Archives page

Posts Tagged ‘rss’

Twitter – Now the machines are syndicating us

RSS recursion is not a toy

… that was syndication for the sake of it.

That’s what I said, word for word. Then a colleague pointed out that I could have twitter automatically update from my blog or Blakepics. And all hell broke loose.

I didn’t like Twitter as another way of updating my blog, or having it throw up all over my Facebook status every time I opened up my Twitter-enabled fridge. But reaching out to new audiences, and the potential to bombard mobile phone networks every time I bounce from one country to the next… Well suddenly it’s become quite cool.

And yes, I admit – I was tempted to install the application to syndicate my Xbox 360 status as well. But I’m not sure I’m ready to spam everyone that much. Yet.

“Kevin has just been killed by a bunny rabbit on Halo 3. Again”

Upgrading Fedora 8 to Fedora 9

It’s time for another Fedora upgrade. Whilst the installations aren’t necessarily getting any better – fixing them is becoming a bit faster, because the problems are pretty similar every time and these notes I’m keeping are helping.

  1. System won”t boot. Met with a grub> prompt, and no menu
    • Boot the system from the DVD again, and select “rescue an install system”.
    • ‘chroot /mnt/sysimage/’
    • “nano /boot/grub/grub.conf”
    • Change this line, “root (hd2,0)” to root “(hd0,0)”. (I’m not sure why Grub seems incapable of finding the right hard drive to boot from each time… It doesn’t change.)
    • Uncomment the line at the top #boot
  2. Cyrus imapd won”t start. Complaining of libcrypto.so.6 library missing.
    • Upgrade Cyrus – “yum upgrade -y cyrus”
    • Restart the service – ‘service cyrus-imapd restart’
  3. Rss2imap no longer posts the messages into Cyrus IMAPD
    • Difficult to place the blame on this one. One turning on Rss2imap debug mode, I see i@m getting the error ‘Message contains bare newlines’, and although Rss2imap has posted the message. It’s been discarded by Cyrus. This is actually proper RFC behaviour for Cyrus – as message’s shouldn’t contain the broken ‘\n’ character, but rather ‘\r\n’. At the same time, I also think, ‘so what?’. Either way, the Cyrus behaviour has changed, or Mail::IMAPClient modules have.
    • So the fix… Edit Rss2imap\RSS2IMAPLIB\Rss2imap.pm, and add the bold text.
       my $message = ($headers . $body);
      $message =~ s/\n/\r\n/g;
      utf8::encode ( $message );

      and
       my $folder = $this->get_real_folder_name ($this->{'last-modified-folder'});
      $body =~ s/\n/\r\n/g;
      $this->{imap}->append_string ($folder, $body);

      You’ll notice we’ve replaced all the \n line endings with the more correct \r\n. Let’s just hope we don’t have to undo that later when the problem gets resolved elsewhere 😉

Remarkably, this was the first time the wireless card started up immediately after the upgrade, perhaps things are improving after all 😉