Technical Pickles

I was recently talking to a friend about writing to screen-scraping tool for wikipedia.

My first two thoughts:

1. Scraping can be problematic at best
   • Dealing with nasty, nasty markup
   • Prone to change
2. There has to be a better way
   • Preferably someone else has already done the legwork

After some digging, I uncovered the following bits:

• Wikipedia Database Download: You can get it as XML or SQL, with various degrees of details (ie all revisions, all languages, with comments, etc)
• MediaWiki API: Web service for various tasks (mostly just searching at the moment). Can get results in many formats, including XML, YAML, and JSON
• Ruby client for Wikipedia API: A Ruby wrapper in its infancy

The new API is very new, so your mileage may vary.

Update:

Rob Cakebread pointed me at a couple more resources:

• DBpedia a project to extract semantic information out of wikipedia and make it available on the web
• Linking Open Data dataset cloud shows how DBpedia fits into the Linking Open Data project

Git seems to be getting a lot more attention lately. I started using it here and there, and I'm pretty enamored with it so far. Here are some links to get you started.

• Peepcode's Git screencast: I bought a 10-pack of peepcode screencasts several months ago. Definitely worth it. This one in particular is very informative and gives you a good walkthrough of doing your day-to-day type tasks.
• Using Git to Manage and Deploy your Rails Apps (screencast)
• Setting up a new remote Git repository
• Hosting Git repositories the easy and secure way: Gives a walkthrough of managing repositories using gitosis
• Sharing Git repository via OS X's built in web sharing: For when you want to ad hocly host repositories, like if you're at a hackfest, for example.

Today, it was my first time being involved with the interview process. Being the go-getter that I am, I of course tried to do a bit of research on the interwebs. Here is what I found:

• Does specific technology knowledge matter when recruiting? My sources say no.
• A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality You know what they say, 5 rock star programmers can outperform a hundred medicore ones. So how do you get those 5 top programmers?
• Effective Technology Teams: Rule #1, No Chumps Covers some heurestics and other techniques for shifting through the medicore developers.
• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0) More of the same.

Here's you latest dose of link action. I have been told that del.icio.us and other services provide a handy way of doing these kind of things in an automated fashion (Thanks Donnie!). I don't really dig that, as a) I'm not sure it will integrate with my blog easily and b) I always cringe when I see other people's daily del.icio.us links. They just feel too impersonal, and I think you deserve better than that.

Anyways, today's links are looking pretty Rails heavy.

• So, You Want Your Own Counter, Huh? From time to time, I find myself remembering some of the fads of yesteryear. Blink tags, Java applets, Guest Books, Counters. An article over at Err the Blog takes the idea of a counter, and redoes it in a Rails-y, Ruby-ish way.
• Quotes and Notes from DHH's RailsConf 2007 Keynote Based on some of the quotes/notes, there's a lot of great work being done to make life better in the Rails world.
• Quotes and Notes from DHH's RailsConf 2007 Keynote Came across this by way of the previous link. This is the blog of one of the core Rails developers, and among other things, Ryan posts the latest and greatest features going on in Rails edge.

I've decided to try a daily (or near daily) roundup of links I've come across. The intent, for now, is to fill in gaps between days when I don't get to write up a real post.

• Recapping UI Architectural Patterns Model View Controller is a common pattern you see in Java web frameworks. Less common is Model View Presenter, although I hear it is used in the C# world. It's an informative read to compare the two, as well as some derivatives thereof.
• Opportunity Overload These past few months, I've found myself reading a lot more blogs outside of my typical technical fare. Finances, 'life hacking', productivity, and so on. This post struck a chord with me, and it has me re-evaluating what I'm trying to achieve by being informed on these topics.
• Why Ruby On Rails Succeeded Rails really seems to be picking up steam nowadays. I have found myself particularly enamored with it. This post is a nice retrospective about how it got to where it is.

This format, of course, is experimental. Feel free to leave feedback on the good and the bad.