bin/urlencode

#!/usr/bin/js
 
function urlEncode(str){
    str=escape(str);
    str=str.replace(new RegExp('\\+','g'),'%2B');
    return str.replace(new RegExp('%20','g'),'+');
}
 
 
if(arguments && arguments.length > 0) {
    for(var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++) {
        r = urlEncode(arguments[i]);
        print(r);
    }
} else {
    importPackage(java.io);
    importPackage(java.lang);
    S = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader(System['in']) );
    s = true;
 
    while (s){
        s = S.readLine();
        if (s) {
            r = urlEncode(s);
            print(r);
        }
    }
}

Notes:

• This works because /usr/bin/js on my system runs Rhino

• function stolen from steveo

The most emotive piece I’ve heard on the radio this week was from one of many ‘town hall’ meetings (I forget which). A sobbing woman says, “The president is trying to make us like Russia. I don’t want America to be Socialist!”

Of course, being me, this leaves me thinking, “but why?”. The speaker obviously thinks ‘Socialist’ is a ‘bad word’ – I don’t. (I’ll leave aside the debate over whether Russia is really socialist any more). Since the quote doesn’t give any more reasoning, I’m left to wonder what this woman is actually opposed to – she clearly feels strongly about it.

Unfortunately, to me, the opposite of socialism seems to be selfishness. Selfishness in health care seems to lead to a situation where you are fine while you remain healthy but if you are unlucky enough to get sick you’d better hope you can afford it. A lot of illness isn’t selfish, by the way – the flu is happy to spread fairly to all people, given the chance.

In practice paying for US health care is somewhere along the selfish/social scale. As companies or organisations buy group insurance plans, they form small pockets of socialness. The only reason insurance works is because it spreads the cost across a group of people, with the assumption that not everyone will suffer illness. So people who pay insurance premiums and are healthy, are necessarily subsidising the health care of people in the same group who are less healthy. That sounds like socialism to me.

Of course, the American argument is that people have freedom of choice about what insurance they buy, or don’t buy¹, and that the current debate is about the government taking away that freedom. I need to think more about that, so maybe more later.

¹ I live in Massachusetts, and it is mandatory for people here to have some kind of health insurance.

I upgraded it with the latest Debian, since that is about the only Linux distribution with a supported PowerPC version now (the computer is an iMac G3). Since I am used to Ubuntu, Debian is pretty similar.

Next I wanted to cut down the number of steps I had to take to get the machine on and playing music. I created a new user called ‘music’, and set up GDM (using the ‘Login Window’ preferences entry) so that it automatically logs in as that user (after 20 seconds, so I can still log in as a normal user if necessary).

Then I set up the user so that Rhythmbox starts automatically when they log in – since I’m using LXDE, this meant finding rhythmbox.desktop and copying it under ~/.config/autostart/

So now I can press the power button, and (after a while) the music user will be logged in with Rhythmbox on screen. I still have to go and click on the network music server icon before it loads up songs though, so that will be the next thing to fix. Having searched around, I think I’m going to have to learn to write a Rhythmbox plugin to make that work how I want…

Since I was being cheap, I built my own connectors. I broke up a junk 10Mb router to take the sockets out of it, and cut up some spare patch cables to get short lengths with a plug on one end. By referring to this colour code diagram I wired up my connectors so I would have a ‘straight through’ path on the orange and green pairs, and a diverted path which connected the ‘external’ orange and green pairs to the brown and blue pairs in the single cable. With an hour or so of (bad) soldering I put my connectors together – and then the moment of truth – I reconnected the modem and router ends of the cable, and connected in the computer in the basement, and it all worked!

Q: How do I get my signal back?
A: There are several options, but the easy answer is to call Comcast.

Assuming you have a TV antenna in place, I think it’s quite easy to buy a digital converter box, connect the antenna to it, and connect it to the TV.

Q: How do I get FREE Basic Cable?
A: It’s easy… sign up for Internet and/or phone (each starting at just $24.95/mo.)

Compare this to a digital converter box. You can request a converter box coupon which gives you $40 off the price. The boxes are selling for around $40 – $60, so your maximum outlay will be about $20 (plus sales tax), with no ongoing cost. If you were previously watching broadcast TV, you can use the same antenna.

Should you take up Comcast’s offer?
I don’t intend to. I don’t think it gains you anything other than another monthly bill. If you just want to get broadcast TV back, a converter box is a cheaper option. If you really want cable, look around at all the possibilities.

¹ Though my impression of US culture is that there is more of an expectation for people to inform themselves to avoid being taken advantage of.

I also didn’t like the configuration of Automatic, which has a global set of regexps it applies to all feeds to decide whether to download an item. My program has separate regexps for each feed¹ which I think is a bit easier to deal with. In order to make the config file easy to parse, it is actually another Ruby file, which is read with instance_eval. By having methods defined as feed and matches the config file can just use those and look relatively sane:

feed 'http://some.feed.url/blah.rss'
matches 'title.to.match.*\d+'

(Some people would call this a DSL, but I think that’s stretching a point)

To make the torrents get into Transmission, the torrent downloader we’re using, I just call the transmission-remote command. Sometimes it’s easier to use what works.

