Leap Day, When Mike Learns about RSS Readers

Well, he learns a little bit, anyway. As I understand it (and if you want to correct me, hit the email button on the right):

If you go to a page such as Syndic8.com, or random other pages, you'll see an orange button labeled "XML".

At the bottom of every Slashdot page, there is a link labeled "RSS".

Click one of these links, and most likely your browser will do something strange. Mozilla Firefox prints the message "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." and then dumps the XML source.

So what are these pages, and how do you read them? RSS (sometimes) stands for "Really Simple Syndication". As far as I can tell, it's a collection of bookmarks for a website. For example, Slashdot's RSS feed is a list of the current articles appearing on the Slashdot home page. The advantage of the RSS feed, rather than your own bookmarks, is that the page is dynamic, that is, it gives you the current Slashdot home page, not the way it looked the last time you went there and bookmarked every article. The articles don't have to come from the same page, they can be distributed throughout cyberspace.

There's more information on this at XML.com and news.yahoo.com. The later link has a bunch of RSS feeds for Yahoo's news service.

OK, that's well and good, but how do you read these things? You need something called an RSS aggregator. Many are listed in that last link.

But, since RSS is essentially a collection of (dynamic) bookmarks to web pages, why not use a web browser to read them? The Mozilla browsers don't support RSS directly, but you access feeds using an extension. (There are extensions for Mozilla itself. Use Google to find them. In Firefox, see "Tools=>Options=> Extensions."

There are several RSS extensions for Firefox. I chose the RSS Reader Panel. You install this in the usual manner, which means you're trusting someone to send you good code. Fortunately, this is in your own file space, so you can't trample on things belonging to root or another user. (Under Linux. In Windows, this isn't true, of course.) The RSS Reader Panel (RSSRP) install itself, and you restart your browser.

Next, create a bookmark folder. It doesn't matter where. I called mine, duh, "RSS Feeds". Under "Tools=>Options=>Extensions" click on "RSS Reader Panel", then on the "Options" button at the bottom. There is a menu which has a scroll button with all of your bookmarks. Highlight the RSS Feed bookmark and click "OK".

Add any XML or RSS feeds you'd like into this folder in the usual way.

Now go to "View=>Sidebar" and click on "RSS Reader Panel", or just hit "Alt-R" on the keyboard. On the left-hand side of the screen, all of your RSS bookmarks will appear in the top half of the sidebar. Click on the one you want. In the bottom half of the sidebar will be the titles currently available from that page. Click on the one you want and it will appear in the main part of the browser window on the right. Get rid of the sidebar by clicking the "X" in the upper right-hand corner.

I don't know if I'll use this all that much or not. Time will tell, I guess.

Interesting

OK, when I installed firefox (previous message) I created a new profile, ~/.phoenix/mike. However, firefox now defaults to ~/.phoenix/default. Which means that I can use the old extensions and bookmarks, and that's OK, I guess, but how do you permanently change what the system considers ``default''?

Maybe they could settle on a name?

The browser formerly known as MozillaFirebird (formerly known as Pheonix) is out with version 0.8. This time it's known as Mozilla Firefox.

Installation, at the moment, consists of undoing the tarball in the location you want the browser, in my case /usr/local/firefox, with a link $ ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox You can use your old profile, or create a new one. In view of what happened with firebird, I decided to create a new profile. This means, of course, that I have to log in again to all those websites that require registration. I did move my old bookmark file over, but I'll let the cookies and password management files build themselves up as needed.

I took my old Flash and java plugins, which work well. I have yet to install plugger. I may try mozplugger first. Maybe even mplayerplug-in.

The adblock extension got installed with no problem, but the mozex extension wasn't available. Hopefully that will be added soon.

Memory Key

I added a Fuji USB drive (aka memory stick/key), on sale this week from Best Buy (256MB for $60, after rebate & before taxes). It doesn't show up using the hwbrowser, unlike it did for johnmunsch.com (search for memory key). Nevertheless, I was able to mount it using the fstab entry that I used for the digital camera. Which means that I read the memory by hitting

mount /mnt/camera

and dismount with

umount /mnt/camera

I could change the mount point, but this isn't all that hard to remember. Conflicts will arise if I try to have both plugged in at the same time.

In other news, KU defeated the Texas Tex Salad Bar Ragers, 96-77.

