Monday, February 23, 2009

Caribbean Pirate by George Patience


Caribbean Pirate by George Patience


George Patience was a naive painter working out his shed in The Ferry, Little Exuma, Bahamas. I was a visitor in The Ferry making a documentary movie on boat builder and natural marine scientist Clarence Fitzgerald. I boarded on the couch of George and Gloria's tiny bungalow for 6 months in 1969. George painted using acrylic colors.



Even in those days, The Ferry had a very narrow bridge that serviced this tiny community at the Northwest end of Little Exuma island. Zoom into the map and notice the few dwellings at the cut between the islands, about 1/3rd of the way from Forbes Hill, Great Exuma to William's Town, Little Exuma.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Walter Lawson Brigham, R.I.P.


Walter Lawson Brigham work jeep


Walter was my friend. Walter was a master craftsman, boat builder and pillar in the community of Shelter Island NY. I enjoyed sailboat racing against Walter and his son Lawson at the Shelter Island Yacht Club for many years before we worked together. In 1972, Walter was my construction partner on the first house that he ever built and the first house I ever built at 10 Chequit Avenue. This house I designed for my father, Henry Nelson Bull and his wife, Janet Scellen. There are many stories I could tell you about Walter. I recommend you ask the locals as they can tell you even better ones.

Here is a rule that Walter taught me, "Measure twice and cut once." Whenever I admire the lines of boat, Walter will be with me.

Obit: The Suffolk Times

Monday, February 09, 2009

Useful LINUX Links

Here's a few helping me now become a better LINUX administrator. In high school I used to punch IBM cards to get things going. They were my punch cards held together with a rubber band, now that's security. Where are those punch cards?

Administering your Linux system at http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=linux:admin

An A-Z Index of the Bash command line for Linux at http://www.ss64.com/bash/

Useful introduction to Linux Command at http://linuxcommand.org/index.php

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser

I like the Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser, a "XML-based RSS parser in PHP. Supports most RSS versions including Userland RSS and RSS 1.0. Supports modules and namespaces magpierss.sourceforge.net/"

I used it to parse the Hollywood-USA.mobi Showbiz News page at http://hollywood-usa.mobi/news.php

The news source is the movie industry standard The Hollywood Reporter RSS news feed.

However, note when you look at the source file of the feed itself at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thr/news that the RSS feed authors added html tags and other conten of no interest to me. So I used 'explode' in this fragment of PHP code below to trim the string:
require_once('magpie/rss_fetch.inc');
//
$url = 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news/';
$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
//
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
$title = $item['title'];
$description = $item['description'];
$pieces = explode("<", $description);
print "$title ".$pieces[0]."";

In earlier attempts I was working with 'lastRSS 0.9.1' "Simple yet powerfull [sic] PHP class to parse RSS files. by Vojtech Semecky, webmaster @ oslab . net with Latest version, features, manual and examples: http://lastrss.oslab.net/"