Well today was another beautiful yet boring day. I did get a few things accomplished. I’ve been searching for things I might want to display on my LCD screen and one of the things I came up with was breaking news. I am currently using MSNBC’s news alert and have it set to only show me breaking news. It is very convenient. I however needed a way to find breaking news of my own. Well I figured that news alert must be getting it from somewhere so I found a packet sniffer and watched what happened when news alert updated. The program is just connecting to a text file on their web site that contains the latest headlines. This will be very easy to parse and put to use. VERY COOL!!!
I was also wanting to show the latest slashdot headlines, and slashdot has a page in XML format specifically to allow people to do that. Now I just need to find a good source of weather information and a few other things and I’m good to go. Of course this is all theory, I have no code to support any of this. Then again it’s kind of hard to write code when I don’t know what language or platform I’m going to write this thing on.
Probably linux and c++. I’m thinking maybe I’ll use perl to grab the web stuff and put it in a format I can use for parsing and then let c++ take a hack at displaying it on the LCD.
That’s about all I’ve got for today. Ta Ta.