stoolpigeon's Journal: finnish folk rock, slashdot, python regex debugger kodos

I was driving in to work the other day and heard a song by Korpiklaani. I really like their music quite a bit. The song I heard was Tequila which is pretty fun, though PÃÃt Pois Tai Hirteen is one of my more favorite songs so far. They have that acoustic stringed instrument at the start and the way it is played sounds just like how the word "hirteen" sounds with the rolling of the r. Very cool.
 
I know that Finnish and Hungarian share some roots way, way back - though I don't think they have much in common now in terms of words or anything. But I do find it's pretty easy to follow what I hear as I read the lyrics as far as the way things sound making some sense. (Finnish and Hungarian are related to one another like German and English are related to one another. It's not a real close thing.) Regardless - I like the music a lot. It goes well with this little folk painting I bought in Slovenia.
 
I've talked about this a lot - probably too much - but here we go. I would love it if Slashdot had built in Journal exporting functionality. To my knowledge it never has. A while back LeoP created a Python program that would go out and grab journals. It's still out there - you can download it right here. Unfortunately it is broken. I am guessing (I haven't spent the time finding out for sure) that the regular expressions it uses no longer match the pages. All the URLs still work but I think the layout has changed too much. In a post I made about it Pudge posted his own archiver in the comments. It's a Perl script that depends on a SOAP interface with Slashdot. I can't get that to work either which may be due to my inexperience with Perl or some change in Slashdot.
 
So I've been working on something similar to what Leo made. I'm moving along pretty well - mostly because the old pl journal page is still working. ( I had posted that the old journal list was no longer working but it is now.) That's key because I have no idea how I'd go about doing it with the new javascript, self loading way - and even doing it manually I haven't been able to get it to scroll back anywhere close to the start of my JEs.
 
As I was working on my approach I found myself wanting to do some regex stuff - but that's something I've never learned very well. Looking for help I stumbled across a nice tool, Kodos - The Python Regular Expression Debugger. I'ts really helpful. It also uses some older QT stuff and doesn't seem to have been worked on actively for a while. So I emailed the author to verify that it wasn't under active development and asked about moving it to PySide. I'll see what he says if I hear back from him. I'll probably try to do it for fun either way - but it would be cool if he let me contribute that and have it be a part of the project.