Clarity’s blog

June 2003

Monthly Archive

screen scrapping in perl

Posted by Clarity on 23 Jun 2003 | Tagged as: Tech

Perl.com: Screen-scraping with WWW::Mechanize

Screen-scraping is the process of emulating an interaction with a Web site - not just downloading pages, but filling out forms, navigating around the site, and dealing with the HTML received as a result. As well as for traditional lookups of information - like the example we’ll be exploring in this article - we can use screen-scraping to enhance a Web service into doing something the designers hadn’t given us the power to do in the first place. Here’s an example:

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come to jesus, iraqis

Posted by Clarity on 15 Jun 2003 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

Daily Kos: Come to Jesus, Iraqis, well the 98 percent who aren’t Christians

During a weeklong whirlwind trip through Iraq in May, 13 evangelists delivered more than 100 New Testaments, copies of the Gospel of Luke and “Why Jesus” booklets to Iraqis and American troops.

“Most of the people we gave them to grabbed them, kissed them and hugged them,” Carl Medearis, one of the trip leaders, wrote in an e-mail he sent back home to America. “A young man I gave one to burst into tears and said over and over again, ‘My family will be SO happy when they see this.’ Another man told me he had searched for the Bible for years but didn’t know anyone who could tell him where one was. Everyone begged us to come back.”

well, you can make up your own mind about this, but frankly, it sounds quite incredible…

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ghost hunting in rotterdam

Posted by Clarity on 15 Jun 2003 | Tagged as: General

Ghost Hunting Expo

Urban Ghost Hunting

&

Psychogeography

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firebird extensions

Posted by Clarity on 15 Jun 2003 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

Firebird extensions

Firebird is built to be extended. That was one of the main design goals, growing out of the way the bloated Mozilla application suite had turned into “every feature anyone has ever thought of, with a preference to turn it off, and thirty prefs to change how it works.” Extending it, or making major changes in how it looks and acts, is surprisingly easy (for some value of easy, at least).

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impeach bush

Posted by Clarity on 15 Jun 2003 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

kuro5hin.org || “Impeach Bush” Spreads

It was one thing when Ramsey Clark called for impeachment of President Bush. He is, after all, the head of a Red/Pinko anti-war organization and we should expect anti-war leaders to start such campaigns. That was last November. When articles of impeachment were posted you knew that Liberal/Progressive website CounterPunch had joined the campaign. That was January.

Deep in the caucuses of Congress, plans were quietly drawn up by Democrats considering impeachment and things got much more serious. That was March. On the net, Democratic Party activists are pledging revenge for Clinton’s impeachment.

But when heavy-weight opinion-makers, like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, allege fraud, smart money gets off the table. In response, President Richard Nixon’s White House lawyer John Dean wrote “this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison”. That was June.

Google reports 36,800 instances of “impeach” and “Bush” compared with 30,400 for “impeach” and “Clinton”. (Sorry, GoogleFight is run out.) There are a large number of web pages are selling “Impeach Bush” bumperstickers, but…

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bhutan troubles

Posted by Clarity on 15 Jun 2003 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Fast forward into trouble

Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan’s first crime wave - murder, fraud, drug offences. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report from a country crash-landing in the 21st century

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