Each year, The NEWS spotlights the industry’s latest commercial heating products. The manufacturers provided us with a brief description of features included with each product.

Summer cooling season is in full gear, which means that both technicians and their tools are being kept extremely busy.

People are still pinching pennies and choosing repairs, but there are ways for contractors to sell new equipment, even when it’s more expensive.

Commercial heating equipment manufacturers are rolling out new systems that are energy efficient, as well as service friendly for contractors.

Old homes and old HVAC systems bring the potential for asbestos — here’s what HVAC contractors and duct cleaning professionals need to know if they run into it on a jobsite.

Low public awareness of incentives that can subsidize residential HVAC purchases means contractors have the opportunity to educate and position themselves as trusted advisors, marketing experts say.

Building automation systems can boost heating and cooling efficiency by more than 20%.

For more HVAC contractors to sell zoning systems, they have to understand the benefits, challenges, know how to approach customers to even be able to sell it, and then comes the install.

A recent survey shows homeowners are unfamiliar with what an HVAC heat pump can accomplish.

There are numerous factors for this trend, including energy efficiency, government incentives, and technology improvement. But HVAC contractors are still the boots on the ground in this electrification mission.

In this showcase, The ACHR NEWS introduces the latest cooling equipment available for the upcoming summer season in order to help contractors distinguish between brands.

Every year, The ACHR NEWS introduces the latest heating equipment that is available for the upcoming winter season.

Any furnace with induced draft combustion may occasionally exhibit unburned gas odor near the furnace in the off cycle.

Every year, The ACHR NEWS introduces the latest heating equipment that is available for the upcoming winter season.

Cold climate heat pumps were on full display on the AHR show floor and manufacturers were eager to share their progress reports in the Department of Energy’s CCHP Challenge.

Throughout March, voters will help the staff at Peterman Brothers select four charity partner organizations for 2023.

The residential heating showcase is designed to help HVAC contractors learn about the new heating equipment that is available for the upcoming cooler months.

Taking a look at the major concerns around replacing an 80% furnace with a high-efficiency one such as venting requirements, drilling extra holes, and financial costs.

For technicians who run across older furnaces where air conditioners were later added, it pays to know how a fan center operates.

The residential heating showcase is designed to help HVAC contractors learn about the new heating equipment that is available for the upcoming cooler months.

Posted by Ciro Santilli OurBigBook via dev on Sep 17

John Wilkes from Google talks with Charles Anderson about managing large clusters of machines. The discussion starts with Borg, Google’s internal cluster management program. John discusses what Borg does and what it provides to programmers and system administrators. He also describes Kubernetes, an open-source cluster management system recently developed by Google using lessons learned from Borg, Mesos, and Omega

Howard Chu, CTO of Symas Corp and chief architect of the OpenLDAP Project, discusses the key technical features of the Lightning Memory-mapped Database (LMDB) that make it one of the fastest, most efficient and safest embedded data stores in the world.

Heidi Howard, a researcher in the field of distributed systems, discusses distributed consensus. Heidi explains when we need it, when we don't need and the algorithms we use to achieve it.

Jeremy Howard from fast.ai explains deep learning from concept to implementation. Thanks to transfer learning, individuals and small organizations can get state-of-the-art results on machine learning problems using the open source fastai library...

Arin Bhowmick, Global Vice President and Chief Design Officer at IBM, discusses why and how UX design for enterprise applications is different than for consumer applications.

Howard Chu, CTO of Symas Corp and chief architect of the OpenLDAP project, discusses the key features of B+Tree Data Structures which make it the default selection for efficient and predictable storage of sorted data.

In this episode, Deepthi Sigireddi of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) spoke with SE Radio host Nikhil Krishna about how Vitess scales MySQL. They discuss the design and architecture of the product; how Vitess impacts modern data problems;...

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If you need to load an RSS feed with the PHP programming language, the open source library SimplePie greatly simplifies the process of pulling in items from a feed to present on a website, store in a database or do something else coooool with the data. There's a full installation guide for SimplePie but you can skip it with just three steps:

1. Download SimplePie 1.5.
2. Copy the file autoloader.php and the folder library to a folder that's accessible from your PHP code.
3. Make note of this folder; you'll be using require_once() to load autoloader.php from that location.

SimplePie has been designed to work the same regardless a feed's format. It supports RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom and the earlier versions of RSS. Additionally it can read feed elements from nine namespaces.

Here's PHP code that loads feed items from the news site Techdirt and displays them in HTML:

// load the SimplePie library
require_once('/var/www/libraries/simplepie-1.5/autoloader.php');

// load the feed
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url('https://www.techdirt.com/feed/');
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

// create the output
$html_output = '';
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
  $html_output .= '<p><a href="' . $item->get_link() . '">' . $item->get_title() . '</a></p>';
  $html_output .= $item->get_description();
  $html_output .= '<p>By ' . $item->get_author(0)->get_name() . ', ' . $item->get_date();
}

// display the output
ECHO <<<END
$html_output
END;


The API documentation for SimplePie_Item lists the functions that can extract data from each feed item. The versatility of the library is demonstrated by get_authors(), which can retrieve an item's authorship information whether it was in the RSS author element, Dublin Core creator, iTunes author, or Atom author.

