Harbour Bridge
March 31st, 2008
Sydney Traffic
Results of a little bit of weekend hacking…
http://twitter.com/sydneytraffic
It parses / screen scrapes the Sydney RTA’s traffic reports, does some text substitution in an effort to get the event text under the twitter 140 character message limit and automatically posts the updates. The idea is that one could then subscribe to sydneytraffic on twitter and receive SMS updates of the latest traffic situation.
Strangely, the RTA don’t provide an XML / RSS / Atom feed or anything sensible for these updates, so it was a bit of a challenge to strip out the relevant information from the table heavy HTML. I’m going to continue making improvements and updates to the text substitution and shortening, but it’s basically functional now. Python source to be posted shortly.
February 18th, 2008 4 Comments
In Rainbows
12/10/2007 WASTE/RADIOHEAD LTD US LONDON 6.45 GBP
INCL CONVERSION FEE 0.36 AUD $14.90-
Just shy of AU$15 for the new Radiohead album. I think that’s about the right price. Thanks Radiohead.
October 21st, 2007
That shell history meme…
Work:
105 cd
102 ls
42 telnet
35 make
20 ppc-linux-g++
17 grep
14 svn
13 sudo
13 ping
12 export
Home:
197 iwconfig
39 sudo
35 iwlist
28 ls
28 cat
24 find
24 cd
19 ping
12 less
7 vim
What does all that say? I’ve been having some wireless connection issues at home recently (hence repetitive iwconfigs… mostly due to unrealistic range expectations) and at work, navigate a lot of unfamiliar directories, telnet frequently to development boards, as well as cross compiling things for them, both manually and with make.
A pretty accurate picture of my computing life, really.
September 26th, 2006
Rotating puff begone - Updated
My SMH rotating puff remover script (also at userscripts.org) has been updated with some new functionality - pagination removal!
The SMH/Age for some reason splits longer articles into multiple pages, just to add annoyance. The script now fixes this by adding a fullpage link onto the end of every article page linked from any other page at smh.com.au or theage.com.au.
Get the new version here: http://semicircular.net/rotatingpuffbegone.user.js. The older version can still be found here if you don’t want the new functionality.
Update 13-08-2007: version 0.2.1 - add extra div type for most recent SMH/Age redesign
April 9th, 2006 0 Comments
Podcast downloading with Bashpodder
I am so behind the times here probably, but I have only just stumbled across a very useful little script called Bashpodder. In 44 lines of bash script (including comments!) it downloads podcast feeds, strips out the enclosures (ie. the audio) and neatly stores them away ready for transfer to your portable media device of choice.
The best bit is the total automation of it all — no annoying GUIs to get in the way, just a raw, cron-able script you can set and forget to run once a day in the wee hours of the morning, when bandwidth is cheap and plentiful. It also scores points also for a nifty bit of XSLT to actually extract the enclosure URLs from the feed. Just plain elegant, and certainly beats the bloat of CastPodder any day.
February 20th, 2006
Greasemonkey the rotating puff of the new SMH layout
The Sydney Morning Herald have done a site redesign. It drew a lot of negative comments, of course, but on balance I think it’s not too bad. The most annoying thing, however, is the box in the right hand column that rotates through various puff piece news articles. Every five seconds or so, it changes to the next story - very distracting. It’s only one step away from the dreaded BLINK tag!
Anyway, the solution is here, thanks to Greasemonkey. If you’ve never heard of it, Greasemonkey allows users to customise web pages through Javascript, changing things as they see fit. See also Dive Into Greasemonkey for some distilled wisdom and patterns for ‘diving in’ to writing your own Greasemonkey scripts.
“Rotating Puff Begone” is a Greasemonkey user script to remove the highly annoying ‘rotating puff’ box in the right hand column for both the SMH and The Age. It also removes ads, sponsored links and other annoyances as an added bonus.
Get it here: http://semicircular.net/rotatingpuffbegone.user.js
(And yes, if you look at the HTML source of the SMH’s web page, they really have called the box “Rotating Puff”. Incredible.)
I also highly recommend the use of another Firefox extension called Adblock, together with the Filterset.G which automatically keeps your browser up to date with a comprehensive list of ads to filter out.
UPDATE (November 9): It appears the SMH have realised the error of their ways and have removed the rotating puff from all of their pages, replaced instead by ’static’ puff. It’s tolerable, for now. Curiously, The Age still has the rotating puff.
UPDATE 2 (November 16): The rotating puff strikes back on the SMH site! This time it has “previous and next” buttons. The mind boggles as to why they thought that would be an improvement.
November 5th, 2005
Pigeons
Pigeons test positive to bird flu exposure:
One hundred and two pigeons exposed to the bird flu virus have been seized by Australian quarantine inspectors.
Inspectors said three of the birds, which were imported from Canada, had tested positive to bird flu antibodies and would be put down.
Why are we importing pigeons from Canada? Were they racing pigeons, or bread for eating? Either way, perhaps we can do without any live avian imports for a while…
October 20th, 2005
The BBC does online language courses
The BBC does online language courses… Now with MP3s!
Take these phrases with you on your mp3 player and as print-out!
A concept that will no doubt be embraced by the podcast generation.
October 19th, 2005
