Lance's TextBox - May 2006 Entries

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lmrobins @halr9000 you cannot connect both your existing cable and the digital antenna? about 2 hours ago

lmrobins @halr9000 re digital cable - just go out and buy a digital antenna about 5 hours ago

lmrobins @jonwalz mine got darker, so it must be time to go home, right? about 21 hours ago

lmrobins RSSBus script now monitoring my blog for new posts, tweeting them. Driven by Google Reader. about 21 hours ago

lmrobins I just got the gmail themes about 23 hours ago

lmrobins trying @royosherove's Audibler about 1 day ago

lmrobins it saddens me that there are still so many 1.0 thinkers in a 2.0 world. about 1 day ago

lmrobins @StevenMurawski I can't wait! :) about 1 day ago

lmrobins Werner Vogels keynote is now. I can watch but not listen. :( about 1 day ago

lmrobins RT @rssbus: Cloud Computing Expo: 6:30 pm, Session 11, Track 2: "Flattening the Information Landscape" by RSSBus' Ralph James. about 1 day ago

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Noteworthy Stuff

Secure email adapter for Biztalk

Jay Kinker outlines the simple steps to configure the SMTP adapter in Biztalk. If you need security (SSL), consider the /n software Secure Email adapter which support secure SMTPS (as well as POPS and IMAPS for securely retrieving mails).

posted @ Thursday, May 25, 2006 7:22 AM | Feedback (0) |

Carolina Hurricanes & angry child flipping the bird

I remembered today that I saved this picture years ago because I thought it was funny. I don't know who took it, but I wish I did. For now, it is lightheartedly directed towards Buffalo Sabres fans!

posted @ Wednesday, May 24, 2006 1:40 PM | Feedback (3) |

Net neutrality discussion between nerd and politician

Politician dances, dodges, side-steps, makes bogus analogies, and misleads.
Nerd wins:

The Wall Street Journal Online invited Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and a net neutrality proponent, and former White House spokesman Mike McCurry, who heads a phone industry group, to debate the issue. Their exchange, carried out by email, is below.

Story on Wall Street Journal Online.

posted @ Wednesday, May 24, 2006 12:57 PM | Feedback (0) |

Bud Light Daredevil

Ted Ferguson, Bud Light Daredevil.

PS - Go 'Canes!

posted @ Monday, May 22, 2006 8:06 PM | Feedback (0) |

RSS subscription to my bank statement

I am subscribed to my bank statement in FeedDemon. Everytime there is a new transaction posted to my account - I get a nice new item in FeedDemon.

No, my bank doesn't offer such an RSS feed (wish they did offer an authenticated feed though, it might cut down on phishing emails too). Instead I use RSSBus which is running locally on my desktop. RSSBus comes installed with a set of Open Financial Exchange (OFX) operations, which give me information about my bank or credit card statement. So with one http://localhost URL - RSSBus connects to my bank securely, uses the OFX standards to retrieve information about my account, and pushes that information out to me as an RSS feed. Very handy.

posted @ Monday, May 22, 2006 12:19 PM | Feedback (3) |

Why I returned my Motorola RAZR

Low battery life
No vibe & ring functionality (without hacking the phone, that is).

Besides that, while I had good reception in general, I had bad reception in my home (Verizon). So, I am trying out Sprint/Nextel right now. So far, so good. I chose the LG 350 as my new phone. It was pretty cheap but has a lot of good features and a 1.3 megapixel camera. Apparently all of the Sprint/Nextel phones have vibe & ring - which makes sense (should be a standard feature, seems to me).

posted @ Monday, May 22, 2006 12:18 PM | Feedback (0) |

Poor RIAA....out 11 trillion bucks

Donny has estimated the "real" cost of piracy. :)

posted @ Friday, May 19, 2006 10:07 AM | Feedback (0) |

IMAP: Programmatically Managing the Access Control List

RFC2086 defines a set of “standard“ rights for IMAP access control lists (ACL):

l	Lookup	mailbox is visible to folder listing commands.
r	Read	mailbox can be selected, fetched, searched, and copied.
s	Keep	seen/unseen information is kept across sessions.
w	Write	flags other than seen and deleted can be stored.
i	Insert	mailbox can be appended and copied to.
p	Post	mail can be sent to the submission address for the mailbox.
c	Create	can create new sub-folders.
d	Delete	can be deleted, and messages marked as deleted can be expunged.
a	Administer	can set access permissions.

With the IMAP component in IP*Works!, you can easily set such permissions for a particular user like so:

imap1.SetMailboxACL("username", "lr");

This example gives lookup and read permissions (lr) to user "lance".

posted @ Thursday, May 18, 2006 12:51 PM | Feedback (0) |

Yet another ridiculous RIAA lawsuit

This time its against XM Satellite Radio. From Yahoo News.

Technorati tags: riaa

posted @ Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:02 AM | Feedback (0) |

RSSBus: visualize the multi-search

Yesterday I talked about using RSSBus script to easily combine multiple feeds into one. The result of the script was a single RSS feed.

RSSBus also has the ability to let me easily expose the data contained in this feed in other formats, such as plain text, HTML, ATOM, etc. We do this through RSBTemplates, which are nothing more than script (such as that in the post from yesterday) intermixed with non-script (like plain text, HTML, etc).

As an example, I will build on yesterdays script. I'll start with that exact “multi-search” script from yesterday and replace the contents of the rsb:call element with this:

<a href="[rss:link]">[rss:title]</a> <br />
[rss:description] <p /><hr />

Now instead of pushing out an item to an RSS feed, I am outputing simple HTML for each item resulting from the call. The results of the template as a whole would be an HTML document with a series of links and descriptions.

