Using RSS on the Beat
February 23rd, 2005 | by Derek | published in Car Tools, XML
Mark Schaver has a great walk-through for reporters on using RSS to help follow your beat. It shows how to set up RSS feeds of Yahoo! search results.
Car Tools
OpenOffice’s Base
January 27th, 2005 | by Derek | published in Car Tools
NewsForge has a review of Base, the new database application that will be included in the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 release. It’ll have queries, forms and reports, much like Access. It’s still in development, but you can download snapshot builds (warning: bugs present).
Python DBF Reader
January 15th, 2005 | by Derek | published in Car Tools, Python
Got a DBF file and want to use Python to access it (a distinct possibility if you’re working on a Mac)? Try this new recipe by Raymond Hettinger from the Python Cookbook. DBF reader and writer can both iterate through existing DBF files and write data out to DBFs.
XML to DDL
September 15th, 2004 | by Derek | published in Car Tools, Python
Wow, this looks useful: “XML to DDL is a set of Python programs to convert an XML representation of a database into a set of DDL (Data Definition Language) statements.” Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL and Firebird.
Screenscraping the Senate
September 2nd, 2004 | by Derek | published in Car Tools, XML
Paul Ford has a new column on XML.com called “Hacking Congress” that aims to create an RDF description of the federal government. His first piece shows how to create an XML file of biographical information about U.S. Senators.
Does creating a Semantic Web of data make it easier to analyze and explore that data in new [...]