Status: ✅ I’m currently studying French, and if you’ve read any of this site, you’ll notice I’m a bit of a techie. Often several of my interests collide, which is what happened today. I was searching for the “most frequent french words,” and while I found some lists, nothing was exactly what I wanted. My desire was to have a PDF of the top few thousand most used French words. With the English translation next to it. In order. I’ve found some great resources, which I’ll list now

I rank OSSEC as one of my favorite pieces of open source software, and finally decided to play around with it more in my own free time. (Yup, I do this sort of stuff for fun). My goal was quite simple: send syslog packets from my Cisco to my “proxy” server, running OSSEC. I found that, although OSSEC supports Cisco IOS logging, it didn’t really work. In fact, I couldn’t find any examples or articles of anybody actually getting it to work.

I recently have been playing with parsing GPX files and spitting out the results into a special KML file. I initially wrote a parser using minidom, yet after running this the first time – and my Core2Duo laptop reaching 100% utilization for 10 seconds – I realized I needed to re-write it using something else. I spent a little time reading the different parsers for XML and eventually read more about cElementTree. And it is included with Python2.5, sweet.

Since I’ve already covered a really simple syndication example, I’ll move onto something a little more complex. Let’s say you want to offer syndication that is slightly more custom. The Django syndication docs give an example from Adrian’s Chicagocrime.org syndication of beats. I had to ponder a minute to get “custom” syndication to work, so here’s my example from start to finish. First, as usual, feeds.py class PerDirt(Feed): link = "/" copyright = 'Copyright (c) 2007, Blog Mozaic' def get_object(self, bits): from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404 if len(bits) != 1: raise ObjectDoesNotExist my_dirt = get_object_or_404(Dirt, slug__exact=bits[0]) …