Skip to content

Justin's Linklog Posts

Open source ‘full text’ bookmarklet and feed filter

Last year, I blogged about Full-Text RSS, a utility to convert those useless "partial-text" RSS/Atom feeds into the real, full-story-inline deal.

The only downside is that the author felt it necessary to withhold the source, saying:

Still, I wouldn’t want to offer a feature that middlemen can resell at the expense of bloggers. So while I do want to open this up, I don’t want to make things easy for the unscrupulous.

However, recently Keyvan Minoukadeh from the Five Filters project got in touch to say:

I recently created a similar service (along with a bookmarklet for it). […] It’s a free software (open source) project so code is also available.

Here it is:

fivefilters.org: Create Full-Text Feeds

I’ve tried it out and it works great, and the source is indeed downloadable under the AGPL.

Five Filters — its overarching project — looks interesting, too:

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky describe the media as businesses which sell a product (readers) to other businesses (advertisers). In their propaganda model of the media they point to five ‘filters’ which determine what we read in the newspapers and see on the television. These filters produce a very narrow view of the world that is in line with government policy and business interests.

In this project we try to encourage readers to explore the world of non-corporate online news, websites which avoid the five filters of the propaganda model. We also try to make these sources of news more accessible by allowing users to print the stories found on these alternative news sites in the format of a newspaper.

Links for 2009-07-03

Links for 2009-07-02

Links for 2009-07-01

User script: add my delicious search results to Google

For years now, I’ve been collecting bookmarks at delicious.com/jm — nearly 7000 of them by now. I’ve been scrupulous about tagging and describing each one, so they’re eminently searchable, too. I’ve frequently found this to be a very useful personal reference resource.

I was quite pleased to come across the Delicious Search Results on Google Greasemonkey userscript, accordingly. It intercepts Google searches, adding Delicious tag-search results at the top of the search page, and works pretty well. Unfortunately though, that searches all of delicious, not specifically my own bookmarks.

So here’s a quick hack fix to do just that:

my_delicious_search_results.user.js – My Delicious Search Results on Google

Shows tag-search results from my Delicious account on Google search pages, with links to more extensive Delicious searches. Use ‘User Script Commands‘ -> ‘Set Delicious Username‘ to specify your username.

Screenshot:

Enjoy!

Links for 2009-06-30

Links for 2009-06-28

Still using perl 5.6.x?

For the upcoming release of Apache SpamAssassin, we’re considering dropping support for perl 5.6.x interpreters. Perl 5.6.0 is 9 years old, and the most recent maintainance release, 5.6.2, dates back to November 2003. The current 5.x release branch is 5.10, so we’re still sticking with a "support the release branch before the current one" policy this way.

If you’re still using one of the 5.6.x versions, or know of a (relatively recent) distro that does, please reply to highlight this….

Links for 2009-06-24

Links for 2009-06-23

Links for 2009-06-22

IBM Ad Execs Who Should Be Fired

Watching television last night, I couldn’t fail to take notice of this new IBM ad:

‘For the first time in history, more people live in cities than anywhere else, which means cities have to get smarter.’ […] ‘Paris has smart healthcare; smart traffic systems in Brisbane keep traffic moving; Galway has smart water’.

Jaw-dropping. That would be this Galway?

A major water crisis has left scores of people ill and tens of thousands at risk from contamination in a west of Ireland city. Galway’s water supply has been hit by an outbreak of the parasite cryptosporidium, with up to 170 people now confirmed to have been affected by a serious stomach bug as a result. Tests found that the city’s water supply contained nearly 60 times the safe limit of cryptosporidium pollution. Residents have already been unable to drink or use water for food preparation for weeks.

Residents in parts of Co. Galway have been hit by a new outbreak of the cryptosporidium parasite.Tests on the Roundstone Public Water Scheme showed trace elements of the parasite, as did water schemes for Inishnee and Errisbeg.

Council engineers in Galway have begun work on providing safe drinking water for up to 1,000 householders […] where supplies have been contaminated by lead. The residents have been advised not to drink tap water until further notice.

Apparently the IBM ad is referring to something to do with tides and aquaculture in Galway Bay, rather than the worst sequence of water-quality disasters in Ireland for several decades. But really — someone at IBM’s marketing department should have done a little more research first before using that line…

Links for 2009-06-18

Links for 2009-06-13

Links for 2009-06-11

Links for 2009-06-10

Links for 2009-06-06

  • the Pearson correlation coefficient : a statistical measure to calculate “nearness” of items for collaborative filtering, a la “people who bought this also bought this”. wonder if this would make a good Bayes p-value combiner in SpamAssassin
    (tags: algorithms statistics via:fergal ruby recommendations correlation nearness collaborative-filtering)

  • Home taping didn’t kill music – Bad Science : ‘SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful. [..] Like I said: as far as I’m concerned, every [dodgy figure] from the [music] industry is false, until proven otherwise.’
    (tags: science journalism p2p mp3 music copyright piracy pr statistics figures spin bullshit)

  • Backing Up Flickr : using “flickrtouchr”, a handy script by colmmacc
    (tags: flickr backup tips howto python small-world)

Links for 2009-06-04

Mae’s OK!

