Jonny’s Blog

I was looking for a MediaWiki extension that could read RSS feeds and output them onto the page. The trouble was, the extensions I found either didn’t work, or were very uncustomisable. For example, for one that actually worked, adding this to the wiki page:

<feed>http://jonnylamb.com/feed/</feed>

forced this output on me:

<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/minimo-bongo/">Minimo Bongo</a></h3>
<small>22 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>

<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/durham-visit/">Durham Visit</a></h3>
<small>22 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>

<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/musically-active/">Musically Active</a></h3>
<small>22 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>

<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/05/age/">++age</a></h3>
<small>5 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>

This is not ideal. Instead of looking further for a better extension, I wrote one. It is called SimpleFeed and it lives on the Extension:SimpleFeed page on mediawiki.org.

It is simple for two reasons:

• It uses the SimplePie feed parsing library
• It’s exactly that- simple.

Here is a quick tour on how to use it:

Once it is installed, one can choose the syntax each item is outputted in. For example:

<feed url="http://jonnylamb.com/feed/">
== [{PERMALINK} {TITLE}] ==
{DATE} by {AUTHOR}

{DESCRIPTION}
</feed>

For each item from the feed, the curly-bracketed words get replaced with their corresponding values. Note the use of wiki-markup as this is then parsed by the MediaWiki parser, producing something like this:

<a name="Minimo_Bongo"></a><h2> <span class="mw-headline"> <a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/minimo-bongo/" class="external text" title="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/minimo-bongo/" rel="nofollow">Minimo Bongo</a> </span></h2>

<p>22 March 2007 by jonnylamb
</p>
<p>I shoved
[...]

So of course there’s a whole load of MediaWiki stuff added which makes it integrate into the wiki much better, and the killer feature is the customisation possible!

There’s more information on its mediawiki.org page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleFeed.

My school’s wireless network has two areas:

• WPA-secured area, with a passkey that I know
• WEP EAP-MSCHAPv2 secured area, requiring a user name & password (which I have)

The WPA area is fine- I can connect. However, this bug in the Nokia N800 is obviously preventing me reach the second, of course, being the area I’m more likely to use the n800 in.. There are a few solutions: I think the famous wpa_supplicant would fix this problem. The other solution is to use Open1x, which of course looks as if it’d definitely fix this. So that’d be my immediate reaction for a normal Linux computer, however, this is an N800. I’m looking into it..

The other issue sounds a little ridiculous, but proxy user names and passwords are not allowed in the N800. To use the proxy server at school this requires a user name and password, and as there’s no-where to enter these, then this does not work. Looking at the osso-feed-reader (Liferea) source it seems to use the gconf values, but it has been reported that simply adding gconf values is not a fix.

These two things are the most annoying problems with it at the moment! There are some other annoying things but I’ll sum them up later. I’d better satisfy my developer discount somehow though..!

CakePHP is the best thing I have come across for a very long time! I had previously looked at it but wasn’t quite interested. But I had a look at the Ruby on Rails screencasts. And after hearing that Cake was the Ruby on Rails of PHP. I am learning it right now, and am loving it- all hail MVC!

Also- today was my Total Dvorak day, and my brain hurts!

The title: lol

I have heard reports that my blog is rather one sided and some can’t actually understand what is going on. It is correct though: unless you have a Windows Mobile phone and want to use it on GNU/Linux, then you will not know, or will not want to know, about SynCE and my woes about it! Same goes about using the bcm43xx driver on my wireless card. Although I’ll keep writing blogs like that, I will try to also write more about what’s going on in the old life I’m having at the moment.

PHP-Site has really been taking off in development. I have been using Trac on my home server and can be accessed at:

https://jonnylamb.no-ip.org/phpsite

This site contains a wiki, roadmap, subversion source and ticket system. Please visit this if you’re remotely interested and check it out. I want to move this site to it’s normal home: phpsite.org, or more precisely: trac.phpsite.org. There is also a mailing list for PHP-Site. It will start to be used more as the script really takes off. This can be found on SourceForge at http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/phpsite-news. I would also love more interest and more people involved in development, documentation or the general running of the project. It would be a great help as well as a good way to promote the project.

Results day is in one week today (it is now past twelve so technically 6 days) and I’m not looking forward to it.

However, Pro Corda starts soon and I am looking forward to it! I’m playing first violin in Dvorak’s American quartet, Op. 96, movements II and IV; and first viola in Bargiel’s octet, Op. 15a, movement I. The former is a really great piece and I still have much work to do on it before I leave, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing it with my regular quartet- Anna, Immy and Conrad. The latter is a new one to me- I hadn’t heard of Bargiel before receiving the music but I am liking the piece. It isn’t quite like the octet but it is a very nice piece! The theme of the party is the letter G, which I think, and I’m sure you’ll agree, is rubbish. In fact, there’s no doubt about it!

Last week while my parents were in France, I was (dumped) onto my god-father who runs the Cambridge Pianola Company. While he is a very interesting guy, we didn’t get up to much as he spends a lot of the time on the phone and, because he’s blind, can’t get out and about too easily. However, there were some interesting moments to the week. He let me drive his Porsche. This was a more than entertaining experience as my previous driving experience is null. I had great difficulty putting it into gear and had to call on both my brother and my darling Fiona as they both had actually driven a car before! I was also quite lucky, as I managed to just miss hitting his Mercedes, which is fortunate, as I doubt he’d enjoy hearing the crunching of metal! Interestingly, he is also a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, which I don’t quite understand, but I wouldn’t, would I? However, thanks to this membership he was invited, with guests, to a barbeque in Fulbourn. Although the weather wasn’t the nicest, I had a nice time and spent most of the time discussing cellular networks in the UK with his daughter, and the bids for the 3G licenses some years ago that went astonishingly high.