So What?

What you get now is just search results from multiple sources shown in one rss feed or html document. Big deal right? Yes.

The rsb:call in this example is just to a feedUnion operation. I could be calling operations for all kinds of tasks. Examples you say?

Check for new PayPal transactions, *make* a new PayPal transaction
Perform a database query
Consume a web service
Read from an Excel sheet
Track a FedEx or UPS package
Transfer a file over FTP or HTTP
Authenticate a user in Active Directory
Get and Set QuickBooks records
Download a bank statement from my bank
Work with Amazon S3 Buckets and Objects
Make SalesForce.com queries
etc, etc, etc!

In fact...ALL of the operations I've listed above are already ready to be used inside RSSBus right now. Using simple scripting, I can pipeline these calls to each other. One rsb:call can be nested inside another. One example that I could do in just a few lines of script:

Query Quickbooks for new customers (it can even be a *REMOTE* copy of QuickBooks!)
For each new new customer I find, send them an email, send a SalesForce.com query, and insert them into a database.
For each new customer I find, create an account for them in Active Directory

Cool huh?

posted @ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 1:54 PM | Feedback (0) |

RSSBus: A script to search 7 sources at once.

I've been using Chris Pirillo's gada.be search service a good bit since it first game out. Its really cool. While it has more to offer than just the multi-source search, I realized that the multi-source search would be really easy to implement with RSSBus. RSSBus, after all, does give me the ability to easily mesh together and manipulate feeds.

One of the service operation libraries that comes with RSSBus is called FeedOps, and one of the operations it contains is called FeedUnion. The FeedUnion operation takes RSS feeds as input, and spits back out a single RSS feed that contains all the items from the input feeds, minus any duplicates (duplicates happen to be determined by RSS guid or link elements). So I can easily implement a search of MSN, Yahoo News, Flickr, Ice Rocket, Technorati, Feedster, and Google News in just a few lines of script:

<rsb:set item="input" attr="feed1" value="http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=mix06&format=rss&FORM=ZZRE" /> 
<rsb:set item="input" attr="feed2" value="http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?ei=UTF-8&p=mix06" /> 
<rsb:set item="input" attr="feed3" value="http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=mix06&format=rss_200" /> 
<rsb:set item="input" attr="feed4" value="http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=web&q=mix06&rss=1" /> 
<rsb:set item="input" attr="feed5" value="http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/mix06" /> 
<rsb:set item="input" attr="feed6" value="http://www.feedster.com/search.php?q=mix06&sort=date&ie=UTF-8&hl=&type=rss&limit=15" /> 
<rsb:set item="input" attr="feed7" value="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=mix06&ie=UTF-8&output=rss" />

Then I call the feedUnion operation, passing the input item to it.

<rsb:call op="feedUnion" in="input">
<rsb:push />
rsb:call>

Notice the rsb:push there. For each item that results from the feedUnion operation, I just push it to the resulting RSS feed. If I wanted, I could add other logic to alter the item before pushing it.

The resulting output of this script is an RSS feed containing items from all of these sources, eliminating any with duplicate rss link elements.

posted @ Monday, May 15, 2006 8:27 AM | Feedback (2) |

Subscribed to 8104 blogs?

That's just ridiculous.

Dimitar Vesselinov is the most prolific subscriber at share.opml.org.

According to Dimitar's blog, he tracks 8101 RSS feeds, 811 Orkut communities, 490 Tribe.net groups, 547 MySpace groups, 2605 del.icio.us bookmarks and many other sources.

Yeah. Ok.

posted @ Thursday, May 11, 2006 8:54 AM | Feedback (0) |

RSSBus Screencasts

Admin Interface - Learn about the RSSBus Admin Console, how it can be used to browse and run operations and build scripts and templates.

Building Your Own RSSBus Operations - Find out how easy it is to build your own custom RSSBus operations.

posted @ Thursday, May 11, 2006 6:10 AM | Feedback (0) |

RSSBus: Create Feeds, Connect Feeds, Visualize Feeds

The RSSBus website talks about “Create, Connect, Visualize”. It goes on to explain that RSSBus lets you do three major things very easily:

Create feeds out of whatever you want, with relative ease (yes, I said whatever you want: data from QuickBooks, data from your database, Asterisk connection information, Amazon S3 buckets, Google maps, file listings, system process information, etc.)
Connect feeds to each other, and manipulate them. Pipeline them through computations or pass them to each other as input.
Visualize feeds however you like - in any format (RSS, ATOM, Html, Text, etc).

But why? To me, the biggest benefit is the ability to move my data around quickly, with a minimum of development efforts or software to buy. One of the stated goals of RSSBus is to connect every system, data, or information source of any significance as simply and easily as possible. I think a big step has been taken in that direction already. With literally just a few lines of code, I can move data around in many ways, from many sources, to many targets:

Anytime a PayPal donation gets made to my account, I can send an email, an IM, a page, an SMS message, etc.
Anytime a new file gets dropped into an FTP location, I can retrieve it, post it to my blog, upload it to an S3 bucket, etc.
Anytime a new sale gets entered into QuickBooks, I can generate a sales receipt, send an email, make a database insertion, etc.

These are just a few examples. Download RSSBus and take a look at it. Look at the operations and sample scripts. How can *you* use RSSBus?

Technorati tags: RSSBus