RSS feeds (and their twin brothers Atom) are ubiquitous over the internet making it possible to easily get a summary of the latest publications of a given website.

Interestingly a huge amount of websites produce this kind of feeds (most blogs obviously but also sites like  twitter[en]) and from this point of view the RSS format is quite lively.

But on the consumer side, I’m pretty  disappointed with the “offer” in terms of RSS readers. Over the time I’ve tested several well-known desktop readers (liferea, rssowl, thunderbird…) and most of then ended up synchronizing with Google Reader. This one has consequently come to be my main newsreader and it appears to me as clearly dominating the world of internet based newsreader. However such a predominance is not that much a good sign¹.

There’s a lot of thing I like in Google Reader and especially its good user experience (the clean UI, the key bindings, the reactivity), but it still doesn’t help me to find the interesting bits in the hundreds of posts that fall everyday down the feed².

Hence the idea to look for alternative solution and maybe libraries and components to build my own personal news reader.

Some open source and pythonic components found on the net:

• Atomisator by Tarek Ziadé: the good idea is here: use natural language processing toolkits to triage the articles³
• pyf (on bitbucket) offers a framework for dataflow programming, also with a re-implementation of Yahoo Pipes‘ UI.  What’s more the site looks nice with a lot of docs that I’d like to dive in to get some more details.
• pypes (on bitbucket) apparently does the same as pyf. The code’s structure and the code samples look a bit more understandable to me, but the whole thing requires a specific implementation of Python (stackless), too bad ?
• pipe2py⁴ (on github) translate Yahoo Pipes instances into Python code and could have been of great use to me during my previous experiments with feeds.

Given all these components (and I’ve only searched for Python ones) I wonder why we don’t have better news reading solutions :)

All the more if we add to that the good advice from Dave Winer, one of the founding fathers of this “feed system”:

• The RSS community wakes up with 2 recommendations: make the subscription easier with a centralised “yellow pages” of RSS feeds and enable notifications into RSS (making them work in “push” mode as well as in “pull”)
• RSS is supposed to be really simple : defining that the RSS reader of the future should be twitter-like

I mostly agree with all that though not 100% with the last point. For my use case, one of the interest of the news reader is not to miss any publication of a given selection of website, even though for other sources of information (high volume of articles, among which a lot of  “noise”) I wouldn’t mind missing (more than) a few. Today both categories are shown and processed in the same way by the readers I know and that’s maybe a place where some amelioration could sought (and, no, I won’t create two separate google accounts :) ).

1. a quick glimpse at HackerNews shows that people are regularly trying to reinvent the newsreader service so there is hope I guess
2. Even worse it seems to be designed to recommend me more subscriptions, argh !
3. a good idea from 2008…
4. if you look long enough you’ll realize that my current post looks like a great exercise of plagiarism of one of the comments

Apparently I’m not the only one to have suffered from this and everyting comes from a security hole in zenphoto (that I use to manage my photo gallery).

The bright side of things:

• it’s a good incentive to think a bit more about the security of my website and its data
• it’s a good reminder to suscribe to the right rss feed for zenphoto (the former has suddently changed, without me paying attention)
• it’s a good criteria to clean-up useless plugins (goodbye wp-security-scan that brillantly failed to detect anything)
• it’s a good time to thank Dreamhost‘s team that answered my question pretty quickly
• it’s the perfect occasion for you, dear visitors, to clean up your browser’s cookies (because the aim of the exploit is not clear, but visitor’s cookies clearly seemed to be involved).

