Basically I want my RSS reader to fetch things (images for example) needed to display every entry during updates, so I can read them offline. Images in most feed entries are referenced remotely (http://), which are usually not downloaded until the entry is actually viewed. Some feeds use enclosures but that works more like an attachment rather than for content.

I’ve tried quite a few RSS readers and Straw seems to be the only one that does full automatic image fetch during updates. However Straw’s development has been stalling, and the latest version seems to be quite unstable.

Liferea has been my RSS reader for quite a while, and so I’ve decided to do it myself with (hopefully) the simplest way possible: a Liferea conversion filter which parses a feed and fetches things for offline reading.

At the moment it works by looking for <img> tags and fetches the image using wget, and then replaces the original image src to point to the local one.

It’s a pretty simple perl script. I have written it in a way so it can be extended it to parse and fetch other things in the future, maybe embedded videos for example. It currently downloads all images, one by one. It also checks if a file is already downloaded or not. You can change $SAVE_PATH in the script as needed.

You can git (yes, git) the script at git://pigeond.net/offline_filter.git. Or alternatively get the latest version here, or browse the repo at http://pigeond.net/git/?p=offline_filter.git.

To use it, set the script as the conversion filter for the feed you want to have things downloaded and it should just work.

Now I can read all the really important stuff on the train, like xkcd and failblog ;).

The first is checking for vim python support before doing anything. I did this because in Debian vim (vim.basic) isn’t compiled with python support, and I prefer vim.basic over vim.gtk or vim.gnome as my default vim (and as for the reason, see my previous vimpress post.

The second is adding a :BlogSave command. Basically sending and saving an entry without publishing it, i.e. saving it as a draft, which I do a lot myself.

I’ve kept it in my git repo now at git://pigeond.net/vimpress.git

Gitweb at http://pigeond.net/git/?p=vimpress.git

Thanks for a few people e-mailing about the problem. Unfortunately most of those e-mails went into my spam mailbox, which I don’t go thru as often (for obvious reason :)

Anyway, thanks Lupis and Larry.

Also I’ve added external links in the airport info box to World Aero Data and AirNav (for U.S. airports).

A little bit of surprise, it ran with Wine latest development version, at least it’s gone thru all the splash screen, characters selection, until it gets to the actual game, crashed.

After turning on some debugging and tracing, followed by consulting on #winehq, I’ve learnt that this game hits one of the famous Wine and DirectX issue, multi-threaded Direct3D.

Still I’m a bit adventurous as usual, and did a bit of code reading and hacking in Wine, trying a few different quick-and-dirty approaches to get threads to use the same GLXContext, not that I’m an OpenGL guru.

After a few tries, I gave up. However I still kind of wanna be able to play this game under Linux. So I rethink the problem from a different approach, and did a even more dirty hack, so that only the main thread can do any GL calls. Any other threads will simply returns before trying. Yes, VERY UGLY indeed. So ugly that let’s not even talk about it anymore ;)

And guess what, that does the trick. It gets into the actual game. So apparently it’s creating a new thread only for the pre-game loading screen. So now instead of the loading animation screen, I simply get a black blank screen, and the game continues after that.

And just for fun, I’ve even created a character with the top Taiwanese model’s name :P

More screenshots here.

I have put together a video driver for MPlayer using the MatrixView screensaver from rss-glx.sf.net. This driver renders videos on the fly in Matrix code style view.

Find more about it at the MPlayer + Matrixview page.

Now we can all see what Neo sees in the dream world…

Ejs is a JavaScript implementation of a subset of APIs from Evas and Ecore – core libraries in E – Enlightenment window manager.

Along with that I’ve ported the Evas test app to JavaScript, ready to run inside your browser. There’s also an interactive playground where you could try out the API inside an interpreter-like environment.

Maybe one day this would become a full blown toolkit and utilities for fancy web development… we shall see…

Evas test running in the browser

At the moment you can either search for a navaid (airport, VOR, NDB, FIX) by its code/name, or you can have it showing you all navaids in the current map view.

All navaids data are from FlightGear, which uses X-Plane’s data. I have stored the data in a database, which FGMap talks to via AJAX.

There are a few things that i haven’t done yet. That includes proper ILS/OM/MM/IM/GS drawing, heliport, airway, etc. I might also add real time metar reports to airports later.

Anyway, feel free to play with it, and leave me some feedbacks.

Here are two screenshots of FGMap navaids in action.

