False Positives » XML & RSS http://www.falsepositives.com Ian Irving's Code and Culture from Toronto Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:10:27 +0000 en hourly 1 Set xsd style dates with zulu time zone in java http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2009/06/18/set-xsd-style-dates-with-zulu-time-zone-in-java/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2009/06/18/set-xsd-style-dates-with-zulu-time-zone-in-java/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:45:32 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/?p=1897 I need to set some XML Schema Date/Time Datatypes (also called ) values for Created (being now) and Expired (one month from now) so that the result might look something like a dateTime in UTC (also known as GMT, but also being a 24 hour clock format) time by adding a “Z” (for Zulu?) behind the time

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<startdate>2002-05-30T09:30:10Z</startdate>

with much chin pulling and Google cursing (suffering so you don’t have to) I came up with this :

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import java.util.*;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
public class xsdDate {
 private static final SimpleDateFormat SDF =    
     new SimpleDateFormat( "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'" );

 public String getCreatedxsdDate () {
  GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar();
  final TimeZone utc = TimeZone.getTimeZone( "UTC" );
  SDF.setTimeZone( utc );
  final String milliformat = SDF.format( new Date() );
  final String zulu = milliformat.substring( 0, 22 ) + 'Z';
 return zulu ;
 }

 public String getExpiresxsdDate () {
  GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar();
  cal.setTime(new Date());
  cal.add(Calendar.MONTH, 1); // adjust date by one month
  final TimeZone utc = TimeZone.getTimeZone( "UTC" );
  SDF.setTimeZone( utc );
  final String milliformat = SDF.format( cal.getTime() );
  final String zulu = milliformat.substring( 0, 22 ) + 'Z';
  return zulu ;
 }
}

as an example of how to use it :

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xsdDate d = new xsdDate();    
System.out.println("CreatedxsdDate Date: " + d.getCreatedxsdDate ());
System.out.println("ExpiresxsdDate Date: " + d.getExpiresxsdDate ());

joy!

]]> http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2009/06/18/set-xsd-style-dates-with-zulu-time-zone-in-java/feed/ 0 DRM free Songbird Media Player is out of the nest with R1.0! http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2008/12/02/drm-free-songbird-media-player-is-out-of-the-nest-with-r10/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2008/12/02/drm-free-songbird-media-player-is-out-of-the-nest-with-r10/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:10:09 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2008/12/02/drm-free-songbird-media-player-is-out-of-the-nest-with-r10/ songbird in the works since 2005 has has reached a major milestone with is 1.0 release!!

What is it? A DRM (Digital Restrictions Management, or they “restrict your rights to digits”. ) free, non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible (plug-in services!!), open-source, customizable music player. That’s what!

It’s built atop XULRunner platform (also used by Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox and Thunderbird), runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms( WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac) via GStreamer the open source multimedia framework.

It’s Fast, Fun and Sweet.  is to iTunes what Firefox is to Internet Explorer.

For us developers, we can create extensions, there is also Greasemonkey add-on, and a that allows any web developers to create Javascript interfaces allowing websites and webpages being viewed from inside the Songbird client to richly integrate and interact with Songbird and the user’s media library. (a “iTunes Store” but without the Apple lock-in?)

To badly paraphrase Apocalypse Now : “I love the sound of SongBird in the morning. It’s the sound of Freedom”

linkage :techcrunch  ; Ars Technica  . I’m sure there will more to follow in the next couple of days as the rest of the net notices… ReadWriteWeb : .

]]> http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2008/12/02/drm-free-songbird-media-player-is-out-of-the-nest-with-r10/feed/ 0 Recent Code and the Culture of Code Links for Sept 5th http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/09/06/recent-code-and-the-culture-of-code-links-for-sept-5th/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/09/06/recent-code-and-the-culture-of-code-links-for-sept-5th/#comments Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:17:53 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/09/06/recent-code-and-the-culture-of-code-links-for-sept-5th/
  • With , Will Shaver has taken ’s accordion sections and added the ability to close panels, and code to keep contents hidden while page loads. Outstanding!!!
  • : Here’s another list of things that tend to confuse (me) unexperienced “prototypers”
  • – Not Bad! Code and instructions for a datepicker widget using Prototype and Scriptaculous librairies.

    • -

  • – one of the single most important things to your career is your ability to manage your boss. The relationship you have with your boss is critical to your success, and how far you will go at the company you’re at.

    • - management career

  • – According to the latest issue of Red Herrring, which features a cover story on the Canadian tech scene, the 10 hottest start-ups are

    • - Startup

  • How Not to Die (if you are a Startup) – Paul Graham eassy : If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing! Distraction is fatal to startups. Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.

    • -

  • – Or Think in Code? (Yea, I know it’s not a either or). So much Deep Thinking to do before you start coding?

