saturn return to sender

Turns out getting CamelBones to do what I need isn’t as straightforward as one might hope, either. Meh. I suppose there is a downside to free internet yayness.

I’ve signed up for feedlounge and think it’s über-spiff so far. The UI is really a work. Clean, simple, easy. Bravo, Alex. (And Scott, but I don’t know him. =) )

I’m extracting a static dump of Wikipedia as an avenue to test some things for my project. The extraction program is 7za, and it’s been using 80-90% of one of the two 2-GHz G5s for about 24 hours now. Wikipedia is big. The article names pass by as they’re extracted. Some of the impossibly obscure topics are pretty funny.

Preferablly I’d hit the Wikipedia database to get the information I need. It is not publically accessible. Second option is to screen-scrape the live site, but they obviously don’t like people doing this (even though I’m doing it for non-evil purposes and throttle the request frequency) and I guess they have defenses in place to prevent it: my requests for pages come back empty. Setting the user-agent string to imitate a real browser seemed to work at one point but now it’s not. I dunno, I suppose there’s something else going on?

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