RasterWeb!

I wrote a simple perl wrapper for my md5sum differ idea, and it does work well, but it’s slow, mainly due to the fact it’s checking large files across the network. Not much I can do about that right now, but it’s a start…

Long ago I had a pretty simple perl script that you would point at a url, and it would spider the site and give you an outline. The output was something like this:

• http://example.com/
• http://example.com/about/
• http://example.com/about/foo.html
• http://example.com/contact/
• http://example.com/help/
• http://example.com/help/fee.html

I can’t find that code anywhere. Does anyone have something quick-n-dirty that might work? Let me know…

Here’s my problem: I’ve got this application that deals with loading images, and no one thought to save any useful metadata when loading an image, they just save the name of the image, so on occasion an image will get loaded again after it’s been loaded. This might be fine because the image might have been edited in some way, but if it didn’t change we waste time loading it again. What to do? I suppose the right way would be to actually save the proper metadata for the image, but my short term solution might be this: use md5sum to check the already loaded image, and the image waiting to be loaded, if they are the same, don’t load it, just discard it. Do you see any problems with this idea? (In theory the md5sum should give a fingerprint of the file, and it should be unique, so if that changes, then the images changes.) I won’t be able to do it on the fly, as they are large files, and md5sum is not fast enough, but I can preprocess the list of files waiting to be loaded…

Just off the top of my head, I think the metadata I would save is:

• name
• width
• height
• date created
• date modified
• file size
• md5sum

I’m sure there’s other bits as well, but that’s my quick list.

When using Mozilla for mail, I can choose between reading a message as Original HTML, Simple HTML, or Plain Text. I tend to choose Plant Text. This allows me to see all message using a consistent font, which the choice of face and size that I selected, instead of say, 72 point bright pink Helvetica. This is a feature. This feature appears missing from the version of Thunderbird I’m running… Did I miss it? Is it not there? Please tell me where it is, or if it’s not there, put it in. It’s a good feature. (Looks like there’s probably a workaround.)

Oh, I’ve also put Thunderbird as well as Firebird onto my old Wallstreet PowerBook, replacing Mozilla, at least for a little while, as I test them out a bit more. Thundebird has some odd bug where 85% of the menu bar is rendered in Japanese-like characters, but it still works just fine. (Perhaps the next build will fix that issue.) As I’ve said before, both of these applications are very good, and I’m sure they’ll only get better.