Here are Rob's Blog entries for April 2004.
Blog entries for other months can be found in the main blog index.
10 new countries have just joined the EU. They are...
The EU is now the worlds largest trading bloc, with 455,000,000 million citizens.
Hello and welcome to club!
Wired.com asks "Will RSS Readers Clog the Web"?
The article raises some interesting points. As more people take advantage of feeds, the syndicating sites have to dedicate more bandwidth to serving them.
However, many developers of newsreaders are not complying with HTTP specifications and are requesting the full feed file each time instead of checking the files modification time. Other readers are checking modification time against the local machines clock instead of the webserver which causes problems if they are not in sync with each other.
I made a quick check of my access logs to see what was happening with my RSS feeds. Two sites poll once an hour, and several others on a less frequent basis.
Of the two hourly pollers, Bloglines was behaving itself and sends an If-Modified-Since header meaning my webserver doesn't send any content, just a 304 Not Modified status code if there isn't any new content.
However the second site, The UK Weblogs Aggregator, doesn't and requests a full feed each time.
I should make some changes to my RSS feed files. At present my RSS 1.0 Feed does not use the RSS 1.0 syndication module. If I added this information to the feed then I can state exactly how often the feed is updated or how often I want aggregators to check it. The RSS 0.91 specification gives users the option of saying what hours and days the feed should not be accessed with the <skipDay> and <skipHours> tags, and this also applies to compatible RSS 2.0 format. Atom is the other popular syndication format, however this doesn't seem to have a formal method for controlling access, so relies on HTTP.
The feeds on RobertPrice.co.uk are cut down, and only carry the first few hundred characters of the five most recent entries, along with some supporting data. However, some sites include the full body of their content, and aggregators behaving badly can waste bandwidth and server capacity for those sites.
I was trying to work with Jo Walsh's RDF::Simple 0.12 Perl module, but it kept failing as it wasn't able to connect past the office proxy server.
It turned out the solution wasn't too hard. I tweaked the RDF::Simple::Parser to accept an http_proxy parameter in its new method. The ua method then checks this when it creates a LWP::UserAgent object, and either sets the proxy method directly, or uses the settings from environment variables.
The following patch has already been emailed to Jo for her to consider inclusion in the next module release, but in the mean time it is available here.
--- Parser.pm Wed Apr 28 11:20:00 2004
+++ Parser.pm.robsnew Wed Apr 28 11:19:52 2004
@@ -4,9 +4,9 @@
use XML::SAX qw(Namespaces Validation);
use LWP::UserAgent;
-our $VERSION = '0.1';
+our $VERSION = '0.2';
-use Class::MethodMaker new_hash_init => 'new', get_set => [ qw(base)];
+use Class::MethodMaker new_hash_init => 'new', get_set => [ qw(base http_proxy)];
sub parse_rdf {
my ($self,$rdf) = @_;
@@ -36,7 +36,15 @@
sub ua {
my $self = shift;
- $self->{_ua} ||= LWP::UserAgent->new(timeout => 30);
+ unless ($self->{_ua}) {
+ $self->{_ua} = LWP::UserAgent->new(timeout => 30);
+ if ($self->http_proxy) {
+ $self->{_ua}->proxy('http',$self->http_proxy);
+ } else {
+ $self->{_ua}->env_proxy;
+ }
+ }
+ return $self->{_ua};
}
package RDF::Simple::Parser::Handler;
@@ -481,6 +489,11 @@
'base' supplies a base URI
for relative URIs found in the document
+
+ 'http_proxy' optionally supplies
+ the address of an http proxy server.
+ If this is not given it will try to use
+ the default environment settings.
=head2 parse_rdf($rdf)
The Happy Valley woods on Farthing Downs are carpeted in a sea of bluebells.
The bluebells are in bloom at Hampden Park station.
I had a training course based at the beautiful Rhinefield House hotel in the New Forest on Thursday and Friday.
The majority of the team were in Executive rooms, which were lovely and included massive Plasma screen TVs and DVD players. Unfortuntely two of us were in Standard Rooms, one of which was me. First of all I was in "Ipley", a very dark room with a view of a mud bank outside one window. I asked to be changed and was moved into Pilley, which while still a Standard room had a lovely view over a lawn on which rabbits were grazing.
The food was nothing to write home about, so I won't, but the main dining room was magnificent. We dined there by candle light and it was very grand.
The staff were very friendly though as many weren't English communication could be a problem at times. The girl at reception couldn't pronounce "Oak" so had to spell it out to me when I asked what room my bag was being stored in.
The grounds are very well kept and there is a large pond with hundreds of Koi Carp that are very restful to watch.
It's about an hours walk through the forest and over the moor to the picturesque village of Brockenhurst. It's certainly worth a visit if you are in the area. As you would expect, there were hundreds of New Forest Ponies grazing in the surrounding area.
All in all it's a very nice area and I'd love to return there for a holiday.
Oh, and if anyone happens to be doing Steve Cowan's treasure hunt, the first clue relates to car parks... good luck!
