RasterWeb!

It has been brought to my attention that I snore. Loudly. Very loudly.

When I was a kid I did not believe it when my brother told me that I snored, so he set up the reel-to-reel tape recorder and proved it to me. The results were astounding.

I’ll be sure to follow Mr. Orchard‘s advice: If you snore, get tested for sleep apnea. Now. but in the meantime (meaning I’ve not yet made an appointment) I decided to record my snoring to experience it in all it’s glory. What else would a geek do?

The cheap little iRiver I have only records 2 hours and 15 minutes, but that’s enough to get a good taste of it. It’s been interesting looking at the waveforms, it seems that the first 30 minutes or so are pretty calm, then it gets pretty damn loud for the next 30 minutes, then tapers off just a bit after that.

What, you want to hear it? I’ve put a sample file up on archive.org that is about 19 minutes long, right at the loudest point. See: Extreme Snoring 001. (I could do a whole podcast based on snoring!) It’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license so feel free to remix it, mash it up, or use it for whatever you’d like (annoy the neighbors?) as long as you abide by the license. (If you’d like to license it under different terms, just contact me.)

Magpie RSS is a feed parser written in PHP. It’s easy to use and does what you want it to do. And as long as you’re using PHP (and PHP is working right) you’re golden.

Unfortunately, I need something just like Magpie RSS, but for JSP.

I’ve found two articles from 2003, one titled Using RSS in JSP pages and one titled RSS Utilities: A Tutorial. That first one mentions the Informa RSS Library for Java which looks interesting, but also worries me because 3 months ago their news page had this:

We started working on the next Informa, which will besides other modernisations based on Hibernate 3 and no longer depend on XDoclet. The core code is going to be refactored, expect therefore that your old database scheme will have to be upgraded.

Yeah, that makes me want to dig into it today…. sigh…

(And don’t bother looking at the RSS JSP Tag Library as that project seems to have been around for more than 2 years without releasing anything.)

Any suggestions?

I somehow came across this post titled New Feedster Site…New Features! and since Feedster has sucked for so long, figured I’d give it another try.

I try a search for "rasterweb" and get a page showing 10 results. The first is for a spamblog. The next 6 are old podcasts I did in 2004, but don’t come from my feed, but from a feed named “Med 2 Lecture Test Podcast” that appears to have stolen my feed. Next is an actual link to this site and something I wrote!. We end the page with 2 more spamblogs. Is the purpose of Feedster to show you which spamblogs are stealing your content?

If I had any doubts before, I’m pretty sure now that Feedster is dead.

Latest thing: embedthevideo.com

Background: Easily create pop-up windows with embedded video!

I know Google Maps is supposed to be the bomb-diddly when it comes to finding places, but maybe it’s just because I live in a semi-rural area with weird letter/number combos for addresses, but I’m finding that pretty often the all-knowing/all-seeing Google can’t find things for me, while the Yahoo! Maps can…

In some cases Google is like “Um, no luck, found nothing, sorry. Thanks for playing.” where Yahoo! is like “Dude, didn’t exactly find it, but this is pretty darn close and might be it!” I’m paraphrasing of course, but which would you prefer?

These are problems the big city folk probably don’t have to deal with…