semicircular.net

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.

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.

If I read one more thing about iPhone ringtones …

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.

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

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.

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.

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…

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.