Monthly Archives: July 2008

The X-Files: I want to believe…

…but unfortunately, I can’t.

We had to wait six years for that? Puh-lease.

Ah, the irony…

…of a Catholic Archbishop telling the Western world that it isn’t having enough babies:

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, today warned Western nations such as Australia to populate or perish … “There is a crisis in the Western world. No Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable, no Western country”.

You first, George.

Screen-scraping Melbourne’s TramTracker information.

Melbourne’s tram operator, Yarra Trams, provides a web and sms system called TramTracker, that can tell you the time of the next tram that will arrive at any given stop, using a combination of real-time information and scheduled timetables. It uses the same system that drives the passenger information displays that can be seen around inner-city tram stops.

The web-service is pretty nasty, however. It doesn’t render very well for me using Galeon, and worse, it doesn’t keep any state information, so you have to keep retyping the tram-stop code every time you want to look up the information on your tram. And having to launch a web-browser to just look up the time of the next tram is annoying; it would be nicer to have either a command line interface, or perhaps even a small application running in a docked window.

It also assumes that you only wish to catch a tram from one stop; if, like me, you’re within walking distance of two or more different tram lines that can take you to a particular destination, then you have to do multiple lookups, which is a waste of time.

So, with this in mind, I pulled out Wireshark and had a look at the HTTP traffic that was being passed when making a request to the service. The following was the most interesting part:

tkScriptManager=upnMain|btnPrediction&
tkScriptManager_HiddenField=%253B%253B
AjaxControlToolkit%252C%2520Version%253D1.0.10618.0
%252C%2520Culture%253Dneutral%252C%2520PublicKeyToken%25 [blah blah blah…]
&__EVENTTARGET=&__EVENTARGUMENT=&__LASTFOCUS=
&__VIEWSTATE= [blah blah blah…]
txtTrackerID=1919&ddlRouteNo=Any&btnPrediction=

The number 1919 was the tramstop code that I’d entered. So I quickly threw together a small web form, with hidden variables txtTrackerID, ddlRouteNo and btnPrediction, which sent a request to the tramtracker interface, but unfortunately this wasn’t enough and it kept returning to the start page.

After a bit of trial and error, I found that it also needed to be passed these variables: tkScriptManager, __EVENTTARGET, __EVENTARGUMENT, __LASTFOCUS and __VIEWSTATE. Fortunately it didn’t need any of the long-winded variables with public key tokens in them.

I was rather happy to find that the output from the service was XHTML, however this feeling soon dissipated when I discovered that whoever wrote this clearly didn’t have a clue that XML would only work if well-formed and that they hadn’t closed off any of their br or img tags. Sigh, so many useless “web programmers” out there, so few jail sentences. This ruled out using XML::Simple to parse it, and I had to settle for kludging it with HTML::TableExtract.

The upshot of all this is the NextTram perl script, which will return the times of the next trams arriving at multiple tram stops, sorted by time:

$ ./nexttram 1419 1259 1216
1:Sth Melb Beach:0
19:Flinders St City:6
8:Toorak:9
55:Domain Interchange:10
1:Sth Melb Beach:13
19:Flinders St City:18
55:Domain Interchange:26
19:Flinders St City:31
55:Domain Interchange:39

While I realise that it has a limited potential audience (Linux/Unix users in inner Melbourne suburbs who actually care about what times trams run, ie, probably just me), I’ve released it under the GPL in the hope that it might go onto bigger and better things. Of course, it will probably just break next time Yarra Trams upgrades their website…

Docbook 5.0 in 5.0 minutes

I quite like Docbook. The syntax is simple enough to pick up quickly, which means I can churn out documents without much effort, and more importantly, without having to fire up a bloated office suite. Furthermore, the documents that it produces look great, which is far more than I can say for anything I’ve put together with a wysiwyg word processor – I will freely admit that I have no artistic skills, whatsoever.

The biggest problem with Docbook, however, is the tools needed to convert it from xml to other formats (eg, pdf, html, etc) – or rather – the documentation of the tools, ironically enough. Most of the information out there seems to have been written to be so platform independent that it’s next to useless for any real-world situation.

So, in the interests of hopefully saving someone the hours that I’ve spent trying to get this working for my specific case, here’s a quick guide to writing and publishing a Docbook 5.0 document, on Debian sid.

Firstly, get the Debian package source to xmlto and apply the patch attached to Debian bug 416622; this gives xmlto support for dblatex, as it currently expects to use passivetex and it has been removed from Debian. Hopefully the patch will be applied upstream and this step won’t be needed in the future.

Install the following Debian packages: docbook, docbook-xml, docbook-dsssl, docbook-xsl, dblatex, xsltproc. Build and install the patched version of xmlto, and install any dependencies it requests.

Now, a simple docbook document. Write this to index.xml:

<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=”no”?>

<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC “-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V5.0//EN”
“http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/5.0b5/dtd/docbook.dtd”>

<book xmlns=”http://docbook.org/ns/docbook” version=”5.0″>

<info>
<title>My book</title>

<author>
<personname>
<firstname>Paul</firstname>
<surname>Dwerryhouse</surname>
</personname>
</author>
</info>

<chapter>
<title>Introduction</title>

<para>This is the first paragraph.</para>
</chapter>

<chapter>
<title>Stuff</title>

<section>
<title>Information</title>
<para>This is the first section.</para>
</section>
</chapter>

<chapter>
<title>Conclusion</title>

<para>This is the last paragraph.</para>
</chapter>

</book>

Note the DOCTYPE line. I can’t tell if Docbook 5.0 has been officially released or not. Wikipedia suggests that it is, but the 5.0 DTD is not available on the OASIS website, only a beta.

You can now convert this to html with:

xmlto html index.xml

…or pdf with:

xmlto –with-dblatex pdf index.xml

If you’re writing a huge document, and want to break it down into multiple files, then you can use XInclude:

<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=”no”?>

<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC “-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V5.0//EN”
“http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/5.0b5/dtd/docbook.dtd”>

<book xmlns=”http://docbook.org/ns/docbook” version=”5.0″>

<xi:include xmlns:xi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude” href=”info.xml” />
<xi:include xmlns:xi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude” href=”ch01.xml” />
<xi:include xmlns:xi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude” href=”ch02.xml” />
<xi:include xmlns:xi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude” href=”ch03.xml” />

</book>

The above example will then read in four files, info.xml, ch01.xml, ch02.xml and ch03.xml, which contain the information section and the three chapters from the first example.