2003 Archive

Will the Ebay2RSS Feed help me to get the best prices on the expensive electronics i would like to buy?

I hate shopping for lowest prices. Once i decide what i want to buy, it must be available near me, with good service and i don’t want to wait.

Unfortunately my wishes do not correspond to the size of my wallet, so to make them fit you dig and dig the internet to get good bargains for stuff.

This used to take a lot of time. Being able to construct an RSS feed from online auctions (eBay in this example) It should be a matter of minutes to check whether there is an item in the search i want to bid on, or not

My hopes aren’t that high set, but i tried it out anyway. (Searching for a digital SLR camera body below a $1000,-)

Some hours ago my changeset number 1000 went into the xaraya repository.

As you can see in the comments, it’s not a good one, basically cleaning up some mess i made earlier that day.

Nevertheless, it’s there

Using a script from Bryan O’Sullivans bitkeeper repository we integrated the bitkeeper repositories for Xaraya with our bugzilla installation. The script is used as a trigger everytime changes are committed to the main repositories on the server and scans the changeset comments for text fragments mentioning bugs.

When it finds those fragments, the following happens:

• the change committed is attached as a patch to the bug; (this patch can in most cases be applied to source trees out there, while maintaining upgradeability)
• a comment is entered for the bug, summarizing what happened;
• links are created in the comment to view the path in the bitkeeper web interface;
• bugzilla mails the relevant parties as usual.

This script is smart enough, not to enter the same information on the same bug and changeset twice which, if you know how bitkeeper works, is not uncommon if you have multiple repositories. As always, on deploying something new, you always start to think immediately about features which you could add (example: scanning for fixed  or fix  and setting the state of the bug accordingly).

During the period of  little over a year, we’ve built ourselves an infrastructure which is still growing and is literally improved upon everyday. Some elements of it:

• automatic updates of mirror repositories;
• fully integrated patch system;
• custom command system, defining new commands in the repository which propagate to all developer repositories;
• funny stats output;
• getting information on RFC status;
• integrated build system based on phing;
• integrated source documentation generator based on phpdoc;
• repository web interface as module of xaraya;
• adding comments to files which propagate across repositories;
• integrated unit test system;
• semi-automatic archiving of old files in the repositories;
• possibility to test for compliance with coding standards on every commit automatically;

With hindsight, a rather long list of tools, mainly created for fun. Some are used extensively, others are only used by myself.

Worked a bit on the  blog by email stuff. Sanitized the script a bit. The posting should now be a bit more clean as the backend now only includes stuff between the body tags of the received html. Nowhere near rock-solid, but useable nevertheless.

Just for the technically inclined, this is the regexp used to extract the blog entry from the html:

!<body[^>]*>(.*?)</body>!

Next step, getting some regular expression which makes sense to extract excerpt and extended entry (if any) out of there. Thinking about using <hr /> as a separator; it just looks natural when composing the entry. Dunno.

As mentioned earlier i like to treat weblogs as much as possible as a messaging activity. Not because i like messaging so much, but it has become the major activity in working the internet for me; communicating through news and mail. I find blogging interesting, but the threshold was always a bit high.

Especially blogging on linux seems a tab bit less friendly than the excellent clients available for windows, and those didn’t fit my pattern. What I did was basically the following:

1. searched the net for email gateways to MT (found 3)
   
2. literally threw the three files into one perl script ( they all had something i needed)
3. reorganized and made it fit to be a baseline for me.

So, phase 1 is complete, i can post in html with my email client to my blog (through a special email-address linked to it), selecting multiple categories.(by specifying them in a X-Categories custom mail header). Attachments to the email are automatically placed in the right location.

Outstanding issues:

1. a bit better extracting of the message (i left this posting as it is generated, definitely not what you want for all postings, look at the source of this page!)
2. keywords, excerpt and extended entry support
3. being able to comment through the same mechanism
4. get the stylesheet of the blog as a template in the email composer (well, maybe not)
5. Editting of posts
6. specifying sites to ping