I took a good deep look at one of the datasets I'm meant to be linking up today. Actually, it's four separate datasets, but all held within the same database. I poked around a bit, and found this:

Last night, I went to the Farnham Beerex — one of the country's longest-running beer festivals.

I went with Alan. And Alan. And Alan. Too many Alans for sanity, in fact:

 $ wget http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/asm/asm/3.1/asm-3.1.jar
 [...]
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden

 $ wget -U "Pointless arseholes" http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/asm/asm/3.1/asm-3.1.jar
 [...]
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Was there some purpose to this minor irritation?

I'm currently at this year's dev8D.

Ever since I started playing with digital TV on my computer(s) 5-6 years ago, I've been intermittently messing around with the idea of writing a video recorder. Until now, I've mostly been using a set of perl scripts I hacked together in the early days. They Worked For Me, but there were several things they didn't do well:

1. No automatic allocation/resolution of recordings to specific tuners
2. Only runs on one machine (i.e. won't handle several machines each with tuners in)
3. Hard to change recording details once set

After a project meeting today, it was suggested that I keep a note of all of the "interesting" issues that I encounter with the various data repositories I encounter on the project. So, here's the first of them.

At least two of our repositories consist of custom-built applications. One of them is a fairly large piece of PHP, backed by a MySQL database. The PHP for this repository is complex, and only understood by one person. The database schema is also fairly cryptic, and almost entirely undocumented. To make matters worse, the web user interface implemented by the PHP is actually a GUI, developed with (I think) Google Gears. The only way of querying this data store through an alternative interface is to access the database directly¹.

After some struggling over the last couple of days to sort out tag-based blog aggregator filtering in Drupal, here's how I did it, with the extra patches and sub-modules I needed to make it work.

... the sound of blog filtering through the percolator.

I've been putting together a website for my current work project, in Drupal, and wanted to aggregate items from many blogs, filtered by keyword on the item's tags. Now, Drupal's default Aggregator module doesn't do this. The News Page module seems to offer the feature, but I couldn't get it to display any blog posts, which was rather a shame. I eventually wound up with the FeedAPI modules.

I'm playing with Drupal, to see how I can aggregate RSS news items with particular tag keywords from several sources into a single place. It seems that the Drupal Aggregator module doesn't do that, but that the News Item plugin can be used to make it work.

This post is more of a test of that mechanism, than actually saying anything interesting. :)

When I agreed to review this book, through the auspices of HantsLUG, I had almost no experience of using Git. However, I'm an experienced developer, and have used several revision control systems in the past (CVS, Subversion, Monotone). I originally expected the book to be "the pro bits of Git", covering the advanced uses and leaving out the basic parts, so I was prepared to have to do a significant chunk of reading before I could get into this book. That turns out not to be the case.