Mambo Taxi

I've given up on using LJ for my RSS feeds. I've got 88 of them, which means I sometimes don't see real people posts for pages and pages. I'm jumping to Google Reader. Google Reader will import "OPML" data, so that's how I wanted to do the transfer. This is a how-to.

(If you are hoping to read your LJ friends list directly from an RSS reader, you might instead try this exporter, which grabs the necessary data for friends- it doesn't include feeds and is beyond the scope of this how-to.)

The short version:

1) if you're handy with Perl, grab the code at the bottom of this entry, change the user name, and run the code.
1b) if you're not handy with Perl, give me a shout and I'll run it for you on my server. :)

2) Output is a list of RSS URLs. To translate these to OPML, feed them to this page. Copy and paste them into the big text box, then hit the "Create OPML" link. Seconds later, you will have an output file, which you should save to disk (the file name doesn't matter).

3) Optionally, open the file in a text editor and change the "title" parts from the URL into a sensible title for each feed. Yeah, I was too lazy to write my own OPML and fix that.

4) in Google Reader, the left-hand lower corner, choose "Manage Subscriptions". Choose "Import/Export". Browse and upload your OPML file.

Done!

So far, I like the google reader interface, and now I can actually pay attention to the real people on my list who do still post. (I appreciate y'all! I did this for yoooou!)

---
Don't bother reading the rest unless you want technical details; mostly here for google searching. Let me know if this helped anybody!

The code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $base_url = "http://da-lj.livejournal.com/profile";

my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new ( autocheck => 1 );

$m->get( $base_url );

my $profile_html = $m->content;
my @feed_lines = ($profile_html =~ /watchingfeeds_body.*/g);
my @feed_urls = ($feed_lines[0] =~ /href='(.*?)'/g);

foreach my $lj_url (@feed_urls) {
    $m->get( $lj_url );
    print $m->find_link( text => 'XML' )->url() . "\n";
}

And that's it. I'm using WWW::Mechanize, which is the bee's knees if you have to do screen-scraping in Perl.

I started off with a manual grab of my "watching" page, a word-processor search-and-replace, and was about to run a batch of 'wget's to grab the lj-feed pages when I realized it would be quicker in perl.

The biggest drawback to this method is the cost of installing WWW::Mechanize in the first place. CPAN makes it easy(ish) but it has a tonne of dependencies. ...I guess it's just one step if you're on a reasonably recent Debian/Ubuntu.

Anyhow.

Just got in from a production of Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard.

If you're local, a recommendation to go see it tomorrow or Saturday.

To start with the minuses: it felt too long by 20 minutes. It was 3 hours with a 15-minute intermission. The first act dragged, and not from the material- the pacing felt like they were sloooowwwwiiing down. The players, wisely I think, didn't try to put on English accents, but I kept having to remind myself we were in 19th Century (or modern) Derbyshire, England. The closing 20 minutes included a piece of music with a soft-pop singer in it, which totally jarred me out of believing in the time-period.

The pluses: the play itself is really good. The plot is complicated, and quite talky. Broad brush-strokes: it covers entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, fractals, whole piles of classical poetry, free will, determinism, romanticism versus classicism, love, madness...

I'm glad I read the wikipedia page beforehand, because many classical references were well above my head (the name Arcadia, for example; Thomasina the 13-year-old genius understands her Latin; and shares a moment with her tutor that is completely lost by her mother; I think there's a theme of "what exactly is going on with the tutor" that gets a bit more play with more knowledge of the references.) I hope you'll forgive me not explaining the bulk of the plot- the wikipedia page does a good job, at least.

There was a lot of dry humour. The setting is elaborate, set in the country house of a lord (or his descendants). For most of the play, scenes alternate between the 19th and 20th century. It's centered on a huge desk, where peoples' effects stay put as the stage resets flips between "then" and "now". This choice is understated in the first act; and then in the second, it feels intentionally "sloppier": a character leaves his laptop; one person pours a glass of wine in the 19th century and it is drunk by another in the 20th. There is a boy, Gus, who is mute and is played by the same actor (in the same clothes) playing Augustus, the brother of Thomasina.

For the last few scenes action is mixed with both time-periods at the same time. By the second act you get a good feeling for the characters' personalities, and seeing them around the same table, arguing in counterpoint, works well.

The actors are fairly good, for the most part. I was impressed by the woman playing Thomasina. Overall they were fairly good, but not polished- the indignant cuckolded poet and his friend the Captain felt particularly weak to me, which is a shame, because if they had been stronger, their pathos would've played a stronger counterpoint to the dry wit.

It was well-attended, at least; though I think 2/3 of the audience were highschoolers. (I watched a group of six try and decide where to sit; they acted exactly like starlings flocking, circling, settling, then taking off again to another bunch of seats. They did that, like, 4 times.) Also, the girls who were cooing after Gus (during the show! every time he smiled!) were a bit much.

I will need to close here, as it's after midnight. I think some time I would like to see this done professionally. And, possibly to seek out more Tom Stoppard plays; I've only seen "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". (And I've seen both "Brazil" and "Shakespeare in Love", though neither left me very favourably disposed).

Oh- and I think the way I wound up seeing it was neat; I ran into thingo, he invited me for tonight's show, I said I'd never heard of it, sounds great, then I discovered it was the night for the monthly Perl Mongers meeting. We were talking about it in IRC, and a small pile of folks said "actually, I'd go see that." So some of us did (and some of us bailed! Slackers! ...kidding). Go, go, coding poets!

The arts event I went to this evening was... meh.

I slept instead of going to the Cory Doctorow talk. It was a good nap.

I had a funny idea that solves a problem at work. I want to start hacking WWW::Mechanize to make a proof of concept, but roverthedog is standing at the door staring at me and her eyes are saying, "You haven't given me a walk yet."

I shouldn't write this code, anyway; I should give it to my co-op.

Really I shouldn't.

OK, Rover, time for a walk!

Three years ago, I read about 9-block quilt patterns and I turned it into a perl program and article, purely for amusement-value. And a Christmas present.

Someone else has taken the original idea and made them into a security feature for web discussion-boards to prevent spoofing. It's a one-way hash from someone's IP address into a unique picture. Quite a clever idea!

I noticed a few weeks ago when these shapes started showing up on wordpress blogs. It seems they've added it as a standard wordpress plugin option. It will take me a while before I don't do a double-take each time I see them though. :)

I'm in Chicago. First task tomorrow: replace my camera's CF card.

I bought my digital camera in 2001. One of its features was its massive storage capacity: a 340 MB hard-disk, in CF form-factor. (Man, that was a lot of storage then. And so tiny!) But progress marches on. Now my camera is old, slow, and I was wondering when I could afford to replace it.

Yesterday, I tried a regular CF card in it. Weow, it's like a whole new camera, so much faster.

Staples has a sale on CF cards. $30 gets you 1GB. That seems like progress to me.

--

emaki and I are in a hotel just next to McCormick Place. It's overlooking some odd looking statuary.

( Blade Runner? )

Also, the
( bedside table )
has both a Gideon Bible and The Teaching of Buddha. [ed: fixed titles]

Tomorrow: architecture tours.