by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 16, 2004 | Usefull Things
My recent investigation into localised news feeds missed out on Topix.net, it looks like a very high quality source for localised news also providing RSS feeds. This was mentioned on Lockergnome today
To ensure proper placement of each story, the Topix.net categorization process is multi-faceted. For each story reviewed, the content of the story is geo-coded to determine where the event took place and/or the location of those involved in the story. It is then further categorized as to the subject matter involved. Once this categorization process has run, the story is then placed on the appropriate web-page(s). For instance, should a news source release a story about a speech Warren Buffet gives in San Jose, CA, our crawlers will read that story and then properly categorize it. As a result, the story will be available to users who access the San Jose, CA Topix.net page, as well those who access our Berkshire Hathaway page, and, depending on the magnitude of the story, perhaps the business page as well.
Sample pages: South Africa 
and Sci/Tech .
So far it looks good, no ads etc, looks like I found my new favorite world news provider.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 15, 2004 | Usefull Things
Noticed this on the Slashdot front page – a great little site that hosts a database of community style logins to online newspaper sites.
BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).
You just type in the URL for the site you require a login for and it shows it if they have one in their DB, else you can add it. Check it out there is even a Firefox plugin that I must still give a try.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 14, 2004 | Code
A while ago I was again frustrated by the limitations in FreeBSD ports. I did a few portupgrade’s on some software only to discover later on that I did not specify the same environment variables as last time I did it, the result was a bunch of badly behaving ports.
After some discussion on IRC we all agreed it would be pretty simply to just store a per-directory environment somewhere. I mentioned this to Neil who pointed me at penv.
penv is a utility which helps manage persistent per-directory environment settings. In other words, it saves you the trouble of setting or specifying the same environment variables over and over again when executing programs in a specific directory. The main reason for the initial development of penv was its use with the FreeBSD Ports Collection , but it may be used for other day-to-day tasks, too.
While this sounds very nice, it has some issues, if you install port a which required port b something has to run penv when building port b else it won’t work. The penv author has a patch to make which works very nice but is a bit drastic to my liking.
Some reading of the portupgrade man page got me to the -M command line option which the man page is something to prepend to the commandline of make. Did not sound right at the beginning but eventually this turned out to be just the ticket.
In my /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf file I put the following:
PORTUPGRADE_ARGS = ENV[‘PORTUPGRADE’] || ‘-M penv’
and now for each port that I have specific build requirements I simply do:
# cd /usr/ports/net/centericq/
# penv -c mkdir
# penv -S WITH_MSN=1
# penv -L
WITH_MSN=1
And any further portinstall or portupgrade operations on the centericq port will always build it with MSN support.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 13, 2004 | Usefull Things
While looking for a replacement for the dodgy moreover.com RSS feeds I came across http://www.local-news.net/ a nifty site that provides web based and RSS based news feeds based on a large database of syndicated content.
It is a frontend to Any RSS that provides complete term based search on their database while local-news.net will use some kind of location aware lookup to find out where you are and then show the news nearest to you based on your IP address, you can also search and browse for other locations if its not 100% accurate. Will try this for a while and see how it works.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 13, 2004 | Front Page
moreover.com has RSS feeds that is based on searches through their big database of syndicated content, I have been reading their London News feed for ages but they have recently started introducing ads into their feeds. I do not have a problem with ads in RSS feeds but I think people need to think how they do it a bit more.
The moreover feeds insert the ad into the feed with a time stamp of the request time. So each time you load the feed you get a new news item for the ad. My RSS aggregator now has about 50 entries advertising travel to Ibiza. This is very annoying and I am forced to unsubscribe from this feed now, I wonder how long it is going to be before aggregators start supporting filtering duplicate entries or entries matching filter strings.