Well, that was a really scary few days.

On Monday, the lovely C was nearly 2 weeks overdue, and was scheduled to come into the Rotunda for induction the next morning; then contractions started on Monday afternoon. We were happy, as avoiding induction was good news for a natural birth, allowing the process to be run through the excellent Domino scheme, etc.

So we went in, arriving at the Rotunda ER for 3.45 or so. They put on the CTG to monitor the baby’s heartbeats, and the first 3 contractions were strong, but everything seemed OK. The next one, however, the baby’s heart rate dropped dramatically — to a very low 40bpm; I called the ER nurses, they ran in, put C on oxygen, and that seemed to help, returning the rate to normal — but on the next contraction the baby’s heart rate dropped even further. Once that happened, the shit hit the fan. In seconds C was on a trolley heading for surgery. It was clear this was serious trouble.

I was left standing outside the theatre while she was operated on — as an emergency Caesarean section there was no time for luxuries like hapless husbands stumbling around the background. Probably just as well. The midwives and surgical staff kept me as well informed as was possible, though.

After a terrifying 10 minutes, the prognosis improved a little. Initially they were worried that the baby had put pressure on the cord, but this was discounted — in fact the baby had emptied its bowels of meconium in the womb, which irritated it enough to cause enough distress and cause its heart rate to crash. After 10 minutes, the baby was out (and was a girl!), and C was going to be OK at least. however the baby was at quite a lot of risk from aspiration of meconium and possible brain damage due to reduced oxygen in the womb. holy shit. :(

The baby had indeed aspirated some meconium, causing a collapsed lung. Over the next couple of days in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, the little mite had surgery to introduce a chest tube into her pleura to re-inflate the lung, and was treated with a variety of treatments to deal with meconium in her stomach.

The best bit was this afternoon when we got news that the results of her cranial ultrasound were in — all clear, no brain damage. Then C got to feed her and hold her — and she latched on like some kind of milk-seeking missile. what a little trooper.

Anyway, with any luck, 2 or 3 days from now they’ll both be able to come home in one piece.

We were lucky btw — if we hadn’t been in the ER at the time, it was very unlikely that the prognosis would have been anywhere near as good. And I have to give credit to the Rotunda staff, they did a great job.

pics on Flickr!

Update, 7 June: C was released from hospital yesterday, and Mae got the all-clear this morning. We’re now all back home, healthy and in one piece. Now we can just get on with the usual second-child excitement-slash-drama! phew!

Links for 2009-05-31

  • Hibernation Tool for Mac OS : OSX doesn’t suspend-to-disk by default, which isn’t good if you want to reduce power consumption of an unused MacBook Pro. this AppleScript provides a nice Mac-ish UI for the commandline NVRAM pokery required to fix this
    (tags: macos power suspend-to-disk sleep hibernate mbp macbook-pro nvram)

  • spamstery.com : ‘The Last Social Game You Will Ever Play’. ‘Want in? Sorry. You can’t. We’re in beta, so we are way too cool for you. If you’d like us to throw you a frickin’ bone when we’re ready to consider your application, follow @spamstery on Twitter and we’ll see what we can do. (No promises, though. God, you’re a dork.)’
    (tags: twitter elitism funny satire spam sns)

Links for 2009-05-30

Links for 2009-05-28

Michael Woods saying “the Brits made us do it”

If you were listening to the Marian Finucane show on RTE Radio 1 last Saturday afternoon, you might have heard the mind-boggling stuff coming out of Michael Woods, the Fianna Fail former Education Minister with a "strong Catholic faith" who brokered the controversial backroom deal back in 2003 which allowed the Catholic Church and its institutions to evade prosecution on child abuse.

Here’s a great thread on Politics.ie where quite a few folks boggle at the incredible things he said.

Thanks to Podcasting Ireland, I was able to track down and cut out this segment, so here is a recording of Michael Woods coming up with the pathetic excuse of how the British forced the Christian Brothers to abuse children:

Michael Woods – the brits made us do it.mp3 (951KB)

The last refuge of a cornered FFer — blame the British. Absolutely incredible. It has to be heard to be believed. What century is this again?

Update: according to Mary Raftery in the Irish Times, this is a preview of the religious right’s tactics:

‘It Is easy to discount former government minister and senior Fianna Fáil member Michael Woods. A former minister, he is no longer a prominent figure. He has, however, left a festering sore behind him which continues to weep poison every now and then. The infamous church-State deal on redress for victims of institutional child abuse, under which the religious orders pay a mere 10 per cent of the compensation bill, was at its most septic over the weekend.

Woods, the main architect of the deal, defended it on the television news and gave a long RTÉ radio interview on Saturday. We were beginning to hear some of the defences likely to be chosen by religious conservatives as soon as they manage to regroup and fight back.’

We marched in the streets about this stuff. It’s like the 90’s never happened.

Links for 2009-05-25

Links for 2009-05-24

Links for 2009-05-21

Links for 2009-05-20

Links for 2009-05-19

Links for 2009-05-18