In July, I had a mixture of interesting excursions. I went to York to check out the university, as well as play in a concert with the York Young Soloists. The concert was good: we played Strauss Romance for Cello, James Freeman (a horn player in the orchestra as well as a music undergraduate at Cambridge) Fantasie, Richard Sheppard (an authority in the minster) Six Shakespeare Songs and Mozart Symphony No. 40. I enjoyed the Mozart the most, but it was a nice concert. The university was also good. I didn’t spend much time there, but I did get a good tour of the Computer Science department which was informative and helpful.

This new graphics card that I ordered came to the door this morning, but 9am is a time that sounds like a boggy marshland when you’ve gone to sleep at 6am. It should be coming again tomorrow morning (again technically later today) and so I’m determined to be up to receive it. I’m bored of using the integrated graphics on this VIA motherboard using the native Linux driver in Debian. Go hardware graphics!

I have noticed (I’m not sure whether it’s a recent thing) that Google now links you to a referrer page, so when you click on a search result, it takes you through Google and then to your site, which is rather annoying when you try and copy the link’s URL. Is there any way to get rid of this?

As I write this, I am listening to: Corelli: Sonata for Violin and Continuo in D minor «La Folia», Op. 5 No. 12 (Manze, Egarr)

SmartLife is an application that has just been thought of. It is for reading Liferea feeds on your Windows Mobile SmartPhone. It consists of two parts:

1. The SmartPhone app: This will be constructed using the .NET Compact Framework and will parse the XML that Liferea stores its feeds in.
2. The Liferea synchronization: This will consist of a simple script to copy the files needed to the SmartPhone.

More information is at the Trac project site: https://jonnylamb.no-ip.org/SmartLife/

As a follow up from my previous post, I have had some more ideas about this mail client/server. I think I would write this using C# and as the server is in no way graphical is completely cross-platform. The server side actually has a very simple task. For now, I am assuming it is only dealing with mail.

If the server ran C#, then a simple System.Net.Sockets.TcpListener class would sort out the server aspect of it. The only real thing that has to be thought out is how to store the main, and in what format… I’d definately send out XML to clients, and with C#, that too would be terrifically easy! So there are really only a few things to be decided about the server:

• The format of storage for permanent mail. This is important as it needs to be able to deal with binary data as well as easy ascii. An advantage of IMAP is that certain parts of an email can be retrieved based on its MIME type- this would be a good idea to implement.
• The XML schema used when sending mail and sending folder structure to clients.
• When to send mail, and how. If it was sent with every folder change, then it could be sluggish to use. However, if it was completely sent at startup it might take an age to startup. Only sending headers would work fine, but then you couldn’t preview the message when browsing the folders.

Note: the word send in this context means transferring data from server to client. I’m not dealing with sending e-mails yet! Although, I expect sending emails would be pretty easy, just send some XML from the client to server and send it through some kind of MTA.

Retrieving the mail would also be a bit of an issue- how? rely on an existing mail server or what? This is completely undecided and does not need to be thought of until mail storage (the main point of this project) is sorted.

If that worked, then the other things what would be great are:

• a calendar - This would be fairly easy to implement. Again I’d need to think of a way to store the data, and how to send the data to the client, but it doesn’t have the problems of mail- of having to actually access the outside world!
• tasks - This would be even easier and has the same plus/minus points as a calendar.
• plugins - I have SynCE in mind. By the time this leaves the ground, there will probably be some kind of sync support for Windows Mobile 5 devices and a plugin for that would be great- I’ve no idea how hard that would be to implement, but it would be terrifically useful.

But I think the most important part of this whole project is the name…

After just starting to use Thunderbird as my primary mail client, so I can view and check emails in windows and linux, I’m convinced that I don’t like it! So now I’m looking for a replacement, and I currently have this in mind:

A backend or server, that is constantly running that holds all the emails, but isn’t accessed directly. Instead, there are frontends, and can be many! Eg:

• A graphical based mail client much like the design of Slypheed, Thunderbird, Evolution etc. for linux. This would probably use something like GTK+ or Qt.
• A console-based mail client much like Mutt, or Pine for linux. This would be great because one could read their mail through SSH and therefore anywhere with an SSH client.
• Another graphical based mail client but this time for windows. This is not entirely necessary, but would be nice.
• A web-based mail client like IlohaMail, or QD-POP.

All of these would access the same server, and output all your emails in the same folders, in the same way. The only difference would be the interface.

Just talking about that now though makes me think what I’m suggesting is a Microsoft Exchange replacement! Exchange has a great web interface, uses Outlook for windows (a great client), and can be used by Evolution in linux. Of course, Exchange is a lot more complex, and has groupware kind-of stuff that is just not required. However, as I think about it more, the following features would be great to have in this server and clients:

• Mail client (obviously)
• Calendar
• Tasks

Which moves more and more into the realms of Exchange. As I own a Windows Mobile phone, I’d also love to have push-email, although that would cost in terms of GPRS and isn’t entirely necessary.

Anyway, that’s my thought of the day, and would love to make it, as a quick look on t’internet earlier for something like this revealed nothing. Let me know what you think…