Dear Lazyweb, I'm possibly asking for the moon on a stick here, but in the office we have VoIP phones, which talk to our Asterisk server. Unfortunately, the ringtone on them are incredibly quiet and I tend to listen to music and don't notice either the ring or the small green flashing light when a call comes in. The question then is does anyone know of a program which will talk SIP to the asterisk server and notice when a call comes in and turn my music down and display a notification?

In my article on Perl's IO::Handle objects I talked briefly about IO::AtomicFile and IO::Digest. I've just had reason to use these very useful modules to create a script which edits a file in place. These modules allowed me to do the rewrite atomically and optionally make a backup if the contents have changed. The example assumes you have a function called perform_rewrite that takes two file handles as the first two parameters.

use File::Copy;
use IO::File;
use IO::AtomicFile;
use IO::Digest;
sub rewrite_file  
   my $file = shift;
   my $sub = shift;
   my $input = new IO::File($file,'r');
   my $input_md5 = new IO::Digest($input, 'MD5');
   my $output = new IO::AtomicFile($file,'w');
   my $output_md5 = new IO::Digest($output, 'MD5');
   $sub->($input, $output, @_);
   if ($input_md5->hexdigest ne $output_md5->hexdigest)  
           copy ("$file", "$file.bak");
           $output->close();
     else  
           # we haven't changed so don't bother updating
           $output->delete();
    
   $input->close();
 
rewrite_file("/foo/bar", \&perform_rewrite, $baz, $quux);

Currently listening to Biffy Clyro's new album, Puzzle, and I have to say it is definitely their best album yet. It's up there with 65daysofstatic for best album of the year so far. It's made a change from all the recent albums where it's taken repeated listenings to like the album. With the first listen I love this album. I am definitely going to have to see them live more often. I've only seen them twice and the gig a fortnight ago was possibly one of my best gigs ever.

I'm looking to buy either a Samsung E900 or D900 and would like some horror stories on either phone from the LazyWeb. I'm tended towards the E900 as it's a smaller phone, but then the D900 has a better camera. I haven't really felt the need for a camera phone, but the quality is reaching the same as my digital camera, with the exception of not having an optical zoom. Particularly interested in tales of slow or confusing UI and success stories of running an ssh client on it. Not really interested in recommendations of other phones at the moment. That might come later when I discover how bad these phones are.

Tim Bray just posted an entry about including a comment count in his atom feed. He said that he soon disabled it as people complained that it meant they saw the entry again as an updated entry. As I've recently done the same for my atom feed, I'm confused as to why this is happening. In my case I don't update either <published> or <updated>, just the <content> element. As the guid never changes, readers shouldn't consider it updated. Do readers really take a hash of the contents and consider it updated if it changes? Why do readers ignore the date fields. Is this affecting anyone? Certainly, it doesn't seem to affect Planet or the few readers I've tried it on.

After my last post on music players capable of Ogg Vorbis playback, I was recommended:

• Anything by Cowan (iAudio)
• iRiver t10
• iRiver iHP 120
• Samsung's YP-U2
• Kingston K-PEX

