by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 16, 2004 | Usefull Things
My recent investigation into localised news feeds missed out on Topix.net, it looks like a very high quality source for localised news also providing RSS feeds. This was mentioned on Lockergnome today
To ensure proper placement of each story, the Topix.net categorization process is multi-faceted. For each story reviewed, the content of the story is geo-coded to determine where the event took place and/or the location of those involved in the story. It is then further categorized as to the subject matter involved. Once this categorization process has run, the story is then placed on the appropriate web-page(s). For instance, should a news source release a story about a speech Warren Buffet gives in San Jose, CA, our crawlers will read that story and then properly categorize it. As a result, the story will be available to users who access the San Jose, CA Topix.net page, as well those who access our Berkshire Hathaway page, and, depending on the magnitude of the story, perhaps the business page as well.
Sample pages: South Africa 
and Sci/Tech .
So far it looks good, no ads etc, looks like I found my new favorite world news provider.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 15, 2004 | Usefull Things
Noticed this on the Slashdot front page – a great little site that hosts a database of community style logins to online newspaper sites.
BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).
You just type in the URL for the site you require a login for and it shows it if they have one in their DB, else you can add it. Check it out there is even a Firefox plugin that I must still give a try.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 13, 2004 | Usefull Things
While looking for a replacement for the dodgy moreover.com RSS feeds I came across http://www.local-news.net/ a nifty site that provides web based and RSS based news feeds based on a large database of syndicated content.
It is a frontend to Any RSS that provides complete term based search on their database while local-news.net will use some kind of location aware lookup to find out where you are and then show the news nearest to you based on your IP address, you can also search and browse for other locations if its not 100% accurate. Will try this for a while and see how it works.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 10, 2004 | Usefull Things
I am writing a lot of regex these days for a spam plugin I wrote and it seems I am a bit rusty or simply just blind. Remembered Barry mentioned some tool ages ago that visually test them a little bit of Googling on his site found it.
I can also recommend this as a very good tool for debugging complex regular expressions.
by R.I. Pienaar | May 11, 2004 | Usefull Things
A quick update on my experiences with allofmp3.com.
Initially when I started out using them they were being terribly slow – the ‘current users’ counter constantly sat around 2000 users so I imagine they had a bit of unexpected traffic. By the weekend of the 1st of May they were actually refusing connections and eventually on the 2nd they were up again after posting a note about maintenance.
Since then the service levels have been acceptable. The 1 Gig of mp3’s I downloaded from them were all perfect quality and their online encoding system is really nice and definitely a reason to return to them in the future. I was surprised with their music selection covering some bands that I had trouble sourcing in London. My bank statement shows a perfect deduction from them with no funny business.
A big thumbs up to them then. The question about the legality of their service still remains, The Register has some interesting things to say about it but still no-one is being clear on what this means for the consumer and if music purchased from them will be considered illegal copies of copyrighted material.
The answer is far from clear. The site is not licensed by any labels. However, currently there is an exemption under existing Russian copyright legislation (Article 39 for the aficionados) allowing phonograms to be performed publicly without the authorisation of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission. The Internet could be deemed to fall under this exemption. A similar argument can be applied to copies in the cache memory of computers.
So as IFPI Russia’s legal adviser, Vladimir Dragunov, concedes: “Because of these loopholes we don’t have much chance of succeeding if we attack these companies who are using music files on the Internet under current Russian laws.”
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 29, 2004 | Usefull Things
A lot of news sites is covering allofmp3.com‘s 1Mb / 1 US cent download service. I subscribed and spent $10 and have been happily downloading music since. They are suffering under a bit of load with lots of server busy messages, but it’s understandable given the attention they are receiving.
The story was first carried by the Sydney Morning Herald who spoke to a legal type that had the following to say:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: “There’s probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?” Even if allofmp3.com’s asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, “the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn’t liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again.”
First thing I got was the Wolfsheim that I had issues with earlier followed by some rare Einsturzende Neubauten that I am finding hard to even find in the usual basements in Camden.
The quality is great, they keep the files in WAV format on their servers and you get to choose mp3, mp4, ogg or wma and the desired bitrate. Higher bitrate = bigger files = pay more. This means you get to wait a bit for your downloads to be ready, but you can easily feed it into wget or something like that to fetch once they notify you by email its all ready for the taking.
Here’s hoping it lasts.
