RSS feeds have made our lives a lot easier by making the information come to us. Unfortunately, some sites still do not provide RSS feeds and enforce you to keep visiting them manually.

In the days before RSS people used web monitoring tools which allowed you to monitor your favourite sites and notify you of any changes that occurred on them. Some of the more advanced tools would check for changes in specific parts of the page only which was very handy for getting notified of new releases for applications that didn’t provide a mailing list. You get the point.

So, after a couple of years of not using any web monitor tools due to RSS, I felt a need for one again. I tried a few free ones and the one that cought my eye was Sitespector. It’s interface is very clean and user friendly and the app does its job very well. It displays only the changes between web page “issues” which is extremely handy and has good alerting capabilities too. The app is still very new, so there’s space for enhancements, but overall I really like it and have already added quite a few “channels”. Very useful tool, my thumbs up…

Spacilus is a new interesting application which acts as a proxy and tries to categorize Google search results in order to eliminate unwanted items (spam, scraper sites, etc).

Spacilus uses Bayesian statistics to categorize search results. Put simply, Bayesian classification looks at the joint probabilities of a search results words and phrases to belong to a certain category. For example, a search result that contains a phrase like “price comparison” will most likely belong to a category “Commercial” or “Spam” rather than to a category “Informative”.

Today I’ve been playing a little with Python Web Modules (aka PythonWeb). While deciding which database I would use for session management and other data persistance I found that PythonWeb comes with built-in support for SnakeSQL, a pure Python relational database. Of course, it supports MySQL and potentially other database engines, but I was intrigued by this little database and decided to try it out.

What was very nice to see is that the database doesn’t require any installation, its engine can be placed somewhere on the path and you can start working. It doesn’t rely on any C code, which makes it somewhat slow, but the beauty is that it will run on any platform which can be very handy for small web services and their hastle free installation on various hosts (no C compilation required and no need for setting up external databases). It comes with a simple, but fully usable interactive interpreter and it supports a surprisingly rich set of SQL features for its small footprint.

SnakeSQL is still in alpha, but so far it’s performing extremelly well. I’ll stick to it for now. If you are looking for pure Python databases, you might also want to check Gadfly.

Tags: SnakeSQL, Python, PythonWeb, Python Database

Opera is well known for its powerfull and flexible little search box. It comes with several predefined search engines, but allows you to add any other engines you want. For example, I have Yahoo!, Google, LinkaGoGo, Technorati, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia and WebMasterWorld searches defined for easy access. Even better, Opera has a feature known as Super Search. When invoked, it will perform the search on the first two defined search engines and display the results in two windows arranged side by side. Much like Yagoohoo!gle (aka Twingine.com and Jaguhugel.com) does. However, with Opera you can compare any two engines side by side, for example Yahoo and MSN, Google and AllTheWeb, etc.

So, how do you activate the super search? The safest way is to download the Opera Search.ini Editor, place your two primary search engines at positions 1 and 2 (for example, Yahoo! and Google), then add a new search named “Super, int” which you will find in the list of search engines in the Search.ini Editor. Save your changes, type in something in the Opera search box, select the Super search and enjoy!

Tags: Opera, Search

These days I’ve been thinking about implementing a new simple but extremely useful application (I won’t go into details at this stage). A couple of similar applications already exist, but they all run on Windows only and just one of them is free. The niche is very attractive for me and the demand for it is growing, so I thought I would jump in and provide an open source alternative. The application would have a fairly simple GUI in the front end and would have to run on Windows, Linux and Mac. Support for mobile platforms would be a major plus. I have loads of experience developing GUIs with Delphi, Swing and SWT, but I’ve ruled these out: Delphi is not cross platform and Java is, well, just too bulky and doesn’t provide a real native interface.

I’ve been looking at Lazarus for a while. This is a very promising open source Delphi port, built on top of FreePascal. It is already quite usable, but it doesn’t seem to currently fully support Mac OSX, so I had to rule it out. I am however thinking of porting IMAPSize to Lazarus, so I’m keeping a close watch on this one.

After considering several other “mainstream” options, I settled with wxPython, a Python wrapper around the excellent wxWidgets. This page explains the pros and cons of various toolkits and does it much better than I would. It’s a must read! The next question was whether to go for a Python or Ruby wxWidgets wrapper, since these are the languages I feel comfortable working with. I decided to go with the smart guys who’ve put a lot of thought into the whole thing, the Open Source Application Foundation and the GNU Enterprise. Apart from that, I like the RAD tool built on top of wxPython, Boa Constructor. Also, Python is more ubiquitous, which is important for an open source project.

