Yabfog

Just started exploring Jaiku and, coincidentally, Planet Venus. One of the cool things about Jaiku is that it aggregates your other web presences (like your blog, twitter, del.icio.us, and flickr posts) and integrates them into Jaiku presence stream. The down side of this is that it's not as good at that as Planet Venus, and then if you use Planet Venus to create a aggregation of your web presences and you include Jaiku, then you've got annoying duplication.

So, I'm not much of a Python programmer, but I wrote this Planet Venus filter that looks at each entry, and if it detects that it's a Jaiku presence update, it only includes it if it originated via Jaiku. In other words, it filters out all the duplicates.

If you understood any of that, you may find this helpful. If not, nevermind.


"""
For jaiku presence entries, only retain entries that originate from jaiku
(as opposed to grabbed via web feeds)
"""
import sys, xml.dom.minidom
entry = xml.dom.minidom.parse(sys.stdin).documentElement
entry_id = entry.getElementsByTagName('id')[0].firstChild.data
for node in entry.getElementsByTagName('link'):
if node.getAttribute('rel') == 'alternate':
entry_link = node.getAttribute('href')
break
if entry_id.find('jaiku.com/presence') > 0 and (entry_id != entry_link):
sys.exit(1)
print entry.toxml('utf-8')


(Updated to fix a bug on line 11.)

I twittered about an amazing playlist (or iMix, if you will) of Frank Zappa tunes that Nick Bradbury published, but it appears that iTunes has deleted the iMix because Zappa is no longer on iTunes. But it's an amazing playlist, so here it is:

1. Peaches In Regalia, Hot Rats (1969)
2. Camarillo Brillo, Over-Nite Sensation (1973)
3. My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama, Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970)
4. Maggio, The Man From Utopia (1983)
5. St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast, Apostrophe' (1974)
6. Echidna's Arf (Of You), Roxy And Elsewhere (1974)
7. Mother People, We're Only In It For The Money (1968)
8. Cocaine Decisions, The Man From Utopia (1983)
9. Five-Five-Five, Shut Up N' Play Yer Guitar (Disc 1) (1981)
10. Can't Afford No Shoes, One Size Fits All (1975)
11. G - Spot Tornado, Jazz From Hell (1986)
12. Dumb All Over, You Are What You Is (1981)
13. Teen-Age Prostitute, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch (1982)
14. Sleep Dirt, Sleep Dirt (1979)
15. Tell Me You Love Me, Chunga's Revenge (1970)
16. Pygmy Twylyte, Roxy And Elsewhere (1974)
17. Baby Snakes, Baby Snakes (1983)
18. Electric Aunt Jemima, Uncle Meat (1969)
19. Po-Jama People, One Size Fits All (1975)

Enjoy!

Part of the nightmare I went through while experimenting with WP-o-matic (no link) was that I accidentally deleted about 12 posts from my blog. Nothing earth-shattering, of course, but I just found an old database backup and recovered those posts. It was a real PITA, though, because the backup was from when I was running WordPress 2.2, and now under 2.3, the database has been changed. So, I had to actually install a dummy blog and "upgrade" it to 2.3.

Cool! XM satellite radio is making some of its programming available as free podcasts. Beginning December 11, you can download XM content hosted by Bob Edwards, James Carville, Mike Krzyzewski, Barry Switzer and Opie & Anthony. But what really excites me is XM Unmasked, hosted by the extraordinarily funny Ron Bennington.

Hmmm... looks like I really need to work on the OPML browser.

The server move is done. I'm sure there will be problems, but so far so good. The new server is actually a home server -- very adequate machine, but I anticipate connection and traffic delays, as well as disruptions due to power outages (which are pretty frequent here). Eventually, I'll probably hook up a UPS, but in the meantime I'm willing to live with the issues because it's saving me the cost of renting a dedicated server.

This site (and Optimalbrowser.com) will be likely be intermittently available starting this evening (U.S. Eastern time) and lasting for a day or so while I move servers.

I just saw some weird traffic on this blog. Last week, I was testing a plugin when it went a little haywire and automatically created a bunch of posts (based on my NewsGator clippings, including a lot of law related and gadget related topics -- things I read about but don't write about). And then because I have Alex King's twitter tools installed, each of those new posts was propagated to twitter, too.

Now, I thought that this little stunt probably would have pissed people off. Instead (maybe), I saw a huge spike in traffic to this blog -- more than three times the usual traffic.

I'm assuming that these "visitors" were just bots that were monitoring the twitter public timeline, but the referrer logs don't back that up (although that doesn't necessarily mean anything).

Tom Morris is pulling his hair out dealing with XML character encoding issues. I've gone through this myself. I found that the SimplePie feed parser has great logic for dealing with this, so I adapted it to my needs in my PHP class XMLParseIntoArray. I think I've expanded on SimplePie's approach a bit, but it's still a work in progress. YMMV. Hope this helps.