I can discount the iHP120 straight away as it's a HD based player and will be too large for what I want. Update: I'm intentional avoiding any Apple products. iRiver t10
iRiver T10 90GBP will get me a 2GB device. Several people have claimed it works as USB mass storage, although I've seen someone say American versions wouldn't work. iRiver have a firmware updater to convert it to UMS, so I might need to find a Windows installation. It has good battery life of around 45-50 hours from a single AA battery, which is good. It's got good reviews for its sound quality and its rugged construction might make it good in the gym. Kingston K-PEX100
Kingston K-PEX100 A 2GB model will set me back around 65GBP. It's a touch larger, but thinner than the T10. Looks like a UMS device. It can be expanded with miniSD cards, which seems a nice feature. It only has a 17 hour battery time using the internal rechargable, which seems a bit low, considering my CD player will do 120 hours off two AA. Reviews have mentioned that the build quality is a little budget and a couple of firmware bugs, but hopefully these have been fixed now. Samsung's YP-U2
Samsung YP-U2 Can only find a 1GB unit for 60GBP, although there is a 2GB unit available. Battery life is only 14 hours from the internal rechargable battery. It's smaller than the iRiver T10 and is a UMS device. I've seen reviews complain about the audio quality of this device. I think the lack of battery life and audio problems will rule this one out. Cowon iAudio U3 and T2 I wasn't recommended any particular models, but the two I'm considering is the T2 and U3.
iAudio T2 The T2 is a necklace style player, which is rather unusual, but I can pick up a 2GB model for around 100GBP. Battery is around 12 hours using the internal rechargable battery. Looking at the reviews, the supplied headphones make up the actual necklace part and you have to remove that to use your own headphones, which is what I'll be doing, having just bought some Shure E2Cs. They also say the controls are a little confusing.
iAudio U3 This is the most expensive of the products I've looked at at 115GBP for the 2GB model. Battery life is around 20 hours. Reviews have been very positive. Not sure if it's worth the extra price though. Update: Apparently the 2GB model can only be charged via USB, where as the 1GB model comes with a charger too, Also, I read in a review that it has doesn't do gapless playback, which is very annoying. Why don't players do gapless playback? Summary I think my top choice is the iRiver T10, although each of the others have their plus points. The K-PEX is expandable, the T2 is small and the U3 gets good reviews. I think I've discounted the Samsung. I will try and find each of the players in a local shop to have a play before I go out and buy one. If you have any comments on any of these players, or you have another product to recommend I'd be very interested. Oh, and continuing my trend of discovering bands that have split up, I've been getting into At The Drive-In. :S

Firefox 2 is an improvement on previous versions, but one thing annoys me is the new tab style. I don't like having a close button on each tab and I don't like it hiding tabs after you have a certain number open. Fortunately you can fix this. Go to about:config in the URL and then set browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 and browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 and now you should have a close button on the right and all tabs displayed.

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
        boundary="----=25532899_4522_4927_1140_664401643181"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=25532899_4522_4927_1140_664401643181
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not
understand =
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.
------=25532899_4522_4927_1140_664401643181
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

No, my mail reader understands it perfectly. It's your crappy mail client that sends out multipart/alternative mails which don't contain alternatives. Fuckers.

If you use Last.fm, you may have got around to using their events feature where you can search for events near you and mark yourself attending those events. I was manually entering the information into my google calendar, which was a pain. Fortunately, being one of those hip, friendly web2.0 websites, Last.fm allows you to get your data out in all sorts of useful ways, including you event calendar as an iCal file. Google being useful, allow you to display external iCal files in your calendar. Can you see where I'm going with this? To get this up, log into you Google calendar, go to "Manage Calendars", then "Add Calendar", then "Public Calendar Address". Finally type in the url of your last.fm iCal file, which will be http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/dpash/events.ics, although obviously you need to change dpash to your particular last.fm username. Now, you only need to mark yourself attending a gig to have it show up in your Google calendar. You can use something like this to get it into your Evolution calendar.

In the continuing saga I like to call "Dave, what's wrong with your ex-employer today?", I'm still missing large chunks of my pension. Finally had enough of my former employers not giving me any answers or claiming to be looking into it, as I've been asking since around last March. As per this guide, I've started making efforts to resolve the problem myself. The first step has been to formally request a copy of the pension scheme's dispute resolution procedure. I sent them an email last wednesday and hand delivered a letter last night, giving them until the 9th February to supply me with the procedure. If by then they haven't I'll contact the The Pension Advisory Service. I'm hoping it won't come to that, but given the lack of any progress in the past, I'm not holding out much hope.

