Peter's Blog

Lack of recent posts is mainly because I am now hooked on using daynotez on my Dell X51v PDA. It's becoming a more stream of conscious, diary kind of thing and is satiating my noting needs.

When I get some time I will try and knock up a Daynotez->blog bridge, however time is at a premium.

The Dell X51v is great, love it, cures all my hp rx1950 woes.

rx1950 == honda h100

x51v == suzuki hayabusa

I feel the need for a status report on various stuff I've mentioned in this blog.

Palm Tungsten T2

I haven't used this so much recently, I only use it as a diary. This is partly because it is summer and I don't wear a coat with pockets to carry it around. It's too big for trouser pockets. I do my blogging with Python Desktop Server, I don't use DayNotez any more.

Dell Inspiron 500m

I love my notebook, I'm using it now, I'd say it was my primary PC. I sit on the sofa in front of the TV and go through RSS feeds. My main gripe with it is that sometimes when it comes out of hibernate it does not see the wireless network and I have to hibernate it and unhibernate it again to kick it into life. Oh, also the SVideo output is only black and white. The laptop is just nice, no noisy fans and it doesn't make my lap overheat. About 2 hours of battery life.

Desktop PC

Hasn't crashed recently but that may be because I don't use it very often. The only time I used it this week was as a print server. The drivers with the PC TV card might have fixed the PCI latency issues. There are a number of PCs at work, including the firewall PC, that use VIA chipsets and they randomly hang as well. I have no love for VIA.

Python Desktop Server

Use it most days. I use it at work for my engineering logs which are behind a firewall. I haven't got around to adding tools or anything, I mainly use it for RSS aggregation. Having the aggregation in the web browser makes it so convenient for following links: in firefox I middle-click and read in a new tab. As a blogging tool my main gripe is the lack of a preview facility: checking links and formatting before uploading. I have to set it to offline mode before I start composing.

Debian

My debian server is still whirring away (noisy fans this summer but it's in a room I don't go in much). It handles email and Python Desktop Server and is also useful as a squid proxy that I can access from work through an SSH tunnel. I can use this to check the work firewall, to make sure it is possible to get in through the firewall. I might change server to a desktop pc as the laptop is a bit slow (166MHz pentium). That would allow me to make it a headless X server.

Object Desktop

I got fed up with animated fish using my CPU time in DesktopX. I use windowsblinds on the laptop to make it a bit more interesting but I don't think it was worth buying.

Intellimail

Still using it at home but I am tempted to move to IMAP + thunderbird like I use at work. Awaiting a home server decision.

Thunderbird

It's ok if a bit utilitarian when compared to Intellimail. However it handles IMAP, if a little flakily (it sometimes displays Inbox(3) but doesn't show the new messages).

Firefox

Love it. I only use IE for broken websites.

ITunes

May register for it today. If I can buy just the tracks I want and blow them to an audio CD then I see no need to buy CD's that are 75% filler material.

Furl

I'm beginning to see Furl as a place to look for websites that other people find interesting. When I run out of RSS articles I now try, e.g. this.

Motorbike

Sold for the asking price to a dealer who was advertising for CBR600's.

I hacked up a Python script to merge my old blog with my new Python Desktop Server blog. It uses the PyDS MetaWeblogAPI. The script is here. Not pretty but it's something. It reads entries from my Natara DayNotez database, sees if they are already in the PyDS blog and if they are not it posts them. I had to make a small change to PyDS to give the posts the correct creation date. To do this I added one line to MetaWeblogAPI.py:

Uploading wentsmoothly after one tricky problem. The £ character caused problems with XML. I eventually got around this by converting the title and description fields to unicode before posting:

I fixed my vim posting script in the same way.

This article talks about mobile blogging using a Newton. Up till now I've been using Natara DayNotez as a blogging tool on a Palm Tungsten T2. I use a Python script to read the blog entries from the database and build a static log site here. My plan is to migrate my old blog entries to Python Desktop Server using its MetaWeblogAPI. I still want to blog on the palm, it passes the time in Starbucks.

