Last week I wrote a couple of tools to keep track of subversion checkins:

The Subversion Log Viewer is a master-detail list of recent subversion revisions. It’s based on the OpenLaszlo contactlist example. The nicest feature is really an afterthought: at the last moment, I added faces for authors; I think this makes projects a lot friendlier. Right now it only adds the faces to the OpenLaszlo log; let me know if you’re interested in using this for your own project, and I’ll make a public API for adding faces to a repository.

The Subversion iCalendar Gateway transcodes subversion logs into iCalendar files, that you can subscribe to with Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird. I find it useful for a projects that I want to check in on occasionally. Unlike an RSS feed, it gives you a sense of the activity level and the change frequency, at least if you’re a spatial person like me.
Both of these point at the OpenLaszlo log by default, but they’ve got a UI for putting in any subversion repository (http: or svn: protocol only), and generating a permalink for that repository.
One caveat: It takes a long time to request a complete subversion log, so the iCalendar gateway only requests the first 500 revisions the first time you (or anyone) view a given calendar, and then the next time anyone or refreshes the same calendar, it catches up to the present 500 revisions at time.
Posted: January 31st, 2006
Categories:
OpenLaszlo,
Projects,
Visualizations
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Comments:
3 Comments.

Jim Grandy wrote:
From: jgrandy
Subject: stupid Google game
Date: January 7, 2006 6:17:58 PM EST
Google for "unfortunately, yournamehere":
Lots of fun hits for "unfortunately, jim":
- unfortunately Jim’s orange dry suit made him look like a carrot
- Unfortunately Jim is no longer with us as he died of a brain tumor in 1993.
- Unfortunately, Jim did not respond. He disbelieved that it was an angel.
- Unfortunately, Jim is only one person with a limited amount of time available to
help Jane find answers to her questions.
I’ve turned this into a web page here.
I prototyped it with a screen scraper for Google, but I didn’t want to deploy a screen scraper.
Fortunately, Google has a Search API.
Unfortunately, Google’s API uses SOAP.
Fortunately, Ruby has a SOAP library.
Unfortunately, the Ruby SOAP library doesn’t work on Dreamhost.
Fortunately, the Yahoo Web Search API uses REST.
Unfortunately, Yahoo’s summaries don’t include enough right-hand context, so it’s harder to extract decent sentences from them.
Maybe I’ll go back to screen-scraping after all.
Update: Jim tells me he got the idea from Jorg Brown at Google.
Posted: January 31st, 2006
Categories:
Amusements,
Projects,
Words
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Comments:
1 Comment.

Expialidocio.us is a tool for visualizing your del.icio.us posting activity. It displays a graph of your posting activity over time. You can select a timespan from this graph, and it will show you a tag cloud weighted by just those dates.
Expialidocio.us was inspired by a posting by Jon Udell. Coming full circle, Udell has posted since posted about this application. Since then, I’ve published the sources.
Posted: January 8th, 2006
Categories:
OpenLaszlo,
Projects,
Visualizations
Tags:
Comments:
1 Comment.
openlaszlo.rb is a Ruby library for compiling OpenLaszlo programs. I use it to build this, this, and the toolbar here. This article describes how to use it with Rake.
Update: This is now available as a gem. The rdocs are here.
Posted: January 5th, 2006
Categories:
Libraries,
OpenLaszlo,
Projects,
Ruby
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No Comments.