SimplePie supports caching so that a feed isn't downloaded every time code is executed. The addition of these lines turns on caching, specifies the location of a cache folder and sets the time to use a cached version to four hours (14,400 seconds):

$feed->set_cache_location('/var/www/cache/');
$feed->set_cache_duration(14400);
$feed->enable_cache();

SimplePie was created by RSS Advisory Board member Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon and Ryan McCue. The project is currently maintained on GitHub by Malcom Blaney.

There are a lot of libraries for processing XML data with Java that can be used to read RSS feeds. One of the best is the open source library XOM created by the computer book author Elliotte Rusty Harold.

As he wrote one of his 20 books about Java and XML, Harold got so frustrated with the available Java libraries for XML that he created his own. XOM, which stands for XML Object Model, was designed to be easy to learn while still being strict about XML, requiring documents that are well-formed and utilize namespaces in complete adherence to the specification. (At the RSS Advisory Board, talk of following a spec is our love language.)

XOM was introduced in 2002 and is currently up to version 1.3.9, though all versions have remained compatible since 1.0. To use XOM, download the class library in one of the packages available on the XOM homepage. You can avoid needing any further configuration by choosing one of the options that includes third-party JAR files in the download. This allows XOM to use an included SAX parser under the hood to process XML.

Here's Java code that loads items from The Guardian's RSS 2.0 feed containing articles by Ben Hammersley, displaying them as HTML output:

// create an XML builder and load the feed using a URL
Builder bob = new Builder();
Document doc = bob.build("https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benhammersley/rss");
// load the root element and channel
Element rss = doc.getRootElement();
Element channel = rss.getFirstChildElement("channel");
// load all items in the channel
Elements items = channel.getChildElements("item");
for (Element item : items) {
  // load elements of the item
  String title = item.getFirstChildElement("title").getValue();
  String author = item.getFirstChildElement("creator",
    "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/").getValue();
  String description = item.getFirstChildElement("description").getValue();
  // display the output
  System.out.println(">h2>" + title + ">/h2>");
  System.out.println(">p>>b>By " + author + ">/b>>/p>");
  System.out.println(">p>" + description + ">/p>");

All of the classes used in this code are in the top-level package nu.xom, which has comprehensive JavaDoc describing their use. Like all Java code this is a little long-winded, but Harold's class names do a good job of explaining what they do. A Builder uses its build() method with a URL as the argument to load a feed into a Document over the web. There are also other build methods to load a feed from a file, reader, input stream, or string.

Elements can be retrieved by their names such as "title", "link" or "description". An element with only one child of a specific type can be retrieved using the getFirstChildElement() method with the name as the argument:

Element linkElement = item.getFirstChildElement("link");

An element containing multiple children of the same type uses getChildElements() instead:

Elements enclosures = item.getChildElements("enclosure");
if (enclosures.size() > 1) {
  System.out.println("I'm pretty sure an item should only include one enclosure");
}

If an element is in a namespace, there must be a second argument providing the namespace URI. Like many RSS feeds, the ones from The Guardian use a dc:creator element from Dublin Core to credit the item's author. That namespace has the URI "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/".

If the element specified in getFirstChildElement() or getChild Elements() is not present, those methods return null. You may need to check for this when adapting the code to load other RSS feeds.

If the name Ben Hammersley sounds familiar, he coined the term "podcasting" in his February 2004 article for The Guardian about the new phenomenon of delivering audio files in RSS feeds.

It’s not just our homes that are at risk from climate change; it’s our customs, songs, and stories.

Analyst Jean Bricmont offers a deep analysis of how France's left-leaning coalition swept a plurality of seats in the recent snap elections.

A new ballot measure in California would reverse progress on reducing mass incarceration. Here's what our regular correspondent Dortell Williams has to say about it.

In the wake of AIPAC’s ouster of two pro-Palestine congressional Democrats, a Jewish American digs into the reality of Zionist influence in American politics.

“We need more white relatives to face their own truth, though doing so may bring immense discomfort,” says Edgar Villanueva.

Marjorie Kelly's new book critiques the U.S. economy's embrace of "wealth supremacy," and explores alternate models of democratic economies.

Analyst Lindsay Koshgarian counters President Biden’s claim that American interests require funding Israeli militarism.

A two-step card check process is efficient, making it easier for workers to unionize with a simple majority.

Childhood poverty continues to plague the U.S., though simple solutions exist to address it. Will the next administration implement them?

Journalist Sonali Kohli’s new book centers the life and work of three young women of color who refused to let powerful elites shape their lives and communities.

In the months prior to Vice President Kamala Harris’ nomination to the Democratic presidential ticket, I felt a lingering fear in my body about what it would mean for Black

Restorative justice can be a challenging approach to domestic violence, but it can also be rewarding when the people involved are participating with genuine desire to find a path forward.

New findings challenge the political adage that youthful idealism gives way to conservative pragmatism with age.

The bond between people and their pets can be life-saving, especially amid the struggle for safe housing.

handy reference

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In a Champions League match between his team, Paris Saint Germain, and Real Sociedad, the French forward managed to run 100m in 10.9 seconds.

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