Template for Java projects

Every time I start a new java project, no matter what size, the first thing I do is go hunting through my java directories looking for one to use as a template. Over time I’ve gathered some pretty useful ant targets and settled on a fairly rational directory structure. Today I got…

MAC-address logging/blocking for linux iptables

Here’s a little script I wrote that checks incoming wireless requests for a known MAC address. I’ve been using it on my Linux gateway/router/wireless-bridge.

Update: Screenscraping HTML with TagSoup and XPath

UPDATE: Oliver Roup has published updated code that uses the builtin XPath processor in JDK 1.5

Some emails and comments on Screenscraping HTML with TagSoup and XPath alerted me to the fact that the example I gave on…

The PL2303 serial-USB adapter and Linux

A short note to fill in for something I couldn’t find via google on getting a PL2303-based serial-USB adapter to work with linux…

Recently I was trying to connect a Garmin Geko 201 GPS unit to my laptop on a 2.4 series linux kernel…

Screenscraping HTML with TagSoup and XPath

Often I find I need to pull out a bit of information from a webpage to reuse inside some code. I’ve always done this from the commandline using a combination of wget, HTML TIDY and xsltproc. Recently I’ve been doing the same thing in program code using…

A Java utility class for the Wordnet namespace

To support the work I’ve been doing with Wordnet and RDF, I wrote a utility Java class to handle URIs from the Wordnet ontology for RDF devised by Dan Brickley.

Using HTTP conditional GET in java for efficient polling

If you’re going to download a resource over HTTP from a URL more than once, there are a couple of features of HTTP you should make sure you’re using. By giving the server some metadata about what you saw when you last downloaded the…

Using OpenOffice Draw to author RDF

OpenOffice’s vector-drawing app has a very nice Visio-like ‘connector’ tool that can link objects together with lines. It’s very easy to put together labelled directed graph diagrams and have the lines re-flow as you move the nodes around. It also has a…

XML TV Listings in RDF

In preparation for a TiVoBot that I’m planning to write as a wrapper for scheduling digital WinTV recordings, I’ve been looking at TV listings data produced by tools from the XMLTV project. I started out using the XML directly and storing it using Berkeley DB XML but soon found (like most…

Dumping Geo RDF from Garmin GPS units

Having connected my GPS unit to my laptop, it was time to dump the data off into a usable RDF model.

There’s a useful RDF Interest Group Geo namespace for describing simple lat/long/alt properties of points, so using
PyGarmin I wrote some…