TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Why is he like this

The stewardship of twitter continues to be a mess of 1 step forward 2 steps back. What will it take to break it?

I guess I'll still be here on my little blog. I should post more. Like about my recent trip to Canada...

Edit: the only thing more insufferable are his antis.

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Brief notes on the mess of scripts involved for Coyo YouTube Post Notifications

I don't exactly know which audience I should write this for, so I'll try just giving some high level notes and anyone curious can follow deeper if they want. If you have any questions feel free to bring them up. Anyway, the context behind this post is that because YouTube won't do notifications of community posts for some reason (though it does do notifications of member posts...) I decided to solve the problem for myself. This initially resulted in a quick and dirty script here.

All the script does is this:
  1. Open up a new instance of my Firefox browser, in "headless" mode so that it doesn't actually show up in my task bar and interfere with any other windows open on my desktop
  2. Navigate to Coyo's community tab
  3. Check to see if there's any new message or not from last time it checked.
    • If there was a new message, notify about it.


I have the script arbitrarily set to run once every five minutes, so there's not too much delay between a post being made and seeing it. This is done with a simple bash loop: while true; do sbcl --script coyo_yt_posts.lisp; sleep 300; done But it could just as well be done by modifying the Lisp code instead, or setting a cron job. (Edit: the latest version of the script on gist now has a loop in the Lisp code and is a bit more robust to some errors.) I could also compile the script into an EXE binary, but there's no need here. The way it checks if a post is new or not is also stupidly basic: it just saves the contents to a local file, and compares against that each time, overwriting it with the new post if it's different.

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