Richi's blog

Category: Software

  • Convert news web page into rss feed

    At the company I work (BORM), we have an internal web page with the company news. We’re required to log in and check every once in a while.

    Now to get notified automatically, wehen some news are to be discovered, I hacked together a PHP script that logs in, downloads and parses the news. It then serves an rss xml file to my feed reader.

    In the past I didn’t do a lot of PHP scripting. Only editing some bits and pieces. So this is my biggest endeavor to PHP.

    Tested with liferea and BeyondPod.

    I won’t tell you where the script can be accessed, as the company news requires login. But the script itself is here:

    (more…)

  • Google Body Browser

    I knew google can read my mind.

    For some time now I was looking for something like GoogleEarth for human anatomy. I even thought about asking Google to make something like that.

    Now I learned they did just that. They even did it as a showcase for WebGL which is part of the upcoming HTML5 standard.

    Have a look at http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/

    You will need a browser with WebGL support. At the moment the beta versions of Firefox and Chrome are known to work well.

  • My first Android App

    Yesterday, my first Android App hit the Market. Just search for flightpred and you should find it. It should run on any device running Android 1.5 and above. The App doesn’t do a lot so far. Essentially, it downloads an xml file from the flightpred server and displays the predictions for how many kilometers it thinks are possible to fly in the next three days in some flying sites on the small screen. Later I also want to add a GoogleMapsView with the circles like on the flightpred website.

    I used to develop some small projects and my diploma work in Java some ten years ago. Since then the language progressed noticeably. I especially like the templatized containers. Back in the days, the containers were not type safe and I always had to cast when accessing elements. Also, the lambda’s look good.