Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

The last two weeks have been very interesting for users of the TV Listings tool in Watson. Right on the heels of a fix to problems accessing the tvguide.com site (due to changes in their HTML pages), the site now requires cookies, which broke the newly released update to the tool. Fortunately, it was an easy fix to a major change; the 'curl' technology deep in Watson has the ability to send cookies along with a request. So today, version 1.7.2.5 of the TV was streamed out to Watson users.

Privacy note: Since this is the first Watson tool to make use of cookies, I should mention what it is doing. The cookie that is transferred has no information about you other than what is evident in the request based on the Zip code that you provide, or the fact that you are making the request for the data in the first place. But this is no different than before; what is different is that more data is transferred back and forth when you interact with the tool. (If you really want to see what is in the cookie, look for a file in the /tmp directory that resembles username_tv_cookie.txt.)

Many (but not all) Watson users have been experiencing problems with the TV Listings tool over the last couple of weeks. I finally have an idea what has been happening, and can now resolve the issue.

When Watson (or any browser) accesses a web site, there may be more than one server computer on the receiving end, even though it appears that there is just one. This is a technique called "load balancing". Apparently, the folks at TVGuide.com have been updating their HTML -- something not uncommon, and a program that 'scrapes' sites has to deal with it. But in this case, the HTML has changed on some of their servers, not all of them.

So today's fix (to 1.7.2.2) accomodates both "old" and "new" HTML, and everybody should be happy now. Unless, of course, there is yet another variation in the mix that I haven't found. Many thanks to the Watson users who helped diagnose and test the fix!

Other updates today:

• Sujal Shah's football tool, to 1.1.3. Another update may be needed after tonight's game.
• Randy Saldinger's iMedia tool, to 1.0.0.1.
• Weather, to 1.7.2.5, to accommodate Satellite images in Hawai'i and forecasts in areas of the Pacific Northwest.
• eBay to 1.7.2.7, to deal with very small result lists

A couple of days, ago, Randy Saldinger submitted iMedia, a Watson tool that browses "independent media" sources -- news, columns, and audio programs. Since making it available for download directly from Watson (from the "Install More Tools..." menu), I've come across some rather strong e-mails, both in favor of, and against the tool.

Love it or hate the tool, all I can say is that Free Speech is a truly wonderful thing!

I have been hearing about "bookmarklets" / "favelets" for a while, but never paid much attention to them. Last night, I just discovered what they are all about. It's really cool -- a "bookmark" that does some useful JavaScript.

Alas, Safari isn't compatible with a lot of the ones out there, but I'm sure that will improve with time.

Some sites to check out:

• bookmarklets.com
• favelets.com
• Jesse's Bookmarklets Site

(BTW, the term "bookmarklets" seems to be more common than Favelets -- a Google search on each term shows the clear "winner".)

Today, Watson got another update to the Weather tool, in order to deal with problems viewing doppler radar in many parts of the U.S.

Unfortunately, I am noticing a lot of database connectivity problems when I try and access weather.gov. It's very intermittent. Perhaps it's because of this PC worm going around -- a lot of their servers seem to be running on PCs. All I can suggest for users is that they choose their location from the Settings drawer again if the first load doesn't work.

Also updated was the eBay tool, to catch up with a change in formatting that hid the prices from Watson.

Hopefully nothing major crops up next week with Watson while I'm on vacation! :-)

A few more Watson tool updates were streamed out today; here's the list.

• Movies (to 1.7.2.1)- Fix some problems parsing the rating and time of the movie in its description
• Phone (to 1.7.2.1) - A multitude of fixes; some business lookups were incorrectly returning residential listings, and some wrangling was necessary to restore European listings
• Weather (to 1.7.2.2)- A fix to get some cities working again; also updated the list of international weather station locations.

My weblog's first (and maybe last) one-line movie review, in Rael's style.

Gigli: Not as bad as I would have expected, this lighthearted movie about a thug's self-enlightenment is relatively enjoyable but otherwise forgettable ... except for its title, of course.

How is the name of the film and the protagonist pronounced? This Italian name is near and dear to my heart, because it figures prominently in my family. It's pronounced "Jeel-yee". In the film, he says it "Jee-lee" (with, inexplicably, a French soft J) which is certainly better than most English speakers can do. Thanks to this film, people don't have to be an opera buff or a fashion maven (or speak Italian) to know how not to butcher a lovely name (which means "lillies" in Italian, by the way).

And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.