The joys of screen scraped feeds

So I only noticed yesterday that apparently the most recent message in the Processing forums was on the 18th, something i simply couldn't believe... A quick sanity check of my local version quickly turned out the offending culprit wasn't actually my fault. Someone has changed the HTML of the forum to bring it a step closer to validating and correctly put all tag attributes into double quotes. Good. Only problem was this tiny change stopped the main RegExp used for the feed generation from matching anything on that page - hence we had an empty feed for the past 4 days. Now fixed again until further (lack of) notice... ;)

UPDATE: There was actually a bit more broken/changed, and you also might have to remove and then re-add the feed in order to see the new items in your reader software. I don't get quite why, but it seemed to have helped in Thunderbird...

Tags: processing.org

Processing recent posts feed fixed

just a quick note to announce a minor bug fix in the screen scraped Atom feed of the Processing discourse: the RegExp to isolate single posts was a bit dodgy and the 1st paragraph of each went AWOL on the way. no more so (at least until someone updates the HTML of that page... ;)

btw. the link to the personal profile page of the author of each post is fixed now too. thanks for your attention, please continue with your regular online activities!

On-the-fly Sparklines with JavaScript and XBM

Inspired by Jesse Andrews' idea to generate Sparklines with JavaScript, I just spent the last 3 hours writing an alternative version to use bitmaps instead of SVG as platform for the visualization. Apart from the limitation of only working in B&W, the XBM image format is highly suitable for this purpose, as the bitmap data can be manipulated with JavaScript. (btw. Wolfenstein 5K must be the by far most impressive use of this format ;)

Ess - a new sound library for Processing

Krister Olsson has just posted the first release of his new sound library Ess, making use of the JavaSound API, which is part of Java since v1.3. That is really good news as that way the library can be easily used in conjunction with other java sound libs, like the Tritonus API plugins or JLayer. It also doesn't require people to have the JSyn browser plugin (although requires the Java plugin, but that's less of a problem IMO).

The library is also a lot more feature rich than Sonia currently is, which until now has been the de-facto standard lib for using audio in Processing. Ess, on the other hand, has high-level synthesis functions for basic waveforms and various types of noise. It also has filters and analysis tools (FFT code still apparently based on my own hacks ;)

Looking forward to play around with it more, just hope Krister will release the source code too, and support the system's AudioInputStream...