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NWSClient 1.2 Released

Doug — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 06:53:05 +0000

NWSClient version 1.2 is now available for download. This version fixes a number of bugs, adds detailed hourly forecast data, and increases the size of the text in the app icon so that the temperature is more readable.

NWSClient Updated

Doug — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 09:14:59 +0000

I’ve released a new version of NWSClient for Blackberry. New features include a link to a Google Map (if Google Maps for Blackberry is installed), and more customization options, including the option to have the current conditions and temperature displayed as the application’s name on the home screen.

The Google Map link is helpful to see where your location is relative to the current NWS weather station.

NWSClient 1.1 Released

Doug — Sun, 31 May 2009 00:17:29 +0000

UPDATE 6/1/2009: The microscopic app icon problem has been resolved. The corrected version for Storm is v1.13.

UPDATE 6/1/2009: There’s a problem with the app icon appearing too small on Blackberry Storms.

Version 1.1 of my free Blackberry weather application includes the following upgrades and enhancements:

Current conditions are displayed as the application’s rollover icon
Links to nearest NWS radar and forecast discussions
Links to NWS alert and warning bulletins
The application no longer blocks when fetching weather
Added a user preference for the minimum font size
The location database is stored more efficiently, resulting in a smaller overall application size

This update is available for over-the-air install here.
A build for the Blackberry Storm is available here.

Scrape the Times

Doug — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:37:11 +0000

A few years ago I wrote a little Perl script called ‘timesScraper’ that grabs the top stories from the New York Times’ RSS feeds. The idea was I could use it to download local copies of the day’s news for reading on my laptop when I was away from an internet connection.

More details and the download after the jump.

The script grabs from a hard-coded list of feeds and their URLs and assembles the downloaded stories as links on an HTML index page. It grabs the “Printer friendly” version of each article so that the article text is complete and it doesn’t have to worry about images or embedded media. It requires the following Perl Modules, most of which are installed by default on Mac OS X or are easily installed using CPAN:

LWP::UserAgent
HTTP::Cookies::Netscape
XML::Simple
Getopt::Long
Encode
HTML::Entities
CGI
Pod::Usage

Since The New York Times requires a free login for some stories timesScraper looks for a Firefox cookies.txt files. If you’re not using Firefox you’ll need to specify the path to your own cookies.txt file using the -cookies option.

The other option that timesScraper takes is -wait. This value specifies the maximum number of seconds that timesScraper will wait between fetching articles. The default maximum wait is 10 seconds. TimesScraper chooses a random value somewhere in between 0 and the max wait value. This is designed to be friendly to the Times web server and also to mask the appearance of a robot grabbing pages.

Download timesScraper.

WordRecorder 1.0 released

Doug — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:20:11 +0000

WordRecorder was a program I wrote for my friend Matt to help him record hundreds of spoken names for his video e-card site. It’s a pretty specialized program and I doubt more than a handful of people out there will actually have a need for it, but the source code may be of use to people trying to figure out how to use Apple’s CoreAudio Frameworks and the Qt Interface Toolkit.

I’ll try to post more details about its design and how it works in the coming days. For now, visit the main WordRecorder page here.