Tonight I finished adding delete handlers and a delete confirmation dialog to HMS. This is probably the state that the code will be in for my LFNW presentation next Saturday.

By default git on OSX wasn't colorizing its output. Two things needed to be setup - setting the color.ui to auto and setting the pager (less) to allow raw characters. Add this to ~/.gitconfig

[color]
ui = auto
[core]
pager = less -R

Presto! Nice colorized output from git!

I wasn't escaping the ship name and destination before creating the XML so a & character would make the javascript choke. Fixed now, so you should be seeing ships update.

www.guetech.org was the first domain I ever registered. This was back when domains were free and you send in an email form with your request. I used it for a UUCP connected BBS (via Eskimo North) for a short time from my apartment in the mid 90s. Since then I have mostly used it to host mirrors of the Infocom Gallery project and the Interactive Fiction Archive. I have just finished moving the data to a new server, and in addition to ftp access to the archive I am now offering http access. Due to an accident (me not making sure all my domains were setup properly) the guetech.org website has been down since last August.

Newseum archives the front pages of of over 500 newspapers from all around the world. If you know the ID of the papers you want to see you can use this simple Python program to download the jpg of the papers' front page to your local system. Edit the CITIES list to set the IDs of the papers to be grabbed.

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
    Quick Newseum Frontpage Grabber script
    Copyright 2009 by Brian C. Lane
    Imp Software
    All Rights Reserved

    Modify CITIES list below to add the city designators (as seen in the
    URLS at http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp)
"""
import urllib2
import re
import os
import urlparse

# Add more cities here
CITIES = [ "AL_AS", "AL_MA",   ]

NEWSEUM_URL="http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=%s"
NEWSEUM_IMG="http://www.newseum.org"

def fetchNewseumImage(city):
    """
    Fetch the image for a city
    """
    print "Parsing the page for %s" % (city)
    page = urllib2.urlopen(NEWSEUM_URL % city).read()

    # Quick and dirty grep for the image name
    match = re.search('<img class="tfp_lrg_img" src="(.*)" alt=', page)
    if match:
        img_url = NEWSEUM_IMG + os.path.abspath(match.group(1))
        print "Saving the image for %s" % (city)
        image = urllib2.urlopen(img_url).read()
        open(os.path.basename(match.group(1)), "wb").write(image)

def main():
    """
    Main code goes here
    """
    for city in CITIES:
        fetchNewseumImage(city)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

The source is also hosted here at github

Much to my surprise my 2 new iPhone apps were approved today. This must be a new record for the App Revew process -- according to the history the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) Countdown app started review at 11:26 AM and was approved at 15:08 (3h42m), the NASCAR Countdown version took slightly longer, from 9:23 to 16:42 (7h19m). I suppose the fact that these are dead-simple apps with only 2 views may have had something to do with the fast turn around. But with the first NASCAR race of the season only 3 days away I'm pretty happy!

Hygrosens manufactures a number of sensors for measuring temperature, humidity, light level, pressure. Their devices use a common serial data format for a wide variety of sensors, include 1-wire sensors from Dallas. This library reads the output from Hygrosens devices and passes it to a calling function as a hash. I have included an example that outputs the readings in human readable format, and another that stores the readings into a MySQL database.

I have made an iPhone version of my NASCAR Countdown Widget and submitted it to the App Store. The NASCAR Countdown app displays a countdown to the next race, the name of the race and the television network carrying the race. On the flip side all of the races for the 2010 season are listed, and tapping on one of them will go to the nascar.com website for that track.

I'm not sure what made me think of these today, but I did a couple of Google searches to see if I could track down any more of these shirts. The only one I could find is the Creep shirt. There seems to be a lack of info on them on the web, so I'm going to help fix that. Stephen King owns a couple of radio stations in Maine, one is WZON and back in the mid 80's the Stephen King newsletter had advertisements for these t-shirts. As a loyal constant reader it was my duty to buy them, and I think these were the only ones offered. I wore these in rotation with my Bloom County t-shirts all through high school. They're a little worn, but really in much better shape than some of the shirts I have from places like Cafe Press.