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A couple of weeks ago I was out for the evening and when I got up the next morning and went out with the dog, Nibby was watching from the window while I let the chickens out, which seemed a bit odd. The reason became apparent when six new chicks came chirping out of the chicken house.
Update: For the latest version and up to date documentation, please see the project page.
feed2omb is a simple tool that takes input from Atom or RSS feeds and posts updates to the open microblogging service of your choice. It should also (though I’m not going to try it) quite happily post to Twitter.
The feed reading is handled by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Universal Feed Parser so it should be able to deal with any feed you throw at it. On the posting side, you can send the updates to open microblogging services such as those based on Laconica – this includes Identica.
Note: This plugin requires WordPress 2.7 or later. (Although see below for other options)
One of the more irritating aspects of WordPress, at least from a feed subscriber’s perspective, is that minor edits cause the last-updated date to change. The knock-on effect is that the post will find its way back to the top of an atom feed causing readers to see it again. Not the desired effect if you are, for example, correcting an insignificant typo, updating a moved link or adding a category, and even worse if you were to reorganise categories and thus blitz your poor readers with a whole batch of old posts all at once.
This plugin provides the answer, by adding a ‘Minor Edit’ checkbox when you’re editing a post. If you tick the box, the post’s last-updated date will be left alone. If you leave it unchecked, things will happen as normal. It’s that simple.
I never did figure out who the previous imposter was on the much maligned Cuil search engine, but while pondering it I wondered why there wasn’t a search engine where I could upload an image and find where it came from.
Lo and behold, along comes TinEye to save the day. Unfortunately, when I went to grab the image, one imposter had been replaced by another as you can see from the screenshot on the right. But thanks to TinEye, I’m not left wondering who I am this time. I’m a character called Lucas, who seems to be from a soap opera I’ve thankfully never heard of called Another World.
I tried carefully cropping the image out of my previous screenshot, but that wasn’t good enough – perhaps TinEye just fingerprints the image’s binary data, while my version had been re-encoded a couple of times. On the other hand, I get the impression from the TinEye FAQ that it should be able to handle that. Maybe when I’m not as busy I’ll have another go. In the meantime the previous imposter is still on the loose, so answers on a postcard please if you recognise him.
Last week I found myself hand-assembling some 80×86 opcodes, for reasons I won’t to go into today, and I was reminded of George Iwanow. George was a character and a half, and an excellent programmer, who sadly passed away many years ago. Amongst other things, he was largely responsible for the Spectrum versions of The Empire Strikes Back and Fighter Bomber.
I could tell George-stories all day long, but I’ll restrict myself to the one that brought back the memory – the job interview…
Update: This is now available as a plugin – see here.
One of the more irritating aspects of WordPress, at least from a feed subscriber’s perspective, is that minor edits cause the last-updated date to change. The knock-on effect is that the post will find its way back to the top of an atom feed causing readers to see it again. Not the desired effect if you are, for example, correcting an insignificant typo, updating a moved link or adding a category, and even worse if you were to reorganise categories and thus blitz your poor readers with a whole batch of old posts all at once.
In the brief time I’ve looked at this, I haven’t managed a plugin-only solution, but what follows is a fairly simple hack to allow you to specify that a particular edit is minor, and thus get WordPress to leave the last-updated date alone.
A surprising number of people have asked about this, so I’ve pushed some updates to my thrown-together C# CouchDB client into the repository at Google Code.
They are only minor changes to get it to work with the changes made in CouchDB version 0.8, and also work against the latest trunk version, 0.9. As well as the compatibility changes, the ‘Query’ form now lets you specify an optional reduce function along with the map function.
For the sake of completeness, I’ll repeat what I’ve said elsewhere – the GUI part is not meant as an example of a good GUI, it’s just there as a testbed for the library. Similarly, the library is not a great or comprehensive example of a library, but it’s serving my needs for now at least. Consider it a how-to if nothing else.
Saturday – a trip to Cheshire to visit our horse, Mouse, who is on an extended holiday there and apparently enjoying it very much. I was pleased to discover that she hadn’t forgotten me – something she demonstrated with a huge cuddle the like of which was in the past reserved only for special occasions such as the delivery of her dinner in the snow.
So everybody is talking about Cuil, the latest Google-challenger on the block. From what I’ve seen, they have a lot of issues at this early stage (understandably) and they might come to regret getting so much publicity so early. But more important than all that, is this:
Disclaimer first, yes I know it’s terribly unfashionable to “google” yourself, but it’s always a good test of a search engine, and everybody does it whether they admit it or not. Now, back to the subject, who the hell is this in the picture?
And, for bonus points, by what insane algorithm did his picture come to be placed there?
Etch has ejabberd 1.1 packaged but if you’re like me you’ll want to play with the new features in 2.0, in which case you’ll need to build from source. Etch’s packaged version of Erlang is apparently not up to date enough to support it (it compiles fine, but I couldn’t get TLS to work) so you’ll need to build a newer version of that as well. Luckly it’s all easy. This following is all from your home directory on a fresh install of Debian: