All posts by ajohnson

Open Source

wget

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As part of the site I’m working on, we’re offering a customizable weather swf that gets syndicated weather from intellicast. Intellicast posts their weather downloads as a GZIP xml file every 3 hours during business hours and they recommend that you use wget to retrieve the file. Turns out wget is a pretty cool little piece of software, albeit with spotty directions for Windows users. Here’s how to install and use wget on a Windows machine if you’re curious:

a) Download v1.8.1 from http://space.tin.it/computer/hherold/. Why not 1.8.2? I got errors when trying to use it…

b) Unzip the files to a location on your computer.

c) Create a text file called “config.wgetrc”. Open up the included HTML helper page and cruise to the “Sample Wgetrc” section and copy the sample config to your text file. Save this file.

d) Add a System Variable (right click ‘My Computer’ –> Properties –> Advanced –> Environment Variables –> New). The variable name should be ‘wgetrc’ and the value should be the path AND file name to the file you created in step c (ie: variable value = ‘c:\wget\config.wgetrc’ if you used the file name I suggested).

e) Bring up a command prompt (Start –> Run –> type ‘cmd’). Cruise over to your wget directory (on my computer: c:\wget). Type ‘wget http://cephas.net/’.

f) You’re done! You’ve successfully retrieved my homepage! Notice the file created in the wget directory.

My illustration was very simple, you can do much so much more than just retrieving one web page. It’s real power is illustrated when you need to retrieve an entire website (for archiving or mirroring purposes) or a large file (ie: a 10MB XML file) among other things. Here are some other sample commands:

Saving a file/site to a different directory
‘wget -O c:\mydirectory\newfile.html http://www.cephas.net/’

Retrieve all the gifs from a directory (directory browsing must be on)
‘wget -r -l1 –no-paren -A.gif http://www.server.com/images/’

Mirror your website
wget –mirror http://www.yoursite.com/

For complete syntax and more examples, check the wget.html file that was zipped w/ the source.

XML

large files

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Spent some time today working on importing a largish XML file (approx 46MB) into SQL Server. I didn’t spend any time thinking about the best way to do it, just the only way I knew how… read it into memory, parse out the parts you want.. it was taking 90 seconds just to read it into memory. Is there a better way?

This is a pretty cool way to look at your outlook mail.

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tourist day in Boston

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Friday night Karen and I drove to Maine to pick up a friend (hi April!) from California who is visiting the East Coast for the summer to show her Boston on Saturday/Sunday.

Had dinner Friday night @ Wild Willy’s, a mom and pop burger joint in York (have the Bubba burger if you get a chance). Drove home.

Saturday we got up, Karen made Chocolate Chip and Dried Cherry Scones. Drove into Boston. Parked at the Common. We thought we’d get the 30,000 view first so we walked to the John Hancock tower, which ended up being closed. Walked to the Prudential instead. Got some pictures of Fenway, the Hancock Tower, and the Charles.

Then we bought Old Town Trolley passes and hopped on the Trolley. Got off in the Fort Point Channel district, saw the Boston Tea Party replica. Had lunch (King Crab legs, a Jonah crab, chowda, cob, and melon).

Walked to the Aquarium. Got back on the Trolley. Took the trolley to the USS Constitution, aka “Old Ironsides” (pictures: here, here, and here). Took the tour of the USS Constitution. Walked the USS Casspin (a US Navy World War II Destroyer! try to find the Hedgehogs if you ever visit!). Trolley’ed again.

Walked through Beacon Hill. Saw the Bull & Finch Pub (inspiration for Cheers). Walked to the famous ducks in the Garden, took pictures.

T’ed it to Harvard Square. Walked through Harvard’s campus. Saw the Memorial Church of Harvard University. Took pictures of the church.

T’ed it to Park Street. Walked to the North End while taking pictures. Had dinner @ Rossina. Walked to see the Feast. Walked to Mike’s Pastries. Got dessert.

Walked (w/ dessert) through the North End, Hay Market Square, the Holocaust Memorial, Government Center, and down Tremont Street to lay on the grass and watch some of Shakespeare on the Common: Henry V. Ate our dessert (tiramuso, lemon tarte, and chocolate eclaire). Watched the stars and took blurry pictures (can someone help me figure out how to take pictures at night?). Walked to Loews Theater. Watched Minority Report. Movie ends at 1am. In bed by 2am. What a day!

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weekend starts today

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next birthday I want this. If you think it’s science fiction, check out the movie. Amazing. Can I add it to my Amazon wishlist?

took the day off today, so my weekend starts today. I’m working outta my wife’s office because our house doesn’t have A/C and it’s sticky hot outside.

Ben Forta wrote an article on CF that showed up on meerkat & xml.com (i’m assuming because it mentioned XML). Notice that they’re running CFMX, an Access database, and no error handling. Poor, poor development practices. Come on guys!

What an interesting movement this is (found here). The mailling list lives here.

XML

xml

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tomorrow @ MINDSEYE I’m giving a presentation to management/design/creative on XML, basically a high level overview of what it is and how they should be thinking about it. After working with Spectra, which used a pseudo XML called WDDX to store data, I’ve created a couple different methods (CF/ASP/JSP) of managing data in web applications, but none of them have been automatic, meaning you couldn’t just send fire method x on object A and persist the data to the db. Data Binding or data persistence does do that… I just haven’t been able to use it in a site yet… so, here’s a link to an article on xml.com about data binding and XML which compares .NET to Java’s open source castor framework. Really interesting. I need this book too.

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a new Kephart

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Our friends Craig and Kristen Kephart, who live up in beautful York, Maine, just had their second. Pictures are here. Coincidentally (or not?), Money Magazine just picked York as one of the top ten places to vacation in the entire US. If you ever get to York, you definitely have to go to Browns Ice Cream. And after you eat ice cream, drive back north (toward Short Sands Beach) on Broadway and turn right on Ocean Ave. Better yet, walk.

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the race

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Karen won… well, she finished. 12 miles of biking, 800 meter swim, 3 miles running.. pictures here.

From robots.net: Micromechanical Flying Insects. Essentially scientists are trying to reproduce the fly. Our flying drones supposedly have scared Saddam Hussein into not appearing in public. Can you imagine what life would be like if we had autonomous flies!??? Sheesh, that’s cool and scary at the same time.

Would you believe that there is an Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International?