Wishful Coding

Didn't you ever wish your
computer understood you?

Wordpress MU in Resin with Quercus

While researching Quercus today, I ran into some trouble running the new integrated Multi Site feature of Wordpress 3.0(previously a separate project known as Wordpress MU or WPMU for short) on Resin. Quercus is a PHP implementation written in Java that runs on any Java Servlet Container, including but not limited to Jetty, Tomcat or Resin. I took Resin for it was the easiest to setup and includes Quercus. Normally one would just use Apache and mod_php, but I also want to run Jython and Clojure projects, so I'm looking for a solution to combine these. Wordpress MU allows me to run multiple blogs on a single installation(as seen on wordpress.com), which I want to use for hosting websites for my clients. The problem with WPMU is that to map the different urls to one installation, some tricky mod_rewrite code is required for Apache, but since I'm using Resin here, I'll have to find another solution. There is a post on the Quercus wiki describing the process of setting up a Multi Site Wordpress installation, but this is for an old version of WPMU(before the merge) and an old version of Resin. After a good few hours of trying, I got it working with the latest version of Wordpress 3.0, Quercus 4.0.3 and Resin 4.0.7. Just follow the wiki, except for a few points: 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://caucho.com/ns/resin" xmlns:resin="urn:java:com.caucho.resin">
	<resin:Forward regexp="^/index\.php$" target="/"/>
	<resin:Dispatch regexp="^">
		<resin:IfFileExists/>
	</resin:Dispatch>
	<resin:Redirect regexp="^(/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$" target="$1wp-admin/"/>
	<resin:Forward regexp="^(/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+)" target="/wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2"/>
	<resin:Forward regexp="^(/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*)" target="/$2"/>
	<resin:Forward regexp="^(/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$" target="/$2"/>
	<resin:Forward regexp="/.*" target="/index.php"/>
</web-app>
Note that I did not use the pro version, skipped the DNS stuff by using directory instead of subdomains in WP, I also skipped the chown stuff by removing this block from resin.xml: 
<resin:if test="${resin.userName == 'root'}">
        <user-name>pepijndevos</user-name>
        <group-name>staff</group-name>
      </resin:if>
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RSS feed of Twitter lists

You want them? Me to! Here is how. The old-fashioned way:
  1. Create a Yahoo! ID
  2. Do some Yahoo! Pipe magic
  3. Get the RSS feed
But this is sub-ideal. Pipes have a huge url, a delay to long for practical use with Twitter, and are unreliable at times. I searched the API for a solution but found none. The only official format for lists is XML and JSON. Just by trying anyway, I and Jaap found out that lists do not have an RSS feed, but they do have an Atom feed(which is sort of RSS on steroids)! This can be used in most cases where an RSS feed is required. The new way:
  1. Copy the url of a list, for example http://twitter.com/erwinelling/eightmedia
  2. Modify the url to look like this http://api.twitter.com/1/erwinelling/lists/eightmedia/statuses.atom
Have fun! One word of warning though, because this feed is undocumented, it might change or disappear at any time.
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Save your date with PyMouse

Save your date with PyMouse With PyMouse this would never have happened. Don't risk your date, get PyMouse right now at its GitHub page! All that it takes to wiggle your pointer with PyMouse is this: 
from pymouse import PyMouse
from time import sleep
from random import randint

m = PyMouse()
w, h = m.screen_size()
while True:
    try:
        m.move(randint(0, w), randint(0, h))
        sleep(20)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print "Goodby!"
        break
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