I was on the development team for the FlightSight (part of the QuickShot software package) during my tenure with SpaceWorks, Inc. This software application helps users visualize flight trajectories in a three-dimensional virtual space. The software interfaces well with a variety of third-party applications, including MATLAB, and users have a lot of control over the appearance and behavior of the simulation. I assisted with the incorporation of Google Maps into the program and moving the project onto a version control system.
Tag: XML
FeedControl
FeedControl is a back-end script that I use to control and filter the RSS and podcast feeds that I use for my daily news. This script provides several key features, most notably filtering out posts by keyword (both traditional and regular expression pattern matching) and controlling when the feed gets updated. I can also pause my feeds when I’m on vacation. FeedControl works by routinely monitoring each of my choice RSS feeds and dumping the filtered results into a corresponding custom feed, which I can then plug into my RSS and podcast readers of choice.
I also pass many of the incoming RSS feeds through tt-rss, which allows me perform pattern matching on the entire content of each article rather than just the title and brief description. This is thanks to a tt-rss plug-in that can substitute in article content with some HTML scraping.
Hg RepositoryEmailToRSS
EmailToRss is a back-end Python script that takes in emails from a designated account and turns them into posts of an RSS feed, with the subject line as the RSS title and the message body as the article body. A Unix shell script runs in response to each incoming email and pipes the information to the script, and the script organizes the messages into the appropriate feeds based on the From address. I wrote this to follow organizations who still communicate primarily through email newsletter, as I found these newsletters were cluttering my inbox. I can further filter the articles with my FeedControl script, as needed.
LifeHackerVIP
I’m a fan of the website LifeHacker, but I wasn’t satisfied with their options for subscribing to their news feeds. They provide either tag-specific feeds, which only gives a short synopsis of each article, or a VIP feed, which gives you all feeds but with the full text of each article. I wanted to combine the two strengths, so I wrote a back-end Python script that scans each tag-specific feed, looks for the corresponding article in the VIP feed, and substitutes the latter for the former. This gives me full-text tag-specific feeds from LifeHacker that I can then filter further with my FeedControl script, as needed.