Udit said, “Let there be RSS”

and RSS feeds were available.

Okies it has so happened that TnP work in KGP is being done through a new TnP Website. All the notices are being posted on the website itself and one doesn’t need to go to TnP to check all the notices. Cool na. But what was uncool about the website that the notices section didn’t have RSS feed. Now how in the world can you make such a website in which the notices section doesn’t provide RSS feeds.

Since the Website has been made by a group of students, I told them to put feeds, but it seems they were busy in fixing other high priority bugs. So I decided, “Bahut ho gaya, Main bar bar site pe nahin ja sakta hoon notices check karne ke liye…. ab iske feeds create karne padenge…“.

Then a few lines of Perl code, some useful regular expressions, knowledge of how to write a Feed XML file and the presence of Arpit’s external domain made it possible. Now you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of TnP notices.

The feed is available at http://www.tnp.intinno.com/tp.xml. I don’t guarantee a 100% correct feed, but whenever you find a bug, please let me know. Also since TnP site is visible from outside Kgp, I don’t think making Feeds public violates any rules. Also right now the feed content only contains the link to the notice, as I didn’t have the tempo to parse the whole notice.

Ok if you are not sure what exactly is an RSS feed, you can read here or here.

And to subscribe to this RSS feed you will need an aggregator. This can be Google Reader, your google homepage, or you could add this feed on your Orkut page by clicking on “add stuff” link on your homepage, or you could Bloglines. Since I don’t want the dependency of Web to read my feeds I use an desktop aggregator called Liferea(thats LInux FEed REAder).

 Note – Does anybody know how to track the number subscribers of this feed???

Finally something’s right!

After a gloomy fortnight , which brought Google rejection and also the news that I won’t be allowed to sit in the campus to be held in December, things seem to have come back to track.

What man ek job nahin mila tu doosra mil jayega, kya load hain. And I am not going for apping right now. Peace hain.

But whats right?? Actually Kgp is a place where it seems to me that internet is the lifeline. To access this internet you are required to go through a proxy server. But when you don’t work on Windows at all then it becomes difficult to check the fastest proxy and change the firefox settings. Checking the proxy now and then and then actually changing the firefox settings requires a lot of clicks(read work).

Solution1: Put up a proxy changer extension in firefox. But this requires you to manually check the fastest proxy running. Also since I have a small monitor, putting up the extension takes up an extra row in firefox which I certainly hate. Also installing an extension might increase thememory consumption of firefox, which already tops the charts. So extension is out of bounds.

Solution2: I found a Script on KLUG(Kharagpur Linux Users Group) which could query a list of proxies to find the fastest one. So I extended this script to also change the firefox proxy to the fastest one. Done!. But it had a problem. Firefox had to restart ever time the proxy was changed. This causes a lot of trouble, since if you are reading something the firefox has to restart.

Solution3: Some one on Mutter suggested to run a local proxy server, have a consistent local proxy in firefox and change the settings of the local server when ever the proxies change. Cool! So I set up squid and configured it to talk to the institute proxy servers. The proxy in my firefox corresponds to the local squid server, and a cron job regularly checks the fastest proxy changing the squid settings, if the fastest proxy has changed. Thus only the background squid server has to be restarted and the firefox remains static. And I am done.

All Hail to the Penguin!