tobias.kochs-online.net

Like I promised to my brother, I started working on a news feed for the marketplace of jzr-threewheeler.de. Contrary to my expectations the problem in this case was not so much the caching mechanism I had to implement. I had done that before and could reuse most of the code. What took me so long was the fact, that the marketplace page seems to be created and updated manually – resulting in an chaotic structure of both content and HTML. While containing over 181 000 lines only about 1 200 of them contain more than whitespaces actually. The content doesn’t follow any strict rule either. All this made it quite complex to write a good parser to process the information into a nice (and valid) feed.

Well, I managed to get it done and here it is:
http://threewheeler.feeds.kochs-online.net/jzr-threewheeler.xml

I hadn’t finished the work on this, when Adrian came up with the next task for me. He wanted to have a news feed to follow all recent posts at simsonforum.de. This was a way easier job to accomplish. Message board software does follow strict rules when compiling the pages so parsing them is quite easy because you don’t need to take all kinds of exceptions into account. So a set of simple rules is sufficient to process all the data. Using the board’s search function my PHP script downloads a list of all recently changed threads and generates the feed based on it. Because this produces quite heavy load on both involved servers (the forum’s and mine) results are cached for at least an hour before an update is made – another script using the caching code.

You can find this feed here:
http://simsonforum.feeds.kochs-online.net/simsonforum.xml

At the end of the “Jericho” episode “Oversight” (S02E04) I just discovered the beautifully sad song “9 Crimes” by Damien Rice feat. Lisa Hannigan. Please cry now.

Again I have written a parser to create a RSS feed. Adrian told me about how much he’d appreciate a feed to follow all newly advertised Lomax kit cars over at the second-hand market of lomax-club.de. As is so often the case with pre-web-2.0 sites there wasn’t a feed available, so I sat down and made one. Et voilà - there it is: http://lomax.feeds.kochs-online.net/lomax.xml

I tried to make it as compliant as possible, but lacking most of the sellers/buyers e-mail addresses and being reluctant to publish mine to all those spambots out there, the feed isn’t completely valid. Maybe I’ll come up with a solution to that problem someday.

An optional “items=” URI query string may be used to define the maximum number of feed entries to be generated.

Just a minute ago DPD rang at the door to deliver a package. I had to sign for it and the guy told me to do it legible. Now that’s interesting. How should I sign something with my own signature trying to make it as legible as possible at the same time? Couldn’t everybody do that?

Being a longtime fan of Sarah Kuttner, I was happy to hear she’s producing a new little show these days. The announcement of “Kuttners Kleinanzeigen” was some weeks ago and I almost forgot until yesterday evening, so I checked her site to see the exact air dates of her show. Being there I visited the news section and thought about reading it more regularly. So I wanted to add the news feed to my FeedReader, but I had to discover there was no feed available.

Well, now there is. I wrote a little parser that converts all news entries into a nice, (almost) well-formed RSS 2.0 feed. You can find it under http://kuttner.feeds.kochs-online.net/kuttner.xml. Using the optional query string “items=” you can specify how many of the latest news items the feed should contain. Default is 10.

Looking for some CD-RWs I could use with my parents’ aged computer, I stumbled across a little-known detail of CD-RWs: The discs available on the market are separated into different speed classes. So far, so boring, but the important thing to know is, higher class CD-RWs are not backwards compatible to lower class discs. This means you cannot burn a 12x-ultra-speed disc using a 4x-normal-speed recorder!

Speed classes are:

• “Normal Speed”/”Low Speed”/”Multi Speed”: 1-4x
• “High Speed”: 4-10x or 4-12x
• “Ultra Speed”: 10-24x
• “Ultra Speed+”: 16-32x

My parents’ Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32A (PX-W8432T) is a 4x CD-RW recorder and is classified as a “normal speed” device. The attempt to write a “high speed” (or faster) disc only produces ATAPI error code 052700 (”write protected”) and fails.

So, if you plan to use that old CD-RW recorder of yours again, start looking for the correct discs. These aren’t in production for quite some time now and begin to get rare. I managed to find some at eBay.