Depending on the price, I really think I want one of these. I’m thinking of using the wifi for communications over jabber+jingle and/or SIP in addition to web and email.

If I end up getting one, you can bet that I’ll be posting about it… you know, my birthday is in September

Also, I’ll be putting up links to other peoples lists of generators. If you’ve got one let me know.

Dang, it’s hot… and I just had to glance at my bookmarks toolbar to know that These microsummaries are very flexible, they can be specified by site owners or generated by user xml files. This lousy blog will surely have microsummary goodness soon enough.

To get your weather, add the current weather observation microsummary generator, bookmark the appropriate XML file (not RSS) from http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/, go to the bookmarks properties and check out the drop down box for the title. Ideally, this would work with the more human readable weather page instead of the xml feed, but I didn’t feel like figuring out the XPaths to the pieces of data I needed, I’ll leave that to someone else… or maybe I’ll do it later.

As a side note, this firefox beta crashed 3 times while writing this post, but the new session restore feature brought me back almost exactly where I was… thanks to having saved periodically. Also during the course of writing this, my bookmark title changed to ’96 F – Fair’… I thought it was late enough to be cooling off

Update: Here’s a generator for google weather (change the zip code in the url, if you actually use their form, the url will no longer match).

I think my workaround will consist of making them disabled so they cannot be editted, and enabling them via a script right before the form submits so that the values for those controls are submitted (disabled controls are not successful and are not “valid for submission”).

If anyone can explain why selects can’t be made readonly, or give me a better solution for simulating readonly-ness, please share.

Is there any standard (or at least reliable) way to “translate” a relative XPath expression into one that is absolute. A successful translation would be one that returned the exact same value/node-set as the original when evaluated in the same context. If such a solution exists… I’m guessing it would involve lots of “position()” calls.

Anyone?

One place I’ve found it particularly useful is when upgrading ebuilds in gentoo. If your new package has a new config file in /etc, portage will not overwrite your current config, but will put the new file next to it. For example, an update to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf would be placed at /etc/apache2/._cfg0000_httpd.conf. For non-trivial updates (where etc-update/dispatch-conf aren’t really practical), it’s nice to be able to see the two versions side-by-side and update blocks at a time where needed.

So, not a tool I use everyday, but one that I’m very glad to have discovered. Check out the docs.

I’m using the LWP::UserAgent module for all of my api requests to flickr, and it turns out that LWP will make the POST request with little hassle:

#####################
#
# function: flickr_upload
# parameters: filename, ...  (array of filenames)
# returns: array of flickr photo_ids
#
# TODO: make error checking more robust
#
#####################
sub flickr_upload {
    my @filenames = @_;
    my @picids;
    foreach my $filename (@filenames) {
        my @filearray = ($filename, $filename);
        my %vals;
        $vals{'email'} = $flickr_email;
        $vals{'password'} = $flickr_passwd;
        $vals{'photo'} = \@filearray;
        my $res = $ua->post(
            'http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploader_go.gne',
             \%vals, 'Content-type' => 'form-data');
        my $doc = $parser->parse_string($res->content);
        my @stati = $doc->getElementsByTagName('status');
        if ($stati[0]->firstChild->data eq 'ok') {
            my @idnodes=$doc->getElementsByTagName('photoid');
            push @picids, $idnodes[0]->firstChild->data;
        } else {
            print "Something bad happened....";
        }

    }
    return @picids;
# Now go to:
#'http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploader_edit.gne?ids='.
#join ',',@picids;
}

This is the key line:

        my $res = $ua->post(
             'http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploader_go.gne',
              \%vals, 'Content-type' => 'form-data');

The first parameter is obviously the URL to post to. The second is a reference to a hash that contains the key=>value pairs (basically, the form fields). Notice that the value of ‘photo’ is an array reference. This tells LWP that this is a file upload. The first (0th) element in that array is the name of the file to upload, the second is the name to tell flickr for the file, I just used the same name. This array can also contain additional values that I didn’t used, info here. The third parameter is the Content type header. This is very important. If you leave it off LWP will try to use the “key=value&key=value&….” syntax, and it really has to be multipart form data.

The rest is pretty simple. I’m using XML::LibXML to parse the responses from flickr.