Yesterday I started doing some work. As a wxPython/Boa newbie, I’m bound to bump into many problems. I already asked for some specific help on their forums/lists and got the right answers within a few hours - a sign of a great community. I’m quite excited, it should be a fun little project.

For a comprehensive list of GUI toolkits, check this page.

I just stumbled upon this ten year old page showing Opera in it’s very early days (version 1.0) while it was still named MultiTorg Opera, running on Windows 3.11. Their browser has greatly evolved since then, but the main goal has remained the same: “The aim was to make a lean program that works fast and supports standards without introducing proprietary extensions.“, “The user should never have to sit and wait unecessarily.“, “Lean, mean, full control“. In a world that changes so fast, it is amazing to witness someone stick to their initial ideas for so long. With a reason.

I know many Dubliners will disagree since the Porterhouse is not a classic Irish pub and is located in the touristy Temple Bar area, but it is one of the few places I keep going back to over and over again (the Mezz and Mulligans being my other two all-time Dublin favourites).

Porterhouse is actually a pub-micorbrewery (they brew their own beer) and is one of the very rare pubs in Ireland that doesn’t serve Guinness drought. They compensate this with their excellent brewed-in-house stout called simply “Plain Porter”, a “classic modern stout” as they describe it. For ale lovers there’s the “Red Porter” which is somewhat similar to London Pride, but much better . For the more courageous there’s the “Brain Blasta”, a strong beer with a magnificent taste (needless to say, it’s my favourite). For the adventureous there’s the “Oyster Stout”, brewed with fresh oysters, and for the common beer drinker there’s the “Temple Brau”, a pilsner. The Porterhouse is also one of the rare Irish pubs with a considerable selection of bottled foreign beers - Belgian, German, Czech, English, even Ukrainian, Indian and Kenyan. Once they get the “Nik” they will be perfect! Although I have to admit, they do have an empty bottle on one of the shelves on their walls.

Apart from having the best selection of beer in town, the pub features an eclectic combination of international cuisine. The restaurant sports a full menu of tasty food with a Caribbean, South American and African flavour. During late hours, after you’ve drank more than you should have, there’s a good fast food Persian restaurant just across the street (the famous Zaytoon) to absorb the excess alcohol. There is live music seven nights a week in the Porterhouse, usually blues or rock, and there are traditional Irish music sessions on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Even though the pub stretches over 4 floors, it gets very packed on weekend nights. The crowd is mostly composed of foreigners, with Spanish people being dominant, or at least the loudest (”Te digo, Españoles son los mejores!”). However, the afternoons are very relaxing and it is a great spot to have a nice chat with your buddies while enjoying a few quality pints.

So, the next time you’re in Dublin don’t miss it. Slàinte!

Tags: Porterhouse, Dublin, Pubs

To many Japanese, the key to their personality lies not in their stars but in their blood type. Speaking broadly, it is said that people with Type A Blood are calm, composed, and very level-headed and serious. People with Type B Blood are curious about and interested in everything. Type O Blood people are said to set the mood for a group and to take on the role of creating harmony among its members. People with Type AB Blood are said to have a delicate sensitivity. They are considerate of other people’s feelings and deal with them with care and caution.

In Japan, blood type has influenced peoples lives in unexpected ways. For instance, some Japanese companies have planned departments around the blood types of their workforce. This is why this myth is nowadays under attack.

Check out more on the personality classification by blood type in these articles:

JapanVisitor, Issendai

The guys at RustyBrick are performing a search engine relevancy challenge. RustyBrick decided to build a white-labeled search engine that pulled results randomly from one of the major four search engines. Everyone is invited to rate the search results and on June 1st they will publish the results of the study. You decide which search engine is best!

Oh, and here you can see some very early results. Quite a close race…

As strange as it may sound nowadays, my email experience is almost spam free. I have to thank Fastmail.FM for implementing Sieve filtering and SpamAssassin in their excellent email service, which made this possible.

However, as another level of protection I’ve been using SpamGourmet. This is a fantastic, transparent system that just loves spam. It “eats” it. Once you create an account, whenever you face one of those “Please enter your email address” in places where there’s no need for it, or the site looks suspicious, just enter an address of type someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com, where someword is a word of your choice, x is the number of email messages you want to receive at this address (for example 3) and user is your username. The first 3 messages sent to this address will be forwarded to your account, all subsequent messages will be “eaten” by spamgourmet. The whole process is transparent, which means you never ever have to visit spamgourmet again (no-brainer mode). Very elegant! Of course, you can use the advanced mode if needed which provides more flexibility, but does require some maintenance.

So, before you submit your real email to a suspicious site again, open an account with SpamGourmet and let it eat the spam before the spam eats you.

Tags: SpamGourmet, Spam