The aim of this project is to trace back the scientific lineage of “all” mathematicians throughout history. The main link considered is the “student – advisor” relationship, though sometimes looser relations are taken into account like “student – professor” (for mere lectures or mail correspondence, even when a PhD or a specific degree is not at stake) or even brotherhood (as for the Bernoulli brothers — Jacob and Johann -  who actually worked hand in hand during their studies)

Here, I tried to follow my scientific legacy starting with my PhD advisor Dominque Jeulin, his own advisor Jean Serra, himself having had Georges Matheron as advisor, and so on…

Mathematical lineage (click on image to get the full version)

Lévy, Hermite, Chasles, Poisson, Laplace, Lagrange, Euler… not so bad :) . On the  generated tree, I stopped at the Bernoulli brothers but happily a big part of this tree is common with John D. Cook’s which goes further back, notably passing by Erasmus and Mersenne.

Along with the links  also displayed the corresponding years and countries to get a grasp of what kind journey into time and space the whole thing amounted to. The “looser links” are also represented with dashed arrows and a “~” prefixed to the year.

Interestingly, this kind of genealogical info is also available for other scientific domain for instance on academictree.org

 Do it yourself !

For those who would like to do the same:

• the Python script generating the full graph (in SVG) taking a “simple” text file as input
• the text file with my genealogical data that gives an idea of the format expected by the script¹

1. and yes the data was collected by hand, which is probably one of the most interesting part of the experiment with all the wikipedia checking that curiosity requires along the way

No matter how much we are aware of this…

The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim. — Honoré de Balzac, Traité des excitants modernes (1838), translated by Robert Onopa)

Via “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee” but the original version is here[fr obviously].

So I guess that’s a “thanks” to my family for offering me this wonderful expresso machine…

And so, the episode[fr] describes the ensuing phenomenon of cognitive dissonance among the UFO believers.

So far, so good, but nothing related to markets !

However, I’ve just read a very interesting analysis on the current state of finances in which, one paragraph describes the “cognitive chaos” in which the financial and public autorities are in. Pointing out at the fact that they’ve recently finely observed that budget restrictions was not doing any good to any economy (and that they increase a country’s economic problem by jeopardizing its growth) and yet they keep on firmly advising countries  to stick to policies fostering economic austerity.

The article is in french but still available there: Le commencement de la fin[fr] by Frédéric Lordon

So, maybe I’m just tired but somehow reading the later immediately reminded me of the former and the cognitive dissonance of UFO believers…

By conviction and also because it’s just common sense IMHO,  I refrain from storing too much content (text, photo, code) directly into sites like Facebook (and as some would say “corporate silos”) that tend to consider their user’s data as their own a bit too easily.

More precisely, the best way to store ones data remains one’s own computer (with a tad of backup that is) and that’s the main way I store my photos and code.

For data a bit more “endemic” to the Internet (blog posts and selection of photos to be shown), I’m using “free” services built on free software and using open protocols that make it easier to connect several of them together. In this matter, WordPress, zenPhoto and identi.ca are doing a fairly good job for me.

Eventually for very specific cases I’m going through proprietary services like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.

The aim

Well, the aim is quite simple at first sight: make it so that the new posts and photos published on my blog or on identi.ca end up displayed on my Facebook wall.

It should be “simple” since all the required technology exists, is free and utterly widespread with Internet and it HTTP protocol on one hand and on the other hand the RSS feed ubiquitous over the web and allowing tons of applications to “keep in touch” with the new content appearing on so many websites (new post, new photo etc).

The failure

Some time ago, Facebook offered to possibility to plug in several RSS feeds whose content would appear on one’s wall. It worked ok, and well enough to make a blog post about this pointless anyway. Since then, they limited the number of feeds that could be plugged to just one, which means that one cannot publish content from several sources and has to chose which one will get on facebook (either photos, blog posts, or dents/tweets). The most annoying thing being that even with only one feed the thing just didn’t seem to work properly.

So the message was clear: if you want to do such a thing, use a third party application. And I actually tried a renowned one supposed to do exactly what I needed  (twitterfeed) but that, despite having several interesting options to filter the feeds’ content etc, appeared to be nearly as bad at readeing feeds as facebook.