    • - Code development Startup

  • IDC picks 10 best Canadian firms to watch for – 10 emerging Canadian software companies

    • - 2007 Software management

  • – Albert makes some good points about “Why” and “How” to Support Canadian Youth in Tech.

    • - Canada education Startup

  • University of Toronto Releases ePresence v4: Open Source Webconferencing – ePresence Interactive Media, developed by the University of Toronto’s Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) for the past seven years, is a Webcasting, conferencing and rich media publishing tool that just launched version 4.0. Plus, you canshare prese

    • - Toronto opensource comunication education

  • kaourantin.net: What just happened to video on the web? – Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2, codenamed Moviestar, which will support H.264 standard video as well as High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) (and Quicktime .Mov) !!

    • - web video Flash co h.264 codecs

  • – PrintAction’s 6th-annual list of Canada’s 50 Most Influential People in Graphic Communications. Congratulations!!

    • - graphics Canada Toronto demoCamp

    • - development future Software web ]]> http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/09/06/recent-code-and-the-culture-of-code-links-for-sept-5th/feed/ 0 Code is Culture Recent Links for July 13th: DRM Law & What’s next in RSS http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/07/14/code-is-culture-recent-links-for-july-13th-drm-law-whats-next-in-rss/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/07/14/code-is-culture-recent-links-for-july-13th-drm-law-whats-next-in-rss/#comments Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:45:46 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/07/14/code-is-culture-recent-links-for-july-13th-drm-law-whats-next-in-rss/

  • – looks at the back room dealing that allowed entertainment companies and electronics companies to craft public policy on digital rights management.
    • – (via the excellent Canadian StartupNorth blog) To help cut down on the noise coming in through your aggregator, the AideRSS guys have come up with what they are calling PostRank a combination of how many links, mentions and conversations there are about a particular post.

    I did I bit of hacking last year on my feed list trying to figure out a way to see significance in the list (3 feed items pointed at X and/or 4 feed items used this word or tag ). Display it as a weighted tag cloud, and then I wounder if you could then use a Bayesian type filter to show a subset of words/tags I’m most interested in . Never did anything with it, but this kind of a personal technorati trend watch would be very useful for anyone more than a handful of feeds.

    ]]>     http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/07/14/code-is-culture-recent-links-for-july-13th-drm-law-whats-next-in-rss/feed/ 0     Amazon’s Web Top Site (Alexa) web service and Ruby; Fixed and juiced! http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/03/15/amazons-web-top-site-web-service-and-ruby-fixed-and-juiced/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/03/15/amazons-web-top-site-web-service-and-ruby-fixed-and-juiced/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:10:52 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/03/15/amazons-web-top-site-web-service-and-ruby-fixed-and-juiced/ I had need to get some data from Amazon Web Services, and in particular their Alexa Top Sites web service which provides access to lists of web sites ordered by Alexa Traffic Rank.

    And, happily, they had a Query Example in Ruby! (as well as Java, Perl, PHP, and C#)

    It is a bit unclear about where to get the country code’s although I see that you can do a query to get the list using ResponseGroup=ListCountries ( I just cheated and used Alexa site to get the country code I wanted) pasted in the access key and double secret code key and fired it off…

    Only it didn’t seem to work! WTF! the error said “The URI http://awis.amazonaws.com/onca/xml is not valid” but but i didn’t change that!!! Carefully reading, and remembering to breathe, the doc’s I noticed that it refereed to the base uri as being “http://ats.amazonaws.com” rather that what was in line 27 of the topsites.rb file : “http://awis.amazonaws.com/onca/xml” , so I tried that and it worked! I guess they changed some stuff and have not updated the sample code? sloppy!

    The next issue was that the query only produces a max count of 100 and I wanted thousands! (The Alexa site already shows the top 100 by country.)

    I quickly wrote up some ruby code to figure out my start count and generate a filename for each increment which was passed to a modified aws topsite query (changed to write to a file name rather than standard output i.e. the console), and many xml files later I’m done. (now to import the mess! – which proved to be easy to do in excel 2003)

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    def loopcount(nol)
    begincount = 1
    incr = 100
    for x in 0..nol
    start = begincount + (x * incr )
    filename = “c://aws/aww_ts_” + x.to_s + “.xml”
    QueryAWS_topSite(start, incr, filename)
    end

    Maybe I will mess with it some more to create one giant xml file (return the xml object and parse out the elements I want before writing to one file?) and otherwise more elegant, but for now it is “good enough”. and geeky fun too!

