Python FlickrAPI is an easy-to-use library for accessing Flickr from Python apps. Here’s a simple app prints the thumbnail URL for a photo, give a list of photo URLs.

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In an ideal world everyone would have full-content RSS feeds. Until then making your own isn’t that hard — and it’s getting easier by the day with mash-up tools like Yahoo Pipes. Here are some I’ve created:

• Digg Direct – links directly to the stories, instead of wasting your time with Digg’s comments page (Python source).
• BBC’s 10 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week – they have their own feed, but it isn’t full-text. This one is (’source’).
• Archie Comic of the Day (Python source)
• The Joy of Tech Comic – they have an RSS feed, but it doesn’t have images (Python source).

Update: added links to source code.

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Folk using CityDesk with servers that only have SFTP enabled may be interested in this script I wrote that uploads only changed files to your CityDesk website. If you don’t have rsync, this should be very useful.

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Finding MSN Messenger 6’s XSLT-driven message log display hard to read, I wrote my own. Here’s a sample conversation that imho looks better and is easier to follow. To use this stylesheet:

• Save msnhist.xslt to {MY_DOCUMENTS}\My Received Files\{MSN_MESSENGER_LOGIN}\History (or wherever your logs are).
• backup MessageLog.xsl
• copy msnhist.xslt over MessageLog.xsl

Update: Here’s Enki’s improved XSL.

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From Mark Pilgrim via Adrian Holovaty (who by the way has a great highlighter for visitors from Google):

The next time someone stands up in a design meeting and claims that you don’t have any blind customers, ask them if they care about search engine placement. Then remind them that Google is a blind user who reads the entire Internet every month, and then reports what it sees to millions of its closest friends.

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Spent some quality time struggling with Java’s I/O routines over the weekend (I know, I have no life…) Any Java/Linux guru reading this — help/comment would be very appreciated. My problem’s about this servlet that does fine on Win2k, but takes ages to execute on Linux, but only when the client is another Java app. Any ideas?

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Sam Gentile: (On C#) There’s not enough complexity in this language to warrant reading a book on the language itself. All of your questions can be answered by judicious reading of the C# language spec. Yes!

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I’ve been thinking about streaming files by SMTP for some time. There are too many firewalls around which don’t allow file transfers, and email is a good way of getting your data across simply because the (hopefully willing) recipient has hardly got to do anything to receive the data. (Of course, people who’ve used Radio upstreaming will scream old hat! here, but not everyone uses Radio (yet! ) So SMTP.

It could work like this: You would be able to drop a file onto a container on your system tray, and after typing the recipient’s name, sit back as the program would split the file and deliver it piece by piece. I wrote up a quick Perl script to show how this might work, it’s a command-line tool but shows the flavor of how things could be.

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