Truetype fonts

Those that Microsoft used to provide, can be installed by following the directions at http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc1.html#ttf. Remember to restart the font server.

There's another Blog out there

fedora core linux installation adventure is a blog similar to this one, except it's got nice indexing, formatting, and intellegence. Also, it's not so hung up with the current UNC basketball administration.

How you know it's a fantasy

Watched "Naked Gun" again last night. Dick Vitale was one of the many sportscasters at the baseball game, along with Allen, Gowdy, Enberg, Costas, Michaels, Palmer, and I've probably missed some.

Vitale is the only one who says not a word.

More USB stuff

In theory, at least, it should be possible to set up a USB hotplug, so that when I plug my camera into the computer and turn it on its memory is automatically mounted to /mnt/camera. Windows, of course, does this, and so according to this Linux Gazette (.net) tip it can be done with Linux. Reading some of the gphoto² documentation indicates the same thing. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to work it with my camera.

Searching Google for "linux hotplug olympus digital", I found the article Olympus C-5050Zoom Digital Camera with Linux. OK, I have a C-5000, but what the heck. The article tells how to look in /proc and /var/log/messages to find out if the computer knows about the camera once it's plugged in. As we previously established, that works. Then I found the section called "Mounting the Camera by non-root users". That says all I have to do is edit /etc/fstab, adding the line: /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera vfat rw,noauto,user 1 0 I'd tried something like this before, but now I can do mount /mnt/camera

and umount /mnt/camera

and things work as the should.

Note: As noted in the above article, Never power off or disconnect the camera before unmounting the device. If you do you risk corrupting the camera file system and trashing your pictures.

The next section of the article is "Auto Mounting the Camera", which is what I wanted in the first place. It uses the autofs package, which is already installed on my computer. Of course, the first thing I'm supposed to do is delete all of the /mnt mount points, which sounds vaguely scary. I'll think about it.

System Services

Something that should be run early on, but I'm just now getting around to: $ redhat-config-services (root password required)

Lets you turn on and off daemons. I'm turning off various things I don't need, like sshd, as I don't need this machine to be an ssh server, at least not at the moment.

If a service is running, you can stop it with an icon at the top of the window. You can also prevent it from starting on the next reboot by unclicking the box next to the name of the service.

Fetch, boy

In my eternal search for methods of combatting spam-mail (not the fine product from Hormel), I have signed up for several free POP mail servers. The idea is that I get my newsletters, tips, etc., through one of these accounts, which can be easily dropped if it gets too much spam. (The despammed.com address filters out some mailling lists.)

This works, but free email popservers are somewhat quirky, and not up all of the time. My mail client, Ximian Evolution, thoughtfully informs you of this.

Every time it fails.

Sometimes, once every five minutes.

At which point it pops up a window to tell you it can't read your mail.

Did I mention the window goes on top of your current window?

Which really messes up your Tetris game.

And, as far as I know, you can't turn this feature off.

The solution, or so it would seem, is to let some other program handle these accounts, and only tell Evolution about it later. Actually, if this program feed its output to the standard /var/spool/mail directory, Evolution could read it automatically, without the regular warnings.

The classic *ix method for reading mail from assorted POP and IMAP servers is fetchmail, written by none other than Eric S. Raymond. There is a fetchmail RPM included in Fedora, so I installed that. But as sometime or other the .fetchmailrc file, which tells fetchmail where to get its mail and what to do with it, became corrupted.

OK, create a new .fetchmailrc file. The easy way of doing this is to run fetchmailconf. Unfortunately, this isn't included in the Fedora-supplied RPM. So go to the fetchmail home page and download the source RPM file, compiling it with the sudo rpmbuild method discussed previously. That works, but fetchmailconf still fails, because I didn't have the Tk GUI toolkit for TCL installed, nor the python interface for Tk. After looking around for the proper source, and by a bit of blind luck, I figured out that the python-Tk interface was in the python-tools RPM included with Fedora. So I did a

sudo yum install python-tools

which apparently installed all the proper python and tk files. At least, fetchmailconf now creates a .fetchmailrc file that doesn't make fetchmail barf.

Unfortunately, I have no real clue if it works or not, because the clunky email servers haven't gotten around to sending me any email yet.

Maybe I should ask Joe Gibbs. He can apparently fix anything, if you read the local papers.