    ]]>     http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/03/15/amazons-web-top-site-web-service-and-ruby-fixed-and-juiced/feed/ 0     Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Query Example in Ruby http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/02/01/amazon-web-services-developer-connection-query-example-in-ruby/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/02/01/amazon-web-services-developer-connection-query-example-in-ruby/#comments Thu, 01 Feb 2007 04:06:33 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/02/01/amazon-web-services-developer-connection-query-example-in-ruby/ Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Query Example in Ruby

    line 27 of the sample should read :
    “http://ats.amazonaws.com?” +

    not

    “http://awis.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?” +

    ]]>     http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/02/01/amazon-web-services-developer-connection-query-example-in-ruby/feed/ 0     Where Do You Think You’re Going, Mister!? http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/01/21/where-do-you-think-youre-going-mister/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/01/21/where-do-you-think-youre-going-mister/#comments Sun, 21 Jan 2007 23:06:37 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/?p=155 Where Do You Think You're Going, Mister!?

    ]]>     http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2007/01/21/where-do-you-think-youre-going-mister/feed/ 0     Adding Tags to your Blog posts, The Magic rel=”tag” http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2006/08/15/adding-tags-to-your-blog-posts/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2006/08/15/adding-tags-to-your-blog-posts/#comments Wed, 16 Aug 2006 01:36:53 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/?p=125 For those who don’t have a blogging tool that auto-magically adds tag’s the process can seem a bit bewildering, especially when there is so much to do.

    We have come a long way since , and since the Beta of Blogger.com looks to include tagging (making my Technorati and del.icio.us Tags added with GreaseMonkey for Blogger.com users obsolete) it is worth a review.

    The trick was a convention to add a attribute to the “common” hyperlink markup code too something like

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    &lt;a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag"&gt;tech&lt;/a&gt;

    . More details are on the MicroFormat Wiki under , because the secret sauce is that rel=”tag”.

    Remember that the url does not really matter! It could be , or or , or even something internal to this site like .

    The rel=”tag” is the microformat that tells any tag aware search engine that text in the anchour link is the tag lable. All tag aware search engines will eat the tagged links regardless of where its linking to. (see also Technorati’s help page on Tags)

    ]]>     http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2006/08/15/adding-tags-to-your-blog-posts/feed/ 0     A Songbird is Hatched. http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2006/02/09/a-songbird-is-hatched/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2006/02/09/a-songbird-is-hatched/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2006 13:18:13 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/?p=76 Boing Boing’s tech godess Xeni Jardin interviews ex-Winamp-er Rob Lord on and about the preview release of the SongBird media player in . Lots of interesting stuff there.

    Back in November I wrote about and what make its different.

    of course everyone going to be comparing it to the 800 pound gorilla “”

    They have come a long way, after a few delays, but it is looking good.

    The nest site is being Slashdot’ed but the Boing Boing article points to some mirrors for getting the download. I hope to post more obsevation and puns when I have a chance and/or more awake.

    Update: The is backup.

    Update: The Nest has published a road map which is promising, althought the 0.3 looks like a big and agressive list.

    The feedback from the developer forums has been good, interesting and should be useful. For example ErikStaats pitching in the start of a ITunes Playlist Reader. The only worrying issue raised is about support of Unicode & umlauts outside of menus, but its hard to see if this a “uh oh” or a “just not finished yet” problem.

    One of the possible very big ideas of Songbird is the plug-in services aspect, that would make it very flexible and dynamic. One thing already asked about is SongBird.(ing) from remote locations, i.e. connecting securely to my mp3 collection over the internet, which is already there in one form via Streampad. very useful and cool. (and will drive the copyright extremists crazy – bonus!)

    ]]>     http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2006/02/09/a-songbird-is-hatched/feed/ 0     The Songbird Media Player, built with XUL, DRM free. http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2005/11/24/the-songbird-media-player-built-with-xul/ http://www.falsepositives.com/index.php/2005/11/24/the-songbird-media-player-built-with-xul/#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2005 15:43:13 +0000 Ian http://www.falsepositives.com/?p=44 The is a desktop media player, built atop platform (also used by Mozilla Foundation’s and ), and will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Just like Firefox, it will be open to!

    A preview release is expected in December, but screenshots are now posted, which have a somewhat with improvemnts to the annoyance of some (which has it own legal problems).

    Songbird uses the (Cory’s favorite media player) Mozilla plug-in that supports a vast number of audio and video codecs, although SongBird does not (yet) allow for video play, although possible.

    Could be the best thing in (Digital Restrictions Management) free media players since Winamp 2! It could also be the first widely known application from outside the Mozilla Foundation to build on (XML User Interface Language).

    Darren Barefoot thinks Winamp + FireFox = Songbird, and is looking to give it a spin, too.

    Update: is out : many improvements including a new VLC cone, new Mac OS X wizard and extend controls dialogs, tree playlist skins2 support, HTTP interface CGI handling, linux binary codecs loader, UPnP and Bonjour service discovery, shoutcast stream forwarding, new languages …

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