Jez posted a nice little toy today - box: monitoring RSS/RDF feeds via email/SMS. Since I don't have access to an email/SMS gateway, this isn't really that useful to me. Besides, I subscribe to far too many feeds - I'd be getting hundreds of messages a day! But I can see tremendous use in various parts of this gadget.

Indeed, between the tool itself and Jez's follow up comments, I've learned a couple of useful things. Firstly I'd not heard of hsqldb. It's a fast, lightweight, pure Java RDBMS, a bit like Python's Gadfly.

And secondly, now I know how to tell Java about my firewall - see Write Java apps that work with proxy-based firewalls.

Thanks, Jez!