Blog Summary (2)

Or you may also wish to know each date on which the article is published. Looking into the html file again, you will see the line like this:

<h2 class='date-header'><span>12/31/2013</span></h2>

So your code, myprog.awk, might be:

BEGIN {FS = "[<>]"}
/<h2 class='date-header'>/ {date=$5}
/post-title entry-title/ {getline;print date,$3}

And you will obtain:

12/31/2013 Taxi Driver
12/22/2013 The Accused
12/15/2013 The Silence of the Lambs
12/08/2013 Nell
12/01/2013 Contact

If you wish to make a list spanning many months, you first make a file, say, getlist.txt;

http://yourFBblog.com/2014-01-archive.html
...
http://yourFBblog.com/2011-04-archive.html

And get all the files, and process them.

% wget -i getlist.txt
% gawk -f myprog.awk 201*-archive.html | cat -n

The result will be something like this:

  1  29/01/2014 My Latest Post
...
402  01/04/2011 My First Post

Actually, my current version of myprog.awk is:

BEGIN {FS = "[<>]"}
/<h2 class='date-header'>/ {date=$5; if(length(date)==9) date="0" date; month=substr(date,1,2); day=substr(date,4,2); year=substr(date,7,4) }
/post-title entry-title/ {getline;printf("%2s-%2s-%2s %s\n",year,month,day,$3)}

This minor modification was required because the months from Jan. to Sept. are represented as a one digit (1 to 9), while from Oct. to Dec. as two digits(10 to 12). Therefore, the output is something like:

2013-12-31 Auld Lang Syne
2014-01-01 DX Pedition to Mars

Blog Summary

Sometimes you may wish to get all the titles of your previous articles in your or someone else’s blog. There should be numeours ways to attain the goal, and here is one aproach.

Suppose all the articles in December 2013 are in, say,
http://yourFBblog.com/2013-12-archive.html.

You will first get the file by

% wget http://yourFBblog.com/2012-12-archive.html

And looking into the file, you will see something like this

<h3 class='post-title entry-title' itemprop='name'>
<a href='http://yourFBblog.com/2013/12/taxi-driver.html'>Taxi Driver</a>
</h3>

This suggests you that you need a line just after the one containg the phrase “post-title entry-title”, and the title you wish to obtain is the second element of the line. Therfore, what you need is:

% cat 2013-12-archive.html | gawk ' BEGIN {FS = "[<>]"} /post-title entry-title/ {getline;print $3}'

And you will get something like this:

Taxi Driver
The Accused
The Silence of the Lambs
Nell
Contact

Mechanical Bug Key (2)

BugSlowI

So my assumption is that you can start your dash immediately if you can move your finger (and the dash lever) fast enough, but not so with your dot because there is a weight which hinders the quick closure of the contact.

The red trace shows the contact closure, but this time the dash contact is adjusted so that it is closed when the lever is in its neutral position. So what you see is:

  1. Low: the lever is in neutral and the dash contact is closed.
  2. High: you start moving your thumb, the dash contact immediately opens, but the dot contact is still open.
  3. Low: dot is generated.
  4. High: dot space.
  5. Low: one more dot.
  6. High: another dot space.
  7. Low: the lever released, and the dash contact closed again.

The duration of (2.) is determined by both the speed of your thumb and the time constant of the oscillation of the weight.

BugFastI

This time I moved my finger much faster, but the time required to move the weight from its initilal position to the place close enough to close the dot contact is the same, thus suggesting the duration of (2.) is lower bounded.

BugDash

This figure shows the delay from the time your start moving your finger to the time the dash contact closes. For the measurement purposes, a grounded contact to detect the lever being in its neutral position is temporarily employed. The delay in this case is 9.5 mS. It depends on the size of the gap and how fast you move the finger, but anyway you will see that the delay is relatively small.

Mechanical Bug Key

BugU

Actually, we do not care for neither full-automatic nor semi-automatic electronic keyers. What we love is our good old mechanical bug keys.

So here is what we really want to take a close look. The red trace shows the mechanical contact closure, and the yellow one is the side-tone signal of 600Hz for the letter U. You will immediately notice that the transition time from dot to dash is rather short, which, of course, is highly intentional, but anyway you can do this kind of thing only with a mechanical bug key.

BugD

On the contrary, making a transition from dash to dot very short is quite difficult. The figure shows an unsuccessful case although I tried many times to do so.

BugR

So this could be a typical sequence for the letter R, a short space followed by a long space in the letter.

Electronic Bug Key (3)

ElekeyRdotdash

This time I used my two channels for Dot Contact Closure (red) and for Dash Contact Closure (yellow). Unfortunately the side-tone signal is not recorded, but you can hear the sound to confirm that the letter R is generated.

ElekeyRsynth

This is a SYNTHESIZED image to emulate a 3-channel oscilloscope. From the top, the signals are the Dot Contact Closure (red), the Dash Contact Closure (yellow), and the side-tone (green), respectively. The synthesis of two images is justified because the side-tone for the letter R is (or should be) always the same.

Electronic Bug Key (2)

ElekeyR

Let’s start again with a very simple case, full electronic keyer operations.

The figure shows the Dot Contact Closure (red) of the paddle and the relating side-tone signal (yellow) of 600Hz. There should also be the Dash Contact Closure, say in green, but my oscilloscope has only two channels. You need to use your imagination by considering the movement of your fingers when you are sending the letter R.

To generate the second dot, the last element of the letter R, you only have to keep your thumb in position until you hear the start of dash, because most modern keyers have both dot- and dash-memories, and due to those memories the side-tone signal perfectly meets the timing rules of morse code (as far as a single letter is concerned).

Any questions so far?

Electronic Bug Key

Elebug2

Most Morse code keyers has a mode for emulating bug keys. The figure shows the dot signal (red) obtained at the mechanical contact and the 7026kHz RF waveform (yellow), which is highly undersampled.

Bug2full

The figure shows the same signals but with a mechanical bug key, Vibroplex Blue Racer. Although the dot signals differ in two cases, the movement of your thumb should be almost the same in a sense that you only push the paddle once.

Bug2short

One feature only available to mechanical bug keys is that you can make your dots shorter by retreating your thumb earlier than usual. I do not know if this could really be a feature, but this is something you can not attain by an electronic keyer.

How many dots?

BlueDots

When the paddle of your bugkey is pushed for dots and is kept in that position, the oscillation of the arm starts and you will hear a series of dots, which may last for several tens of seconds, or about 23sec in this particular case.

The waveform shows the side tone signal (around 600Hz) which is highly undersampled.

My First Bugkey

BlueRacer2

Here is a Vibroplex Blue Racer – 2000 (standard edition) , my first bug key. I need to do a lot of practice with the key, I am sure, but it will give another aspect of the joy in my CW life.