Anatoliy Belsky - Web

Using great Geonames database for geographical data handling

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:57:19 +0200

This time I needed some geographical data evaluation for one of my current projects. The data used to be opensource and as possible qualitative and complete. After spending some time in front of the famous search engine window there was a solution:

http://www.geonames.org/

That's the first sentence from the site:

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.

Geonames is used by number of sites. Besides data it has also web services and code libraries in many programming languages to access them.
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Making server side playlist with PHP

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:36:35 +0200

Hi again,

whole last week I was mad about hearing music. I've heared tons of mp3's and radio stations over the internet. After a couple of days hearing music at work and at home I was really bored with creating and syncronizing playlists/files. Based on this, I came to the idea to make an online playlist which I would must update only one time and in one place and it would be accessible from anywhere. The idea was easy brougth out with PHP. So just a light reading for you:

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Domains avaliability checker

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:44:06 +0100

About a month ago I've written a simple domain checker, which is using whois.net to get the domains availiable. The main goal was to find free 3-symbols domains.

BASH:

#!/bin/sh 
 
if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
    echo "usage: `basename $0` extension
Check domains avaliability
 
examples:
`basename $0` com
";
    exit 2;
fi
 
EXT=$1;
LAST_FILENAME=/tmp/dc_$USER$EXT.last
 
if [ -f "$LAST_FILENAME" ]; then LAST_DOMAIN=`cat $LAST_FILENAME`; fi 
 
for DOMAIN in {{0..9},{a..z},-}{{0..9},{a..z},-}{{0..9},{a..z},-}
do
    if [ "$DOMAIN" \< "$LAST_DOMAIN" ]; then continue; fi
 
    trap "echo $DOMAIN > $LAST_FILENAME;exit;" SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM
 
    STATUS_STRING=`wget -qO - http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi\?d\=$DOMAIN\&tld\=$EXT | grep 'Status'`
 
    echo "$STATUS_STRING" | grep 'free' && 
    echo "$DOMAIN.$EXT" >> ~/domains_found_$EXT.txt && 
    echo "the domain is free: $DOMAIN.$EXT" | mail -c my@mail.com -s "free domain" other@mail.com
 
    sleep 7
 
done

The thing is very simple and the results can be kept on. Additionally it sends mail messages about each found domain. Lets see, what it brought for the .de domains ( about 9000 free domains was found )
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I know the future weather

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 23:16:11 +0100

A simply and cool script for the weather forecast. May be even correct

.. thanks to Weather::Underground perl module

PERL:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Weather::Underground;

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Stop image hotlinking with Perl

nospam@example.com (Anatoliy Belsky) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:04:48 +0100

Sometimes there are things, which can bring everyone to the rage accumulation. For example if traffic of the server is exceeded because of hotlinking and it's measured at least in hundreds of megabytes. | So, for me this is only a story about someone else because I'm always using the following script, if the traffic of the server is not unlimited. I've used Perl to convert or resize images, because according my measurements Perl was doing this at least twice as fast as PHP and more qualitatively as PHP (this concerns anyhow PHP4). Only the one weakness can prevent you from using this script - it works with HTTP_REFERER server variable and since some browsers, firewalls or proxies for any reasons don't sending this field to the webserver, you can punish innocent people, who want only to see your images. But the advantages are evident - you can place your images out of the web space and show them only if they has been called from your web site. Lets go on.
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