So here’s the full program (see my previous post for how to set things up on the DNS-323):

#!/ffp/bin/env ruby
 
require 'open-uri'
require 'rss'
 
CONFFILE='/ffp/etc/mypodder2.conf'
PODCASTDIR='/mnt/HD_a2/podcasts'
TORRENTDIR='/mnt/HD_a2/torrents'
TORRENT_UPLOAD='/ffp/bin/transmission-remote "127.0.0.1:9091" -a "%s"'
 
class ConfigParser
	def initialize(feeds)
		@feeds = feeds
	end
 
	def parse(file)
		instance_eval(File.read(file), file)
	end
 
	def feed(url)
		@current = Feed.new(url)
		@feeds << @current
	end
 
	def matches(pattern)
		@current.add_pattern(pattern) if @current
	end
 
	alias :or :matches
 
end
 
class Feed
	def initialize(url)
		@url = url
		@patterns = []
	end
 
	def uri
		@url
	end
 
	def add_pattern(pattern)
		if(pattern && pattern.length > 0)
			@patterns << Regexp.new(pattern, true)
		end
	end
 
	def allow?(item)
		icompare = item.title
		@patterns.empty? || @patterns.find {|p| p =~ icompare}
	end
end
 
class Main
	def initialize(options = {})
		@options = {:config => CONFFILE, :verbose => false}.merge(options)
		@feeds = []
		read_config
	end
 
	def read_config
		ConfigParser.new(@feeds).parse(@options[:config])
	end
 
	def vprintln(sometext)
		if(@options[:verbose])
			puts sometext
		end
	end
 
	def torrent?(item)
		item.enclosure.type =~ /.*torrent/
	end
 
	def run()
@feeds.each do |feed|
    vprintln "checking feed #{feed.uri}"
    rss_content = ""
    open(feed.uri) do |f|
        rss_content = f.read
    end
    rss = RSS::Parser.parse(rss_content, false)
 
    rss.items.each do |item|
        vprintln " + checking item #{item.title}"
        if(item.enclosure && feed.allow?(item))
            iurl = item.enclosure.url
            vprintln " + + allowed item #{iurl}"
            ctitle = rss.channel.title.gsub(/\W/, '_')
		base = PODCASTDIR
		base = TORRENTDIR if torrent?(item)
            system("mkdir -p #{File.join(base, ctitle)}")
            system("chmod a+rw #{File.join(base, ctitle)}")
            ifile = File.join(base, ctitle, File.basename(iurl))
            unless File.exists?(ifile)
            	puts "About to download #{iurl} as #{ifile}"
            	system("wget -O #{ifile} #{iurl}")
 
		if(torrent?(item) && File.exists?(ifile))
			system(sprintf(TORRENT_UPLOAD, ifile))
		end
            else
            	vprintln " + + file exists"
            end
        end
    end                                
end
	end
end
 
if __FILE__ == $0
	require 'optparse'
 
	options = {}
 
	opts = OptionParser.new do |op|
		op.on("-f CONFIG", "--config CONFIG", "Specify config file (default #{CONFFILE})") do |f|
		      options[:config] = f
	        end
 
		op.on("-v", "--verbose", "Output messages") do
		      options[:verbose] = true
	        end
 
	        # No argument, shows at tail.  This will print an options summary.
	        op.on_tail("-h", "--help", "Show this message") do
	              puts opts
	              exit
	        end
 
	end
 
	opts.parse(ARGV)
	Main.new(options).run
end

¹ At the moment, it ‘OR’s together multiple regexps on a single feed, but I’m thinking I may change that so it’s easier to exclude certain matches as well as include.

• Then I found out if I turn on such a stream, it eats all the wireless bandwidth in the house and my wife complains her internet isn’t working. Nix that idea…

kill -9 1

But I have enough of a guess that I don’t want to do it while my computer is doing anything else Maybe later.

We’ve started planting seeds in our vegetable beds, so naturally wanted to keep a record of what is where, and since when. Hence, Garden of Ethelred

It’s a fairly simple site – the data is in an xml file, and we have xsl transforms for the different pages. We chose xml because my wife is familiar enough with it to make changes too.

On the main hosting site I run a short PHP script which uses the XsltProcessor class. For testing on the home server the setup is more ‘fun’ – a CGI shell script which calls xsltproc. I’m not sure why I’m quite so amused at writing CGI as shell script, but I am.

I’m doing some performance testing of one of our java servers, and I want my test to run in the night while I’m asleep. The test has previously been run using jconsole to get graphs of memory and thread usage. This looks good but it’s a GUI only tool so not scriptable. I figured I could run it and get some screen captures.

import from ImageMagick is a tool for doing screen grabs from a script. However it needs an X11 window ID to grab a window, which can be a little tricky to find. Another problem I found when testing was that if I had another window overlapping the window I was grabbing, that part came out black, and when the screensaver kicked in, the scripted grab didn’t work.

Taking these problems, I came up with my workaround. First, run a vncserver, so that jconsole is in a separate display which isn’t affected by other windows or the screensaver. I also set the geometry to have just enough room for the windows I want.

vncserver -geometry 1000x1500 :1

Connect to this with a vncviewer, start up jconsole and set it up to display what I’m interested in.

Now I can start my test, and run my windowdump script:

#!/bin/bash
 
dumpdir=/home/edward/screencaps
wingrep=Monitoring
 
while true; do
    pdate=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M`
    for winid in `xwininfo -display :1 -root -tree | grep $wingrep | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2`; do
        import -display :1 -silent -frame -window $winid "${dumpdir}/${wingrep}_${winid}_${pdate}.png"
    done
    sleep 30m
done

This uses xwininfo to grab all windows in the display, then grep and cut to get the IDs of the ones I’m interested in, and pass those to import to grab them.

Quite silly really. If I have time I’ll be writing some code to just read numbers from JMX and log them to a file.