TXR: data extraction language

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TXR is a pragmatic, convenient tool ready to take on your daily hacking challenges with its dual personality: its whole-document pattern matching and extraction language for scraping information from arbitrary text sources, and its powerful data-processing language to slice through problems like a hot knife through butter. Many tasks can be accomplished with TXR “one liners” directly from your system prompt. TXR is relatively new: the project started in 2009.

It is difficult to give a small introduction to TXR because it is no longer a small language. The PDF rendition of the reference manual, which takes the form of a large Unix man page, is over 600 pages long, with no index or table of contents. There are many ways to solve a given data processing problem with TXR.

TXR is a fusion of many different ideas, a few of which are original, and it is influenced by many languages, such as Common Lisp, Scheme, Awk, M4, POSIX Shell, Prolog, Ruby, Python, Arc, Clojure, S-Lang and others.

Moving from Feedly

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Got tired of a few shortcomings with Feedly (inability to add feed directly from firefox or to have private RSS feeds), so have migrated to a self-hosted tt-rss install.

Components:

  • VPS from Host-US ($15 / year) running Centos 7
  • tt-rss installation
  • tt-rss feedly plugin (some 3rd party apps supporting syncing to this)
  • tt-rss app for android
  • tt-rss feedly (dark) theme

Installation isn’t straightforward for the novice: it’s an nginx (LetsEncrypt cert) / php (7.3 from remi running as fpm) / postgres stack with a cronjob to update the feeds. I also wrote a job to backup & archive the postgres DB off-site.

Clients: Tiny Tiny RSS for Android (Palabre also supports tt-rss via a plugin, but not very well it seems), Newsboat for CLI & Fiery Feeds for IOS which is almost as good as Mr. Reader (RIP).

 

Gnome 3.30 on Arch Linux not ready for use

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It seems that the version of Gnome 3.30 on Arch is so unstable with such poor plugin support (despite what the Gnome developers think, tray icons are still required, Gnome is not the only DE available) that I strongly recommend against using it for now. I’ve gone back to the comforting embrace of XFCE. Maybe when Fedora 29 is released 3.30 will be stable in other distributions.