blog.no-panic.at

Today I discovered a service called mail2RSS which converts mails you send to a predefined adress to a RSS feed. Quite handy, I have to try if it also handles multiple newsletter subscriptions and splices them to one aggregated feed.

I guess that means I can ditch my attempts to program this particular functionality in PHP, especially since I failed miserably on decoding MIME attachements like for instance pictures. I wanted this because I needed a way to display the really funny nichtlustig.de comics (sorry only in german!) in my feedreader instead of getting them in my eMail box.
What I came up with was a PHP script that reads from a specified mailbox and then constructs a new RSS item with a link to the latest comic but I wasn’t able to get the image to display properly without just focusing on one particular message format.

Well, I’ll try mail2RSS and see if it can do everything I wanted in my app.

I’d like to present to you the latest project I worked on. It is called FeedMonsun and is an online RSS aggregator which Herbert & myself did for programming for distributed systems at our uni.

Read more about it here and feel free to test it out here.
(beware it’s is far from finished!)

Manu Cornet, french Ubuntu developer and free software supporter, startet new ways of marketing recently called PCjacking. He wants to point people to different ways of using computers and tell them that there is more on the market than just Microsoft Windows.

He walks into computer stores and throws in Linux Live CDs like Knoppix or Ubuntu booting them up and hoping that the store employees won’t recognize it. He then leaves the computers running on Linux and watches how people approach this new experience.

I think thats a pretty neat idea, which we could all try out and see how it spreads

In a recent interview with Pressetext Austria he said that he hopes many people will start to PCjack (of course without harming any computer). Manu Cornet added that he wrote an explanation on every CD so that the staff knows that they only need to reboot their computers to reset everything to the state it was before.

For everybody interested, there is even a little HOWTO on Cornet’s page.
» Wanna PCjack yourself?

…for the last time this year

update:
I returned! It was wonderful …now back to the basement with my snowboard.

This could be really bad! Be sure to disable “Open ’safe’ files after downloading” in Safari’s preferences to circumvent this security hole.

Read more from Jürgen Schmidt, editor-in-chief at heise.de.

Proof of concept provided by Heise Security.

Wow! I really gotta have this.
The Binary Bonsay has set out a competition to code a Growl plugin that notifies you of events happening at your Wordpress install. This is a great idea. I hope the guys working on it can sort out the NAT issues somehow and will deliver a working implementation.

If you wonder what Growl is:

As described on the Growl website, Growl is a global notification system for Mac OS X. Any application can send a notification to Growl, which will display an attractive message on your screen. Growl currently works with a growing number of applications.