing with the Oracle of Bacon, I realized that the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” is just a graph traversal problem. Schools are using it as such, and while poking around I managed to stumble upon IMDB’s FTP Site which happens to have text files of their raw data. How long until someone slaps a web service in front of this? Cause apparently IMDB isn’t about to :) Perhaps I need to write an IMDBGenerator for Cocoon…
Via The Fishbowl:
If you can’t make sense of the spec in 10 minutes no one is going to use it so you can safely ignore it.
Dave Winer, Scripting News
manero’s corollary:
Any spec whose acronym contains the words “simple” or “easy”, isn’t.
I’ve noticed that lately some people have come looking for the pictures of Lifter Puller’s last concert that I took. When I moved manero.org, they never got put back in place, so I promise to put the pictures back up on the site within a week. Stay tuned.
OK, I’m pathetic. After leaving my job, I feel like I’m in a creative rut, especially since I’m probably not going to be doing anything with Cocoon in the forseeable future. What am I to do? I could continue helping in the Cocoon community, documentation, etc. But it just doesn’t appeal to my artistic creational side. My idea for a Cocoon-based webmail app has stagnated lately.
Cocoon Blogging App: Cocoblog already exists, but Ugo’s ignored it for a while. For all the time I’ve spent learning Cocoon, it still seems like I don’t know how to do stuff. Or maybe it’s still too complicated.
Python RSS Aggregator: Meh…. I could do it but it still doesn’t appeal to me do some reason.
Maybe I’ll finish reading The Great Shark Hunt or something. Enjoy my last few days of unemployment.
If anyone has ideas of stuff I could do, leave a comment :)
Every programmer should have at least two kinds of languages in their repertoire: A general-purpose scripting language (e.g. Perl), and an industrial-strength nitty-gritty language (C, Java).
I’ve neglected the scripting side recently, after dropping Perl a while ago just like Michael Jackson’s baby. At my old job, when a task came up where I needed a scripting language, I pulled out the only thing I really knew like the back of my hand: PHP.
Unfortunately, PHP isn’t much of a system-scripting language as it is a web-scripting language. It can be run from the commandline, but it’s not really the environment it was meant for.
For Christmas, I got a couple books on Python, and I’ve been impressed so far. In the few days that I’ve started to pick up on the lanugage, I’ve already managed to write a script to recurse through a web site and make an index of all the pages. I guess I’ve got my scripting language hole filled out nicely now.
Oh, and for those not in the know, there’s Jython, a Java implementation of Python. Keen.
Sung to “Food Is Good“:
i like python, python is good!
i like python, python is good!
juicy tuples, greasy lists
dictionaries and raw whitespace
geeky girls, will write python too!
get out of my way, or i’ll lambda you
i like python, python is good!
i like python, python is good!
I think it’s time for bed.
I tried out iTerm since it seems to be making the rounds, but it seems to slow down quite a bit on my G3 300MHz iBook with 320MB RAM, especially when I open six tabs. Guess I’ll be sticking to Terminal.app until iTerm speeds up, or I find a fix.
BALTIMORE — Microsoft must include rival Sun Microsystems’ Java programming language in its Windows operating system, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The injunction is in force while Sun pursues its antitrust case against Microsoft, one of four private lawsuits that followed a federal judge’s ruling in the government’s case against the software giant.
(via Star Tribune)
(more…)
A few weeks ago I wrote a simple XSP for Cocoon that connected to an IMAP server and spit out some XML. I’ve started work on rewriting it as a “normal” Generator. Here’s how I have it working in the sitemap so far:
<map:generate type="imap"> <map:parameter name="user" value="foo"/> <map:parameter name="pass" value="bar"/> <map:parameter name="host" value="mailserver.baz.net"/> </map:generate> <map:serialize type="xml"/>
Obviously it’s not the most secure thing, since I directly store username and password in the sitemap. However, I think that I’ll be able to work in some good user authentication in order to avert this problem. It’s simple and easy to use, but it’s also very easy to use insecurely. I’ll continue to post updates as to the progress of the IMAPGenerator.
Update:
Here’s some sample logging output in case anybody cares:
DEBUG (2002-12-19) 18:46.00:588 [sitemap] (/cocoon/imap) Thread-10/ResourceLimitingPool: Got a org.apache.cocoon.generation.IMAPGenerator from the pool.
DEBUG (2002-12-19) 18:46.00:589 [sitemap] (/cocoon/imap) Thread-10/ResourceLimitingPool: Got a org.apache.cocoon.serialization.XMLSerializer from the pool.
DEBUG (2002-12-19) 18:46.00:597 [sitemap] (/cocoon/imap) Thread-10/IMAPGenerator: Connecting to IMAP server @ [deleted]
DEBUG (2002-12-19) 18:46.02:068 [sitemap] (/cocoon/imap) Thread-10/IMAPGenerator: Attempting to open default folder
DEBUG (2002-12-19) 18:46.02:359 [sitemap] (/cocoon/imap) Thread-10/IMAPGenerator: Downloading message list from folder
DEBUG (2002-12-19) 18:46.02:359 [sitemap] (/cocoon/imap) Thread-10/IMAPGenerator: Starting XML generation
DEBUG (2002-12-19) 18:46.31:979 [sitemap] (/cocoon/imap) Thread-10/IMAPGenerator: Finished generating XML
(via cocoon-users)
At 816 pages, this looks like a nice little tome :) The book is now available through Sam’s (10% off!). I look forward to checking this book out.
Downloads, and Sample Chapters are also available.
This brings the total number of Cocon books up to three. Someday, we’ll think back and we won’t believe how we managed to get along without any books for so long :)
I would love to have an Amazon feed, or a Best Buy feed, or tons of other feeds. I’ll say it here and now: I’d love to subscribe to a business’ RSS feed with sales and advertisements.
Because it’s voluntary. Because I’m asking for their info, which happens to not appear in my INBOX without my permission. Because I ultimately control the feed.
With a traditional newspaper, I can’t decide what ads I want. Sometimes I get three copies of the CompUSA ad. Sometimes I get none.
With RSS, it’s a win-win situation for both the advertiser and the customer. Advertisers get people who will most likely purchase their products. Customers actually become informed, and they’re more willing to purchase things because they weren’t pissed off by the obtrusive spam or banner ads.
Think about it.
Somehow I managed to miss Matthew’s article on RSS. You know why? Because I don’t currently use an aggregator :)