kstruct

I just put a python script up on google code which you can use to convert an allhomes.com.au page (like this one for all the property listings in Braddon). I’m using it with NetNewsWire’s script subscription feature, and it seems to have done exactly what I want for the last week or so.

http://code.google.com/p/allhomes-rss/

(I’m pretty new to python, so anyone who’d like to take the time to point out where I’m making life hard for myself in there is most welcome)

Looks like the iPhone developer program has gone international - I’m in Australia and just got my approval. Looks like there are now 28 countries (or at least currencies) on the list. (Actually, now I think of it, lots of those countries are in the EU and using the Euro. Hmmmmm)Time to start playing with that accelerometer…

I tried to look this up a little while ago, but couldn’t find the info anywhere obvious. Anyway, since I recently got my new one, I can confirm that the expiration date on a credit card (or at least my MasterCard one) is inclusive (i.e. 03/08 means it expires at the end of march, not the beginning).

I’ve been spending quite a bit of my time lately learning my way around a big new code base. Being able to set random breakpoints and step through the code is a godsend, but quite often, it can be tricky to quickly narrow things down to the area you’re interested in. What I realised this afternoon is that my life would be much easier if I had a debugger combined with a free text search.

In the first instance, it would be enough to just search the source lines which are being executed (and maybe break whenever there’s a match). That would let me, for example, find exactly where that extra parameter is being added to my URL without having to step through everything or grep the source code for what turns out to be a very common string.

To take it a step further, it would be really handy if it searched values of variables along the way to catch the case where the parameter name was pulled out of a config file or database).

Of course, it would probably be very difficult to implement (at least in a compiled language) in a way that has reasonable performance, but even a very slow solution would work well from what I’m currently doing. Maybe the another way of looking at the problem is that I want to search through only the code which was actually executed during a particular invocation…

Anyway, it’s probably not something I’ll be heading off trying to implement (and I imagine at some point someone will tell me you can already do it in smalltalk), but it certainly would have been handy if it had been in eclipse today.

I played with Macrovision’s InstallShield for the first time last week in my new job. Pretty impressive UI compared to InstallBuilder which I’d used previosuly. Obviously the problem is made a lot simpler by the fact that InstallShield doesn’t really work cross platform (and from my experience, Macrovision’s InstallAnywhere’s UI crashed so much it was more of a liability).

In a way though, the name find and replace change I was making would have been a bunch simpler in InstallBuilder, where the installer is pretty much configured with a big XML file (once you very quickly hit the limits of the token UI editor provided).

I guess I should try opening the InstallShield file in a text editor to see what under the hood there…

Just worked it out…You need to hold down option, then drag around one of the circles which appears (under your cursor, and in the opposite corner relate to the screen’s centre). The other moves in the opposite direction relative to the centre of the touchpad. If you hold down option and shift, you can move both circles together in the same direction (though I’m not sure what that’s for).What’s surprising is that I only now realise that you can’t pinch into a specific part of the screen (even on a real iPod touch), it always zooms into the centre.

I won an iPod touch for my 5 minute lightning talk about One-JAR at CJUG a couple of weeks ago. The interface is fantastic, and and of the guys at work has already bought one after briefly trying mine.

The guy who beat me out of first place in the talks (and then chose to take the second prize Asus Eee PC instead) is expanding his talk on Selenium for the next CJUG meeting on Wednesday March the 12th, which should be an interesting one.

I was playing with selenium to try testing a web app I work on earlier today, but ran into the following error pretty much straight away…

input [error] Unexpected Exception: message ->
  element.ownerDocument.createEventObject is not a function
...

From a bit of digging, it looks like the current version of Selenium (0.8.3 as of Jan 15, 2008) isn’t compatible with mootools.

The mootools forums have a fairly simple patch to fix the issue.

Apparently Selenium is checking for the fireEvent method, normally only available in IE, but which mootools adds to other browsers. As a result, mootools thinks it’s running in IE, and tries to call createEventObject, which really is only available in IE.

Having made it over that hurdle, selenium is looking like quite a nice tool.

Crossed my mind while chatting with a friend earlier today… How far can you browse without a keyboard. If you’ve got a browser home page with a search box, or a bookmark to Google, you could go there, copy some word on the page, paste it in, search, grab some letters from the summaries, construct words to search for.

For example, copy the word about from Google’s home page, and paste it in, then search.

Ok that page were more than enough letters to make the word kstruct and hence make my way here.

There is a linked list of numbers of length N. N is very large and you don’t know N. You have to write a function that will return k random numbers from the list. Numbers should be completely random.

This one seems pretty simple. Walk the list, generating a new random number for each entry. Keep a ‘top k’ chart of the highest random numbers, and their associated entries. When we hit the end of the list, the numbers in the chart are the required random numbers.

Anyone have better methods?