A "No News is Good News" Tsunami Feed

I have subscribed to the NOAA/NWS/West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center's feed of ahead-of-time tsunami warnings for the U.S. West Coast, Alaska, and British Columbia coastal regions (example information statement) for some time. Most, like this one, are "wolf-cry" statements stemming from some seismic activity somewhere that won't generate any tsunami, marked with the all-important body phrase "The magnitude is such that a tsunami WILL NOT be generated" - meaning I don't really care about them.

Today I made a Yahoo pipe, filtering away those from the feed. Here is the resulting feed, containing only positive tsunami warning statements. Behind the scenes, it's created by the simple YQL statement select * from rss where url="http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/rss/tsunamirss.xml" and description like "%tsunami <strong>WILL NOT</strong> be%" (there's some newline or similar after "be" in the original feed, and it doesn't seem like YQL does any whitespace normalization, but this matches well enough to filter the stuff).

The resulting feed is my enrapturing contribution to today's supposed end of the world. You may note that the feed is currently (and hopefully still, by the time you read this :-) empty - which is, of course, good news. Enjoy!

On a related hacker's note, it would be really handy to extend Google Reader with a "filter this feed" feature that created these more on the fly, without mucking about for an hour in the Yahoo Pipes interface, and then changed the old subscription to the new feed.

Chrome + NaCl + libmodplug + ... = tracker modules on the web

Some notes I took while looking into how to build a libmikmod_x86_32.nexe and libmikmod_x86_64.nexe to get Chrome tracker module playing support from javascript (the work seems to be done already in naclports) via NativeClient, for all the MOD, S3M, XM, IT, 669, AMF, AMS, DBM, DMF, DSM, FAR, MDL, MED, MTM, OKT, PTM, STM, ULT, UMX, MT2 and PSM formats:

• In a Chrome 11 profile, go to about:flags, and click Enable under "Native Client", and then the "Relaunch Now" button at the bottom (alternatively: start the session with the --enable-nacl command-line flag)
• Download the NaCl SDK (for Chrome 11, in my case; eventually the ABI will supposedly freeze and cover a wider range of versions)
• Download depot_tools, extract it and export NACL_SDK_ROOT=$PWD in that directory (technical overview here)
• Check out naclports
• Probably optional: comment out all the RunInstallScript lines in naclports/src/packages/nacl-install-all-bitsize.sh except the one you're interested in (in my case: RunInstallScript libmodplug-0.8.7 nacl-libmodplug-0.8.7.sh)
• Run nacl-install-all-bitsize.sh 64 (or 32 for a 32-bit build), which, in my case, built $NACL_SDK_ROOT/toolchain/mac_x86/nacl64/usr/lib/libmodplug.a
• About here my research petered out, as I found this smaller hack for XM-only playback by some forthcoming Japanese fellow (git repository here; English translation of same page c/o Google Translate), which has basic functionality
• If you got curious about my original venue and proceeded further, I'd love to hear about it, especially if you managed to build the final nexe:s; do post a comment!

Github tag and branch labels

I just made a little update to my github improved! user script; now it shows you branch and tag labels in the commits view, like this:

There's been some more mystery meat features slipping in there too somewhat unannounced; if you click a committer icon a little filter panel opens on top that lets you see how many commits in the view were by whom, and if you click one of those, hide those commits. I got the idea when I was playing with Autopatchwork at some point, unpaginating a whole repository's worth of commits and wanted to slice and dice the view a bit, get aggregate stats and the like. This is what Greasemonkey's early history (from 0.8 and back) looks like, in terms of authors (not committers) involved, for example:

Autopatchwork could use some more coverage on the English-speaking web, by the way, because of its neat way of aggregating user data from contributors. Instead of a dedicated backend server someone maintains for the script to work, it's using a wiki-like JSON database for public domain content: Wedata.net; define your json schema and let anyone that wants to fill in, edit and co-maintain the data (here: unpagination url regexps and node xpaths). The editing process looks a bit like this. I am especially glad to have found it, as I've been wanting a service like that for a long time but not really wanted to host it, and having a public cloud sync point for mini-applications like this to update their localStorage copies of the data from is a neat trick.

Anyway, happy githubbing! As with so many little features before it, I already can't fathom going back to a github without this feature (and I've only been using it since yesternight). It helps a lot seeing what went into which release at a glance, without doing all sorts of manual work. It would be nice for it to mark branch-off points too, but it would require some kind of merge-base type api end-point, for digging up where a branch's closest common ancestor is to all other branches. Maybe time for devising a neat response format and crafting a little api feature request.