The solution

I eventually found another application that did exactly what I asked it to (at least so far): RSS Graffiti. This application transcribes the content of several feeds onto a facebook wall. Functionality wise that’s about all there is but its exactly what I need and above all: it works !

Going a little bit further…

For a little more refinements and to play a little with the feeds’ content (modifying the titles and filter some articles), it’s possible to use Yahoo Pipes: a very impressive tool which is also quite fun to use.

For those that intend to try, be aware that there is a drawback with using Yahoo pipes with an application like RSS Graffiti (the same would happen with twitterfeed and facebook): Yahoo sets a limit to the number of connection coming from a given IP, and as soon as too many people plug RSS Graffiti on their Yahoo pipes, Yahoo blocks (some of) the connections from RSS Graffiti. Result: RSS Gaffiti is unusable when plugged directly on Yahoo Pipe…

Happily a solution exists but then it becomes a little more hackish, even if there nothing there to impress anybody that has already played with a linux server for instance. What’s required is a server serving web pages and where you can set a cron job running wget to fetch the feed from yahoo pipes and save it in a directory accessible from the web. It’s the URL of the copied rss file that must be given to RSS Graffiti for the whole thing to work. Also note that one must be sure that the copied rss file is deleted before wget goes looking for another copy¹.

Update: Apparently the rss file generated by Yahoo Pipes does not declares its encoding in the xml header (the first line reads <?xml version=”1.0″?> ) but when several feeds, mostly in UTF-8, are joined into a single pipe and when somehow among all the content some non-utf-8 character appears this can cause some interpretation problems on some services (for instance accentuated letters are displayed as “weird” characters). A way to avoid these problems is to make sure that the UTF-8 encoding is explicitly declared, which can be done with a little play of echo and tails, so that the command would become:

rm machin_no_encoding.rss \
&& wget yahoo_pipe_url\&_render=rss -O machin_no_encoding.rss \
&& echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>" > machin.rss \
&& tail -n +2 machin_no_encoding.rss >> machin.rss

1. so the cron job is more like ‘rm foo.rss && wget yahoo_pipe_url -O foo.rss’

Much has been said on facebook’s like button and privacy, since its release nearly one year ago (release comments on TechCrunch in april 2010). It’s now just about everwhere and somehow getting on my nerve.

Facebook is everywhere !

With all the traking ability of the ‘like’ button and the spreading comment system it’s now as if there was no way to go away from facebook, while on the web.

It so simple to disconnect, or is it ?

There is however a simple way, apart from deleting one’s facebook profile, which is to carefully disconnect each time one want to “browse away” from facebook, and reconnect only when in need to see what’s happening there.

Ok, that’s tedious, but that’s where Mozilla’s clever Prism app comes in. It make it very handy to handle several different browsing session as if they were several different application.

The web through a prism

So, I’ve started to use it a few weeks ago and defined a prism “app” for facebook only, while doing most of my usual browsing in my main browser. Less oppressing and quite handy, since the “separate app” stuff is the exact same principle as many smartphone application that just send you to a specific website to do your stuff (and theirs).

Now, facebook is not the only one from which I feel like a little protection is needed since google, with its “google analytics” being used a bit everywhere on the net too can also track the users of any google app. Not even mentioning their very own “+1″ button.

As a conclusion let’s keep in mind that the prism thingy will not make us anonymous on the net nor will it fully preserve our privacy, since cookies and IP address are still good ways to track somebody. However, I don’t feel a urge to go any further in paranoia :) and protecting mysef from those companies to which I have given many personal info, from trying to get even more without my consent is already a good step I guess.

Some photos from Paris’s Chinese new year défilé:

Not a rabbit

Still not a rabbit...

Good try, it'd be best without feathers though...

:/

No need to get on your nerves, that's ok not to be rabbit, I guess...

Now that's a well known specimen...

I see you...

No, not you !

Yes, here you are...

No not you, *sigh*

GOTCHA !

Ok with all this fun, let’s hope for a…

Happy New Year !