Yak Shaving

I hit a problem making my app that appears on the front page of someones profile update. I found a lot of people had had the same issue. Calling fb.profile.setFBML updates the profile of the widget on the users front page but only after the apps page has been visited e.g. http://apps.facebook.com/appname. This is Facebook caching the app. My cheat is once the update has been done, I call the page and then discard result to refresh the cache.

So I did the following in App Engine. This works for me testing the app locally but it needs a lot more testing and I’m certain there must be a better way but until I find it…

class FacebookUpdate(webapp.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
       fb = getFacebookConnection();
       fb.profile.setFBML('', 12345678, 'profile', '', 'mobile_profile', 'Happy Happy test 4')
       self.response.out.write('complete')
       urlfetch.fetch("http://apps.facebook.com/cassandra")

Just a personal reminder about how to get App Engine into debug mode:

def main():
  # Set the logging level in the main function
  # See the section on Requests and App Caching for information on how
  # App Engine reuses your request handlers when you specify a main function
  logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
  application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/', MainPage),
                                        ('/sign', Guestbook)],
                                       debug=True)
  webapp.util.run_wsgi_app(application)

if __name__ = '__main__':
  main()

Thought I should mark this day somehow. Its my first time being made redundant. The project I was on no longer exists therefore I`m surplus to requirements. Nothing more, just felt like making a note.

Playing with Google Gears: Geo Location Example. You will need to install Google Gears.

I`m sure this mentioned in its docs somewhere but it might handy: http://localhost:8080/_ah/admin/datastore Thats the web interface into your local datastore.

Its nasty I know but sometimes I lose sound normally after Firefox gets in a twist with a Flash video. To fix it and to check thats the problem run:

channam@tomservo:~$ sudo lsof | grep pcm
[sudo] password for channam:
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /home/channam/.gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
pulseaudi  5727    channam  mem       CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi  5727    channam   39u      CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
firefox    5917    channam  mem       REG        8,1    22052     670628 /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so

The last line above shows Firefox holding open some Alsa lib. At this point all Firefox windows are shut. We now know Firefox hasn’t closed correctly. So to make sure it dies:

channam@tomservo:~$ kill -9 5917
channam@tomservo:~$ sudo lsof | grep pcm
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /home/channam/.gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
pulseaudi  5727    channam  mem       CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi  5727    channam   39u      CHR      116,8               12971 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p

Restart Firefox and should be well again until next time…

I wrote a little ruby a while back to interpret the data from National Vulnerability Database

require 'net/http'
require 'rexml/document'

include REXML

#url = 'http://static.nvd.nist.gov/feeds/xml/cve/nvdcve-2.0-recent.xml'

# get the XML data as a string
#xml_data = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url)).body

# for download
#doc = REXML::Document.new(xml_data)

file = File.open("recent.xml")

doc = Document.new(file)

doc.elements.each('nvd/entry') do |entry|
	print entry.elements["vuln:cve-id"].text
	print " ==> "
	if entry.elements["vuln:cwe"]
		puts entry.elements["vuln:cwe"].attributes['id']
	else
		puts ""
	end
end

While bored I wrote the following python twitter bot. It gets the rss feed from uk hot deals and then tweets the deals. Its pretty basic as it just checks the top item on the list instead of doing dates and times. It uses python-twitter-0.5.

The script is run by cron currently every minute.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import twitter
import urllib
from xml.dom import minidom
import simplejson

api = twitter.Api(username='username', password='passwd')

def shorten(param):
	""" Using bit.ly to shorten the url """
	url = param
	request = "http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl="
	request += url
	request += "&login=username&apiKey=APIKEY"

	# fire off request for bit.ly
	sock = urllib.urlopen(request)
	json = sock.read()
	sock.close()

	# get the json
	json = simplejson.loads(json)
	return json['results'][url]['shortUrl']

# get the rss feed
sock = urllib.urlopen("http://www.hotukdeals.com/rss/hot")
rss = sock.read()
sock.close()  

# parse the rss into ready xml
xmldoc = minidom.parseString(rss)

# eextract our results
items = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('item')
result = items[0].getElementsByTagName('title')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
result += " " +shorten(items[0].getElementsByTagName('link')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue)

# open the temp file and read in old value
f = open('/tmp/workfile', 'w+')
existing = f.read()
existing = existing.replace('\n', '')

unicode_result = unicode(result)

# if the new value from the top of the rss feed is different tweet and record it
if unicode_result.encode('utf-8') != existing:
	unicode_string = unicode(result)
	f.write(unicode_string.encode('utf-8'))
	if len(result) > 0:
		api.PostUpdate(result)

f.close()

A little old news but fun. Add a track to your play queue using python:

        import dbus
        bus = dbus.SessionBus()
        player_queue = bus.get_object("org.bansheeproject.Banshee",
        "/org/bansheeproject/Banshee/SourceManager/PlayQueue")
        player_queue.EnqueueUri("/home/channam/Music/Jonathon Coulton/Code Monkey.mp3",True)

On the back of my App Engine bit.ly library I have created Deal Chimp. Hes a twitter bot that updates from UK Hot Deals RSS feed so that you can keep up with the bargains.