Over KOAK – Metropolitan Oakland Intl

Over VHHH – Hong Kong Intl

At the same time I did some “sightseeing” around, and checking out one of my favorite buildings, currently the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101. Then I noticed the difference (pretty obvious) between the satellite images from GMap v1 and v2. The one from v1 is in fact newer than v2. The one in v2 is still being built!

GMap v1

GMap v2

And so I started off doing it. It’s heaps of fun, not to mention finding out all those bugs with IE. M$ is very kind, they always do things that make people laugh. This always gives me a chance to revise a lot with Javascript.

I also ended up writing my own routines for map overlays displaying plane markers and info, instead of using the GMAPI’s GMarker. A bit more flexible, and it does exactly what I want.

There is time when Javascript is useful, and there is time where it’s just overkill. IMHO, Javascript is useful for writing “web app”. Same as using Flash, or Java applet. But btw this does NOT mean every website should be bloody web app!!

And there you go, the FlightGear server online map. A couple of FlightGearers have been using it as a flying map and as a simple ATC radar. If it’s the right time you’ll see us flying!

I’ve got plans to add more features, like airports/navids lookup. And of course, improving the usability and UI is always on the plate. Comments are also welcomed…

Also thanks to everyone who has helped me with testing and giving suggestions to the page. (ampere, AJ, thorben, vivian, gorilla, Surge, johnh51, MasseR, etc)

- porting to gtk2/gkrellm2
- kernel 2.5 support
- different colors/species of fishes for in and out network traffic
- configurable interface for network traffic
- SMP ducks
- include/exclude nice time from CPU usage
- some bug fixes for memory/swap and network traffic
- APM…?
- clouds and birds…?
- transparent background/sky…?
- even more monitoring…?

Project deadlines at work as usual. It was still pretty good time though. And I got 18 cans of Lipton tea for the X’mas kringle thing. And they’re all gone already!

I’ve moved again. Well just the next road down. The move was sort of quick and easy without any significant drama. (And of course, we hired removal people to do it this time. I have to say they’ve done a pretty good job.)

So, just what can you do with an ipaq running Linux? Well, while I was packing all my stuff including computers, I managed to get bpalogin (a Telstra Bigpond cable login client) running on my ipaq. It was easy. I compiled it for strongarm and that’s it. Another thumbs-up for Linux and open source software. So with all my main computers packed and unplgged, I was still able to get online. I took a picture too :P

Click it for larger version

Coding… hadn’t really got time to do much.

I got at least 5 different patches from people all around the world for the gtk2/gkrellm2 port for bfm. I have to apologize for not doing anything with bfm at the moment. Hopefully in a few months time I will be putting together another release.

I was trying to get some sort of chinese inputing on my ipaq and it wasn’t that easy. I hacked xkbd a bit and got to the point so it is showing the changjei keyboard layout. However at that time Xft and Freetype weren’t cooperative enough to work perfectly on the ipaq. I’m pushing this off a bit and will deal with it later :P

I was playing with Evas again and getting my head around with its smart object. I started off with this Evas Staff widget. Hopefully I can write some useful programs using this in the future.

Also, I’ve joined the GPE gang and started working on gpe-irc, an IRC client (obviously), together with a few other developers. I’m mainly dealing with the backend stuff.

Hmm I’ve written a quick perl script to do english-to-engrish translation. If you don’t know what engrish is, visit engrish.com.

Piano… My piano tutor has found a better job, but it’s in Kaohsiung. And so she went back to Taiwan which means I’m now teacher-less :( Still, I’m keeping up with my piano every now and then. I’ll probably look for another tutor a bit later.

A bit of credits here for my piano tutor. Claudia, she’s very good at piano and music. And I guess she understands me a lot too in terms of my knowledge of piano and music. She knows what I’m good at and weak in. She knows what, where and how I’ve been thru piano and music. And so she’s done a very good job in guiding and teaching me. Not to mention we both share the same level of enthusiasm and passion towards piano and music. We can basically just sit there and talk all about piano non-stop.

Yet I have to see if I can find another tutor like that :)

Been playing around with Evas, a nice graphics library written by <Raster>. I wrote an XMMS plugin with it, just a little learning exercise. Here are two shots of it…

Went for go-kart recently and I won a trophy! Well I’m not going to tell you how I got it though. For those who know, you knew it already. :)

Bought a 2nd hand desk for 20 bucks from an auction. Now all I have to do is to get it home. And then I can do all my coding/hacking properly again.

Fixed some more bugs and added some more features and supports for Maggie’s newsgroup reader. I’m still not convinced though. One day I will rewrite the whole thing.