Www

While trying to find an API or “mobile” (read: iPhone) access for the NMBS website, I came upon some cool stuff.

The time table and train managing software seems made in Germany. The NMBS “look up” site gives you the software and version it is using ("Software versie/dataversie: HAFAS 5.21.B-RAIL.4.7f/5.21.B-RAIL.4.7k - 14/09/08").

Googling for Hafas returns some cool websites.

Using this one, you can download a pdf with all train (including hours) info between two stations. Not quite the same as an API-key, but at least you have something you can save and use lateron.

The missing tool in Mac OS X is most likely wget. Here’s a (universal) port.

Read the readme for installation howto. :)

For those using the PDA & iPhone wordpress plugin, which turns your blog into something more readable on a mobile device, don’t forget to add the Google analytics script to your footer.php (in both iphone-theme and pda-theme directory). As other plugins seem to be disabled.

This is actually also meant for me, as a reminder, for when I update the plugin. ;)

Took me a while to figure out what went wrong.

With the new Firefox (v3) and the wordpress update, I was no longer able to see my Wordpress stats on my dashboard.

Every (Wordpress) login attempt, to see the stats, resulted in… Well nothing. I just kept getting back to the login page. No error.

Actually, I have “third-party cookies disabled” on all my browsers; I don’t like to have cookies from sites I do not visit. And this was the cause of the problem.

Been using it from time to time, and so far it has been great!

Maybe I’ll post some mini review about it some day.

Anyway, here’s a interview with one of the developers/leaders.

And a nice mail from them (reply to an idea of mine):

PS Bedankt voor de inspiratie voor blog post van twee weken terug op de next web:

http://thenextweb.org/2008/08/08/soocial-will-totally-obliterate-plaxo-and-mobileme/

(Zie TUINSLAK onderaan ergens)

In short: search my nick on the page.

When I tried to order my iPhone a few days ago from the Mobistar webshop (which is using Ogone payments), and I got to its last step “Pay goldz plx !” something happened.

Submitting the required (and correct!) info, using my MasterCard, I received this helpful error page (roughly translated): “Order failed. Seller cannot sell item” and at the bottom, error code: 30001100.

I tried to execute the payments multiple times (you have no idea’s how many times I checked and rechecked my credit card number), reordered the item, other browser, and so forth. Nothing helped.

I quote my Hypermedia teacher from school:

“You add <?xml:stylesheet href=“blabla.css” type=“text/css”?> to blabla.xml. You will notice that, once again, this will not work in Firefox for some weird reason. I suggest using Internet Explorer for this. Nevertheless, there’s a workaround for Firefox, using xml-stylesheet for you Firefox fans…”

Well well, let’s all blame Firefox (well, Gecko, to be precise) for not parsing this correctly! Especialy when xml-stylesheet is the only valid option set by W3C…

While checking the logs of one of my websites I noticed something rather weird.

Some person (65.210.123.237) with User-Agent/browser “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT; ……/1.0 )” was downloading all files from my website. Totally ignoring robots.txt and requesting pages without providing a referral.

This seemed quite odd and didn’t seem to be a decent/real search robot. It kept requesting files every 3-4 seconds for about one hour. Decent search bots try to spread the load over a few minutes, and wouldn’t request about 1000 files (1.6 Gb) at once.