upr00ted

Since finding geektool (for the second time) a few weeks ago, I’ve come to really love this little app. It sits nicely in the background constantly gathering information, in a very matrix-esk way, quietly displaying it on the desktop. I just wrote my first “from scratch” script after being unable to find an equivalent online anywhere.

Here’s the script:
curl http://slashdot.org/index.rss | grep <title | sed -e ’s/<title>Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>Search Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/</title>//g’

If you haven’t guessed it from the liberal use of ’slashdot’ in the script, it simply pulls the rss feed from slashdot and puts the titles of the current slashdot articles on your desktop, one per line.

Be careful, slashdot has a policy I didn’t know about “You may only load headlines every 30 minutes.” So set your refresh time above 1800 seconds. You have been warned, you will be banned if you don’t follow this rule.

Maybe not the most useful script, but it’s always nice to know you haven’t missed a post. In addition I found the best weather info I could get was from nws.noaa.gov, give them a look.

Somewhat on the spur of the moment I decided to switch from to WordPress for the blog portion of this site. The switchover was all but seamless.

I’m sure no one really wants to hear the details, but what started as a Sunday morning project quickly became a Sunday project. The initial transfer to WP was actually quite simple and painless, it was the CSS that had me tinkering. I probably should have just done a quick re-work of the site and come out with a simple new design, but I wanted to see how hard it would be. In the end things look roughly the same and some parts look better in my opinion.

The main draw to WP for me was the simplicity of the configuration and ease of use of the admin section. It took me hours to get the archival format right for MT, but I had that done within the first 5 minutes of the install today. I also felt a need to switch shortly after MT decided to start charging for their previously free software. That kind of change irks me.

Well my Mental Train just derailed, so I guess . . . stay tuned for some pictures or notes about my upcoming project building one of these.

I think the server switch over is just about complete, I have a few parts of my gallery to upload yet. While most things have been working for a while the little stylsheet switcher was failing because the new server has a different version of PHP installed and old variables weren’t working. Took me a while to figure out why Safari was refusing to go to a null address. I was under the impression it was supposed to be re-directed back to where it was. Seems $HTTP_REFERER isn’t good enough any more, you need $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’]. In addition on my old server I could simply use the variable name of an item passed through the url so somepage.php?variable=true, could be referred to as $variable. No longer. Now it has to be gotten with $_GET[’variable’]. I guess that is a good thing because you really might not want your variables to have values when you think they are empty, but for crying out loud, that took me way too long to figure out.

Everyday is a learning experience. . . . election day being one of the biggest.