Jon’s Project Blog

This is a greasemonkey script for firefox (not sure if it works with other browsers since it uses GM_openinTab). Simply put it can generate RSS feeds for old xanga entries, should you want to download them for archiving purposes for a diary perhaps, or should you want to migrate to another blogging framework. It took me around 2 hours in the wee hours of 4-6am in the morning to write.

I was trying to figure out why people were so into wordpress. It is pretty neat! Using WordPress’s rss import feature, I have demonstrated that I can import my old xanga entries for free and painlessly.

Install Greasemonkey script: Xanga2rss

Features:

• Handles Titles
• Handles Dates
• Handles Post content fairly well.

Instructions:

1. Get Firefox, Greasemonkey Firefox-Addon (If you don’t have them both).
2. Install using the above link.
3. Visit a xanga blog, and look for the “Generate XML” link on the bottom of the page near the prev,next navigation links. This will open a new tab with the RSS 2.0 feed which an assortment of blogs (including wordpress) can read and import.
4. For ease, I suggest you grab repagination, or antipagination depending on which firefox you have. Then right-click the “next” link, and goto repaginate, where you can combine shotgun amounts of pages into the current page. Go back to the first (actually never tried the other “Generate XML” links) “Generate XML” links and the resulting tab will hold all the posts.

TODO:

1. I would like to very much figure out whether or not it would be possible to import comments via rss.

A program to find the shortest walking path by road, hills, or shortcut through the Berkeley Campus. Includes cool tracking and zooming picture and GUI interface. CoWritten and planned with Tony Wu. We did this over the winter break in 2004.

Download: Binary and Source

This is a simple application that can search the online music service Ruckus and download Ruckus tracks via a GUI interface instead of a web browser. It was created mainly for the IMPORT feature which attempts to traverse the previous Rhapsody playlists and re-download the DRM-ed files. The motivation behind this is that Berkeley decided to cancel the Rhapsody 20$ a year deal and instead use Ruckus. Ruckus seems to currently have less features and a somewhat smaller subset of selection of songs, but i’ve been able to recover a good 75% using just the import feature of my music library so I’m quite satisified. (Note I made back in 2005, but the last time I tried in 2007 it did seem to still work.)

Known problems:

• Not all songs/albums/artists are downloaded: This is because of different naming conventions between rhapsody and ruckus. I’ve tried as best I can to determine the voodoo differences. Currently Ruckus seems to like to cutoff the ends of long Album names. i. e. “Space between Us – extended” becomes “Space between Us – …”. However there does not seem to be a standard number of characters that it cuts off at, so I can not programmically fix it.
• Lack of other search features: I’m lazy. Ask me for source, I’d be glad to give it to you under certain conditions.

Download:Binary

This project/combine solves the classic IQ Testing Peg Game. Of course, what my code does, is show that your IQ doesn’t need to be that high to solve the darned puzzle. The method is simple. It uses a recursive algorithm to simply try out ALL, and i mean ALL, of the possibilities. Realizing that the dumb 15 peg puzzle is symmetrical and so forth could’ve saved a lot of possibilities with a Board comparison of some sort. But I figured that 15 pegs = 13 moves or something, with a max of 4 possible moves per empty peg. At most, even with mathematical combinations, the answer should be found quite quickly by my laptop of 1.6 Ghz Intel Mobile. So in the end, it did work out, quite quickly, probably because of the symmetry and such.

Donwload: Binary and Source