Do you ever feel you should implement equals(), hashCode() and toString, but just can't be bothered to do it for every class? Well, if you aren't bothered by speed, you can use Jakarta Commons Lang to do it for you. Just add this to your class:

import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.ToStringBuilder;
import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.EqualsBuilder;
import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.HashCodeBuilder;
class Foo  
   public int hashCode()  
      return HashCodeBuilder.reflectionHashCode(this);
    
   public boolean equals(Object other)  
      return EqualsBuilder.reflectionEquals(this,other);
    
   public String toString()  
      return ToStringBuilder.reflectionToString(this);
    
 

And that's it. Your class will just do the right thing. As you can probably guess from the function names, it uses reflection, so may be suboptimal. If you need performance, you can use tell it to use particular members, but I think I'll leave that up to a future article. I also recommend you don't use this technique if you are using something like Hibernate, which does things behind the scenes on member access; you may find it does undesirable things. :)

I noticed today that Mark Pilgrim linked to Eddie, my liberal RSS and Atom parsing library for Java, so I figured I should make a new release. It's been a few months since I did any serious work on the parser, but in the last few days I've reduced the number of test case failures to less than 100 out of 3502 test cases which come as part of Mark's Feedparser parser for python. The majority of the failures are in the date parsing routines and due to bugs in the Jython library which cause literal dictionaries not to match with classes inherited fro PyDictionary. Improvements in this version include:

• Massively improved support for different character encodings. With Java 6, it also has support for UTF32 feeds.
• CDF Support.
• Optional support of TagSoup for sanitizing of HTML in entries.
• Improved support for different input sources including String, InputStream and byte[].
• Numerous bug fixes, with 97% of test cases passing, up from 90%

If you use Eddie, drop me an email. I'd like to thank Mark Pilgrim again for providing the community with a fantastic and comprehensive suite of test cases, extensive documentation and a first class Python library.

I was quietly minding my own business, fixing some encoding bugs in Eddie, my liberal RSS and Atom parser, when I noticed that Java 6 included support for UTF-32, which is one of the encoding tests that was failing. I downloaded and installed the Ubuntu packages and installed it, and decided to run a quick benchmark using my unit tests. First up was the Sun Java 5 JVM. I'd been running the unit tests all night, but timed it this time,and got these results:

Ran 3502 tests
Passed 3322 tests
Failed 180 tests
real    1m10.293s
user    0m40.375s
sys     0m3.632s

Next I tried the Sun Java 6 JVM, using the same jar files and got;

Ran 3502 tests
Passed 3326 tests
Failed 176 tests
real    0m56.059s
user    0m39.198s
sys     0m4.212s

One thing to note was that it spend a couple of seconds noticing new jars to read, so I decided to run it again and got:

Ran 3502 tests
Passed 3326 tests
Failed 176 tests
real    0m45.317s
user    0m34.770s
sys     0m3.516s

Wow, I'd gone from 70 seconds to 45 seconds using the new runtime, and interestingly enough, past 4 more tests in the process. I'm assuming they are the UTF-32 tests, although I have't checked yet. The other thing for me to try is recompiling the code to see if that has any additional benefits. Update: Got around to checking what Java 6 fixed and it turned out it was the additional support for koi-u and cspc862latinhebrew encodings. After I fixed the UTF32 support in Eddie, it passed an additional 16 tests. Down to just 160 out of 3502. I just wish they would add support for some of the stranger encodings. Maybe this will happen when it's open source.

Dear Lazyweb, I'm after recommendations of a portable music player, which is small and can play ogg vorbis files. I'm not sure I need something with a large capacity; 2GB should be fine. Basically want something I can use in the gym, so I don't have to listen to the god-awful dance music they keep playing on MTV Dance. Reasonable audio quality a bonus. Last.fm support would be amazing. I would be tempted by something that could run Rockbox, but I suspect they are going to be on the top end of the size scale. Spent some time checking upcoming gigs and I've settled on And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, The Killers, 65daysofstatic, and The Barfly's Great Escape mini-festival, 3 days of gigs over 20 venues. Trying to decide if I want to go to see Inspiral Carpets and Electric Six in the world's dirtiest club.