Bill Bumgarner

RSS: It isn't just for weblogs and geek pubs anymore...

Google reveals a number of interesting RSS feeds. Some that I have found (so far):

The USGS has RSS feeds for World Earthquake Activity.

Xicons has an RSS feed via which they announce new icon sets.

No mention of RSS would be complete without a pointer to Dave Winer's weblog. He has recently focused upon the pending Indecision 2004 presidential race and, in so doing, has compiled a tremendous number of related RSS resources.

BBC News has a plethora of RSS feeds ranging across many sections of their site. Look for the RSS version mark. Yahoo! News also has rss feeds.

The National Weather Service has RSS feeds for all state weather, national weather, and hurricanes.

Did you know that the US Government has an entire site devoted to XML (including RSS)?.

Update: Mark Carey has a feed of Mars rover photos Spirit Imagery also has an RSS feed of news and images from the rover. The feed does not include images, but tends to be a more complete/scientific feed than Mark's. I subscribe to both, now. Thanks to Eric for the link.

The iTunes music store now has RSS feeds!

Not only does it have RSS feeds, but you get to create personalized feeds that can have custom quantities, genres, and whether the feed is focused on New Releases, Just Added, Top Songs, Top Albums, or Features & Exclusives.

I have already received notices of new releases via my NNW iTMS subscription that I never would have seen otherwise. This could be very dangerous.

New system. New Python installation. Need readline. Now!

Because of the weblog 'refresh', this has fallen out of cache. Python's interactive interpreter supports readline style command line editing. That is, a good chunk of the basic emacs text editing/navigation commands will work at the interpreter prompt if the readline module is available. Because it is tainted by the GPL, Mac OS X does not ship with the readline library.

Building libreadline is trivial. It can be downloaded from GNU's ftp site. If you do decide to build libreadline, consider building it as a statically linked library via ./configure --disable-dynamic --enable-static. Subsequently, any applications linked against readline will not require the readline dynamic library to be preinstalled on the target system.

That is exactly how I built the readline.so module for Python. To install (this is one command):

curl -s http://www.pycs.net/bbum/2004/1/21/readline.so.gz |\
	gzip -d -c |\
	 sudo cat > /Library/Python/2.3/readline.so

The source to the module is also available. It isn't very interesting in that it just contains the readline.c module extracted from the Python 2.3.x source tree and bundled up into a standard distutils managed module.

Ahh.... readline at the Python interpreter. One more bit of sanity restored to my computing environment.

Update: Bob Ippolito pointed out that everything is included in Panther to install the readline module without preinstalling the MacPython Panther extensions. Not only that, but can be done with a one liner:

python `python -c "import pimp; print pimp.__file__"` -i readline

Shortly, it will be "google-able", making it the best solution yet.

Thanks Bob!