Well, I started using rake instead of make in 2007, when I got ruby infected. I noticed then, that rake’s output is a little “dis-arranged” (the entire “command” came printed in one single line). That changed in the meantime, at least now with 0.8.7 it is just the way I like it. Thank you to the developers!
Blog
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Google Mail Contacts is my personal killer app
Serious!!!
Once again: it syncs with the iPhone address book.
I use it for reverse look up (phone number to address book entry) together with my telephone system in my home office, and that’s build around an AVM “FRITZ!Box“. The glue software got implemented by myself in ruby (w/o Rails).
Why ruby? I thought, I could make it run with Cocoa Ruby on the iPhone. But you know yourself: Apple fights those kinds of things. And just for running it with a GUI on a usual Mac OS X? No, that’s not worth my effort.Update / 2010-06-16 11:45:
I forgot mentioning xing.com here. Downloading vCards from xing and adding them here – that’s just awesome! -
my own “tiny” Facebook security leak
I started using a Facebook “Profile Badge” here on this blog quite a while ago. Today I noticed, that all my Facebook status updates got shown here on that Profile Badge in the right column of this blog. Believe me: I seriously hurried removing that field “Status updates” from my Facebook Profile Badge.
To be very honest with you: no, this security leak was a giant one, not a tiny one.
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I really love using vCards and profiles pictures from Xing
I “always” also “copy” them for my Google Mail address book, which gets synced with my iPhone’s address book. This really makes my life so much easier – recognising resp. remembering people by their faces is so much easier.
Update / 2010-06-16:
I forgot to mention, that I always use Xing’s vCards for new contacts to create resp. complete their entries in my Google Mail resp. iPhone address book. -
option and configuration processing
Once again I came across this very nice and certainly very helpful article on O’Reilly’s perl.com.
I personally really have been loving the Art of Command Line Processing for a very, very long time. During one of my last projects (it was actually mainly using p*th*n as programming language because of some rather weird and esoteric guy, who made it his personal mission to reinvent all the software spread over the bank from perl to p*th*n, especially the one he had written himself in quite unreadable perl a couple of years ago) I faced the task of prepping up a Java program from JasperForge.org, and the major value I added to that utility was to add command line processing using libraries from Apache. I actually offered Teodor Danciu of JasperSoft, JasperReports’ inventor and main developer, to contribute my version of that utility to JasperForge, but he wasn’t interested. I was rather sad. Maybe he will rethink that decision.
Update / 2010-09-19:
I think, I sort of “lied” 🙂 here. I didn’t “offer” Teodor that extension of his own OSS software, that he had developed himself and then published under LGPL, I rather asked him this:
Is there any interest in a “‘-D’ command line / getProperty” version of TextApp?
I would really love to even write and contribute a new and better version of my old approach, which was 100% based on OSS.
Can you imagine, that I get legally threatened for the above question, because an organisation thinks to possess rights on these minimal modifications I applied? We are talking literally about a couple of lines.
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comparison of web application frameworks on en.wikipedia.org
I was cleaning up my Google bookmarks, came across Maypole, tried to look it up, and came across a comparison of web application frameworks on en.wikipedia.org, that includes the perl approaches.
My humble suggestion:
members of the respective perl communities add resp. maintain their entries to / within that table. mojolicious came to my mind at first. I personally wouldn’t be too shy changing anything on wikipedias, but I can’t promise to keep the entries updated – but I might be of help setting up the row in that table, if that’s of any use.
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more on web harvesting
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Data Extraction for Web 2.0: Screen Scraping in
Ruby/Rails, Episode 1 - http://scrubyt.org (ruby)
- HPricot.com : “a swift, liberal HTML parser with a fantastic library” (ruby)
- http://brightplanet.com : “Pioneers in Harvesting the Deep Web”
- …
Update 2010-06-05/06:
One night later I am still very impressed by scrubyt, and I rather want to try it on a real life example quite soon.
Actually in a way scrubyt does, what I also do with my JHwis toolkit, but of course, it looks, as if goes far (?!?) beyond that. JHwis navigates in a programmed way through web-sites, and it downloads certain HTML files to the disk for further processing. Those HTML files contain HTML tables, and there is already a nice PERL library, that I wrap into a command line utility, that extracts HTML tables into CSV files. These CSV files are actually not really of a kind, that you can directly load into a spreadsheet GUI utility like OpenOffice Calc or whatever. They need further mechanical processing and refinement, before they can get loaded into database tables.
With scrubyt’s help (apparently) you extract an XML file from the quite nested HTML table structures of a web page.
Years ago, when I started my project I created CSV files. A couple of years later, I also created XML files. But I never adapted the entire tool chain to make use of these XML files.
My XML files only reflect exactly the data, that I want to make use of.
scrubyt’s XML files reflect (I think) the entire table structure.
Nowadays with XSLT processors you “easily” develop an XSL script (aka “stylesheet”), that extracts the portion, that you are really interested in.
To be continued … -
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creating diary entries from procmail LOGFILE entries
Incoming e-mail messages may be worth getting recorded in a diary, of
course most of them are not, do you agree?
Quite some times I manually create diary entries from my procmail LOGFILE.
I should have written a script to do that a long time ago. Now I did. That effort was really, really little, but I like the results.Update / 2010-07-23:
I used to copy the entries from that log to my diary, and then a little later I usually wonder, which ones got already processed and completed. So what was missing, was just a little aid, but it looked difficult so solve for a while.
Today I introduced something new and the entry now looks like this:23 Jul 2010
09:56:49 [_] From: abc@def.com;
That’s wicked cooled, isn’t it? Yes, I know.
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ruby and here-documents
Ruby has such a feature, and of course it’s pretty, pretty useful. I found an article on here-documents in several programming languages at the English wikipedia.
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my CV or Resume in XML
Until not too long ago I had kept my CV in DocBook, then I converted it to XMLRésumé (but the project really looks dead nowadays), now I am converting it to HR-XML/Resume. Yes, I know, its project admin just recently declared this SourceForge project as inactive. But then, what alternatives are there?
Of course, I want to edit HR-XML files in emacs using a RELAX-G grammar, but I didn’t find any on the web. Well, that’s not really a huge problem. Take a few nice sample files (of any XML), stuff them into trang, and trang creates a RELAX-NG grammar from them. Of course, that kind of grammar is far from perfect, but it’s better than nothing, and you can always improve it manually, that’s not that hard. That way I created a RELAX-NG “compact grammar” for HR-XML/Resume last night.
The grammar created actually has problems with InternetWebAddress and Competency, but I was able to fix that for my personal use.
HR-XSL comes with a nice “XMLRésumé -> HR-XML/Resume” converter, that way my old XMLRésumé CV got converted into a good initial version for HR-XML/Resume. HR-XSL uses DocBook for creating HTML and PDF, but there is also a “DocBook -> RTF” converter, that I want to make use of.