Tried out the PHP test on my server and it worked. Not sure it was going last night, it seems to have magically fixed itself. I still want a server based RSS aggregator and PHP is a good bet, and there is lots of PHP code out there, but do I want to mess with another noddy scripting language? Apache plus PHP is probably as powerful and secure as it gets. I really want to be able to submit changes to my DayNotez entries made at home or work to my home server which could then publish them on a proper web-based server. I can always dream.

Radio UserLand looks interesting but I'd have to buy two copies, one for home and one for work, and I'm too mean. My server at home is always up, at great expense, and it runs linux. Unless Radio Userland runs smoothly under Wine with no GUI I am not interested (a quick search reveals it does with GUI but I think the mean argument will swing this).

Set Palm up so record button opens BigClock. Pressing and holding the select button brings up the World Clock app but the delay is annoying.

Downloaded a star trek theme for BigClock to make palm look more like a tricorder. Needs some flashing leds.

For palm buttons, I now have:

Button 1

Zlauncher

Button 2

DateBk5

Button 3

DayNotez

Button 4

Zlauncher Quicklaunch

Record

BigClock

To hide DayNotez categories from people looking over shoulder, I've set category colour to black background. Makes entries look, well, black on black.

Installed all palm stuff on laptop. Seems like an easier way to do daily syncs and blog updates than firing up the desktop pc. All palm stuff means:

• Palm Desktop

• Bluetooth dongle

• DayNotez

• DayNotes Desktop beta

• Bonsai

• ISoloX

• Turic ISolo links

I killed the install of documents-to-go and I deleted all the stuff from the install folder that palm was going to install for the umpteenth time. It still took ages to get the HotSync to calm down, to get it so that it only did what was necessary. The first two syncs took a long tme because bluetooth hotsyncs are slow anyway and because it had to backup 12M or so of stuff from the palm.

When it came to downloading Bonsai I found it was a new point release. Haven't looked to see if there are any new goodies yet.

Got an email to say there was a new version of BackupBuddyVFS out but the changes appear to be for palms with big rotating screens.

Rejigged website generation. Decided to try using Cheetah (www.cheetahtemplate.org), a python templating library. This allows me to modify my html template, putting in variable names to be replaced by code. It was very easy to get going and it looks very powerful: you can virtually embed python code in your html.

Example:

#
from Cheetah.Template import Template

strTemplate = """<body>
                A $simple example.<br/>
                 Hello $names['wibble'], how are you today?<br/>
                 $MYGOD( 'software')
                 <table>
                 #for oEntry in $ENTRIES
                 <tr><td>$oEntry['Title']</td><td>$oEntry['Date']</td></tr>
                 #end for
                 </table>
        </body>"""

def MyGod( strPara):
        return "Now that's what I call " + strPara

oEntries = [ { 'Title': 'Fred', 'Date': 'Now'},
                                { 'Title': 'Noreen', 'Date': 'blub'}
                        ]

oNames = { 'wibble': 'Peter' }

oSearchList = {
                'simple': "Simple",
                'names': oNames,
                'MYGOD': MyGod,
                'ENTRIES': oEntries
                }

strHTML = Template( strTemplate, searchList=[oSearchList])

print strHTM

Generates:

<body>
        A Simple example.<br/>
         Hello Peter, how are you today?<br/>
         Now that's what I call software
         <table>
         <tr><td>Fred</td><td>Now</td></tr>
         <tr><td>Noreen</td><td>blub</td></tr>
         </table>
</body>

The advantage of all this complexity over strHTML.replace( '$simple', strSimple) is in the way that it allows loops to be expanded. The system as it stands allows me to create the HTML and make it pretty using HTML-Kit, then use python to populate it up. My python script has no layout HTML in it. The only other HTML involved is that generated from the DayNotez entries using DocUtils.

Just tried the 'Group By' feature in the DayNotez custom list. I have enabled grouping by Year, Month and Date. This means that all entries are compressed into a single row for each date. This makes it easy to find an entry in particular day, I expand the 'Year' group, then the 'Month' group, then the 'Date' group. Nice. Had to give it a kick by filtering and unfiltering to get this new entry to appear.