Entering the Helix -- and getting your toe stuck in the door

The Helix Community is Real Networks attempt to build an open source content production/player for Windows, Macs, and, of course Linux. Though they have taken quite a bit of flack for past practices (which didn't appear in the Linux version), this is in a Good Thing (TM) IMHO.

So let's get the Helix "DNA" player, called hxplay, and run it. Fortunately, FedoraNEWS.ORG has an excellent article which walks you through the steps of building and installing a Helix Player RPM. You'll need to yourself up to do non-root RPM installs, which is the subject of the previous post. Everything else is quite easy.

OK, so we have the RPM installed. Now let's test it. First, do "about:plugins" in MozillaFirebird. No Helix plugins there. Go back and see that the RPM installs links in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. Go back and do the same for /usr/lib/MozillaFirebird/plugins/. While we're at it, edit /etc/pluggerrc-5.0 to remove all references to Real plugins from plugger, and delete the ~/.phoenix/pluginreg.dat file so that Firebird will generate a new one. Now "about:plugins" gives me what I want.

Go to http://service.real.com/test/ and click on one of the set programs. I'm going to look at the 512K RealVideo 9 Sample Clip. Click, tell Firebird we want to use hxplay to see the clip, and go:

The Helix player comes up, but there is also an error box, which says Unexpected error code (0x800400C9) /tmp/realvideo9_512.ram.

OK, somethings a bit fishy. Let's look around: $ cat /tmp/realvideo9_512.ram rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/rob_h_realvideo9_512.rm (with no return character at the end of the line). OK, try
$ hxplay rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/rob_h_realvideo9_512.rm That works. Try
$ hxplay http://service.real.com/learnnav/testrams/realvideo9_512.ram That works, too. But it doesn't work from the browser.

More research is obviously in order.

Non-root RPM installation

Selected users can install RPMs from their local accounts using sudo, but certain things have to be set up. See How to create rpmbuild directory on FedoraNEWS.ORG for details.

Deconstruct this

Without Slashdot, I never would have learned how literary deconstruction works. In particular, I wouldn't have been able to parse the sentence

John Kennedy was not a homosexual.

into

John Kennedy frequently wore J. Edgar Hoover's red dress. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The author does make some serious points about how things got this way, and is surprisingly supportive of deconstruction. He doesn't put it in these terms, but it appears that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") applies here with a vengeance.

English majors may want to deconstruct this page in a different manner than I have here.

Traffic Monitor

When I was running Mandrake Linux I couldn't get (meaning, didn't know how at the time) to get the FVWM window manager to work as I wanted, so I used icewm. Actually, I might still use it, if I could figure out how to set up a giant virtual desktop like FVWM has.

But I digress. One of the things I liked about icewm is that it had a network traffic meter which fit into the toolbar. This was particularly helpful because it let me know when my Linksys BEFW11S4 (ver 4) router decided that it didn't want to handle downloading that file anymore, thank you very much.

FVWM doesn't come with a traffic meter, but a quick Google search found Roland's software for Linux. Roland created a program called xnetload. It was easy to compile, though I had to hand-change the install location from the default /usr/local to my preferred /home/local location.

And then I was able to get it into FVWM's ButtonBar. After much playing around, I finally decided on an entry that looked like this: *FvwmButtons(2x2, Frame 2, Title eth0, Swallow(UseOld) "xnetload" 'Exec xnetload -nv -ni -kb eth0 -fg red -bg gray &') which monitors my ethernet port ("eth0") displays the upload and download information in graphic form only ("-nv -ni"), and logs information in kilobytes.

So thank you Roland, great software.

Seen this before dude

In the beginning, it was an army of white-armored (nice target, guys) troops all lined up in "Attack of the Clones". Then it was an army of Orcs lined up in "The Two Towers". Tonight we have an army of super-Jaffe lined bowing to Lord Annubis in Stargate SG-1's "Evolution Part II". Isn't CGI wonderful? What's next?

An army of Abe Pollins in "Michael Jordan's Worst Nightmare"?

An army of Howard Deans in "Dubya's Favorite Election"?

An army of bookies in "One Day With Pete Rose"?

An army of Sarah Jessica Parkers walking down Fifth Avenue in "Sex and the City -- The Clone Years"?

Actually, that last one isn't all that bad.