After my laptop crashed and lost all my data and software, I've been gradually replacing and reinstalling applications.
One application I've had problems with is the Nokia PC Suite. I previously had an older version, where as the current version is 6.0.013. I've had trouble getting the USB data cable I'd purchased from the Carphone Warehouse to work with it and my Nokia 7250. The USB cable isn't produced by Nokia but by a another company (Mobile Action, part number MA-8620C) and they supply custom software called Konnect (powered by Kondor) .
The solution is when trying to connect from the Nokia PC suite to select Serial as the connection method and not USB. When asked what COM port to use, select MA-3 Bridge. You can now use the Nokia software to transfer data to and from the phone.
God knows when i'm getting home tonight. Trains are not even being advertised due to a fatality at Thornton Heath. Bugger!
Jason Rohrer has written a Perl script that allows you to access Apple iTunes from any computer.
iTMS-4-ALL has all the details!
Now to do the same for MyCokeMusic.com...
It seems the BSD demon has a part time job selling vibrators for naughtyvend.com at the Hole In The Wall pub in Colchester.
It appears that mirror.ac.uk is going to close down at the end of July.
The UK mirror service contract announcement says that the current service provided by Lancaster University and the University of Kent is too expensive and a new contract will be awarded by JISC from 1st August 2004.
The announcement says that mirroring will be available until July 31st but some sites may become unavailable if source sites request their mirror to be deleted.
I use mirror.ac.uk as my main CPAN mirror, so I'll certainly feel its loss as it's the fastest in the UK.
Robert Nagler has put up a copy of his book, Extreme Perl, online.
Extreme Programming is a very interesting concept and it's good to see someone has put it into a Perl context.
This is definately on my reading list now.
Some Perl scripts I've been writing lately have to connect to remote pages to collect data. Normally I use LWP::Simple, but this hasn't been working too well since we started having to use a proxy server in the office.
One solution is to either set the environment variable http_proxy with the address of the proxy server.
Another is to export the useragent variable $ua when you use the module, and set the proxy details directly in the resulting LWP::UserAgent object.
As an example, we'll download the contents of my homepage in the variable $page.
use LWP::Simple qw($ua get);
$ua->proxy('http','http://lonsqd01.emap.net:3128');
my $page = get 'http://www.robertprice.co.uk/';
I also came across a useful piece on Perl Monks called Getting more out of LWP::Simple, that has lots more useful tips on it.
After feeling a few potential RSI twinges in my hand I've installed a rather nifty bit of software called Workrave onto my PC at work.
It keeps 3 counters running. The first to make me have a few seconds break from typing every 3 minutes. The second to make me take a longer break every 40 minutes. The third to ensure I get up and take a proper break every 4 hours.
When it's time for a break, an alert pops up on the screen.
The information board at Liverpool Street underground station in London has crashed and is asking for boot media.
In these days of Microsoft Windows powered displays, this is a rather common sight, but still one that amuses me (except when I need the information they should be displaying).
The staff at London Victoria railway station are amongst the worse in London in my opinion.
I wanted to get an extension ticket on my annual season ticket so I could travel to Colchester later today from zone 6 boundry, returning tomorrow morning. The jobsworth at the ticket office would only sell me a single one way ticket as he was selling tickets for "today only".
Obviously wanting to return tomorrow breaks the "today only" rule, though it does sound a very literal and petty interpretation of the rules.
Eastbourne Pier looks very picturesque at night.
I have finally got past level 7 of Bounce on my Nokia 7250.
I was convinced their must have been a bug in the code as I'd been stuck for months trying to get the last ring. However, I decided to Google for Nokia Bounce Level 7 and I found a solution.
The answer is on this Bounce page. My only variation on this is at step one move to the edge and bounce over the spider instead of trying to go under it.
We aim to run at least 13% of our trains late, this quarter we managed to run just under 30% late.
The service continues to worsen on South Central's Sussex Coast service.
Tonights journey to Eastbourne was over an hour late as the shiny new train ahead of us couldn't close its automatic doors at Plumpton or Lewes.
The Perl Template Toolkit has proved its worth again, and has enabled me to provide a basic RSS 2.0 feed of my website in under half an hour (including reading the specs).
It's basic at present, but working. The RSS 2.0 feed validates on FeedValidator.org.
The feed can be found at http://www.robertprice.co.uk/robblog/RSS2.xml.
Those fancy new trains from up England way have reached the wilds of Eastbourne.
Just how do we open those new fangled door things?
Thankfully South Central Trains have provided a helpful poster.
Thanks to the power of the Perl Template Toolkit I've been able to setup a basic Atom feed for my website in just over 10 minutes.
It's very basic at present and is more a proof of concept, but it's there and working. I will probably expand it to take more content shortly, but it currently validates on feedvalidator.org.
The feed can be found at http://www.robertprice.co.uk/robblog/atom.xml, and I have added atom auto-discovery links to the site.
If the other door is locked then we're closed.
It seems the regulars at The Gildridge in Eastbourne need the obvious pointing out to them. :-)
