My name is Edward Tanguay. I'm an American software and web developer living and working in Berlin, Germany.
5 hours ago: If you are a developer in Berlin and need to improve your English, I'm looking for groups to teach after work: http://tanguay.info/itenglish.
6 hours ago: As far as I'm concerned, the singularity is already here, every time I wake up twitter tells me something amazing was created while I slept.
6 hours ago: We're not suffering from information overload, we're suffering from faulty filtering.
6 hours ago: Classic literature for free as nicely formatted 1-page or 2-page PDF downloads: http://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks.asp.
6 hours ago: Yes, when you pour coffee, "a lightning storm of neuronal activity occurs almost across the entire brain": http://is.gd/eWO1T @pholdings.
23 hours ago: If you put two spaces after a period or use underlining for emphasis, you were born before 1980.
23 hours ago: Word of the day: infovore, n. an animal with a voracious appetite for information.
yesterday: It's said that on average people use less than 10% of their brain, but I think on average computers use less than 1% of their CPU.
2 days ago: Saturday fun: team drawing on two computers with six-year-old in a shared google doc diagram.
2 days ago: Someday I want to produce a developer podcast called "What's that?" but for now "the developer's life" is a nice genre: http://is.gd/eTURO.
3 days ago: Here's a use-case for datapod format, recording human-readable data that later can be used as a datasource: http://is.gd/eSsLg @pholdings.

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My Old Web Dev Site

WPF CODE EXAMPLE created on Sunday, March 21, 2010 permalink
How to consume text from any Google Document, RSS feed, or Twitter feed in your Silverlight application
If you try to read data via WebClient into a Silverlight application, you will get a security error unless the site from which you are reading text has a clientaccesspolicy.xml file which allows you to read the text. This seriously limits the kinds of data Silverlight application can access on the web: no public RSS feeds, no Twitter feeds, etc. So I wrote this proxy script and put it up on my PHP site, and now can get text into Silverlight from any site on the Internet via this proxy by passing the url I want to access as a parameter like this: http://www.mysite.com/getwebdata.php?url=http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc7gj86r_1sdc4trnd2. This allows you to create Silverlight applications whose content can be controlled by non-technical administrators simply tweeting or updating a Google Docs document, etc.
<?php
$url = filter_input(INPUT_GET, 'url',FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

$validUrls[] = "http://docs.google.com";
$validUrls[] = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline";

if(beginsWithOneOfThese($url, $validUrls)) {
    $user_agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)';
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "/tmp/cookie");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "/tmp/cookie");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
    echo curl_exec($ch);
} else
    echo "invalid url";

function beginsWithOneOfThese($main, $prefixes) {
    foreach($prefixes as $prefix) {
    if(beginsWith($main, $prefix))
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

function beginsWith($main, $prefix) {
    return strpos($main, $prefix) === 0;
}
?>
need markup?
 

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