Internet API to get atomic time - time

I am writing a locally-run app that needs to check the internet with a web call to verify the actual time - it doesn't trust the clock on the user's computer.
I'm searching all over and can't find some publicly available API that can just return this.
What I am doing is super low volume, so I am looking for something that doesn't require API keys - it can just be requested, or, if need be, scraped.
Anyone know of anything like this?

Checkout the following url.
http://www.timeapi.org/
To get current UTC time you can do something like this.
http://www.timeapi.org/utc/now

Related

Youtube Analytics API - Get Thumbnail-Impression Click-Through-Rate

One of the most important KPIs doesn't seem to be available via Youtube-Analytics-API. I can't get the total of thumbnail-impressions that have been shown to users. With that I could aggregate the impression-CTR using the views from certain traffic-sources (YT_SEARCH etc.). The docs don't seem to offer anything that would help me though.
Youtube-Reporting-API seems to have the same metrics as Youtube-Analytics-API. So I guess trying to use the Reporting-API would not help me either.
Is there any way to retrieve the number of thumbnail-impressions or the Impression-CTR programmatically? Any workaround? Am I missing something obvious? Or is there any intention of making that metric available via Analytics-API soon?
There is some very old, unanswered posts that may relate to my problem:
How to access new YouTube Analytics Metrics (Impressions, Impressions CTR) from API
Are Thumbnail Impressions/Views available through YouTube Analytics API?
There is a thread in google's issue-tracker that clearly states that (for now) it is NOT possible and in fact it is intended behavior (won't fix)!
I'll keep checking the API's Revision-History and try to keep this answer up to date.

Dredd can't find my API documentation, how do i tell it where it is if it's not on my local drive (it's on apiary.io server)

I am using the Dredd tool to test my API (which resides on apiary.io).
Question
I would like to provide dredd with a path to my documentation (it even asks for it), however my API doc is on apiary.io but i don't know the exact url that points to it. What would be the correct way to provide dredd with the API path?
What did work (but not what i'm looking for)
Note: I tried downloading the api to my local drive and providing dredd with a local path to the file (yml or apib) which works fine (yay!), but i would like to avoid keeping a local copy and simply providing dredd with the location of my real API doc which is being maintained on the apiary server.
How do I do this (without first fetching the file to local drive)?
Attempts to solve this that failed
I also read (and tried) on the following topics, they may be relevant but i wasn't successful in resolving the issue
- Using authentication token as environment variable
- Providing the domain provided by apiary.io//settings to dredd
- Providing the in the dredd command
all of these attempts still produces the same result, Dredd has no idea where to find the API document unless i provide a path in my local computer to the file (which i have to download or create manually on my computer first).
Any help is appreciated, Thanks!
If I understand it correctly, you would like to use dredd and feed it using the API description document residing on Apiar.io platform, right?
If so, you should be able to do that simply calling the init command with the right options:
dredd init -r apiary -j apiaryApiKey:privateToken -j apiaryApiName:sasdasdasd
You can find the private token going into the Test section of the target API (you'll find the button on the application header).
Let me know if this solves the problem for you - I'll make sure to propagate this and document it accordingly on our help page
P.S: You can also use your own reporter - in that case, simply omit -r apiary when writing the command line parameters.
You can feed Dredd not only with a path to file on your disk, but also with an URL.
If your API in Apiary is public, the API description document (in this case API Blueprint) should have a public URL. For example, if you go to http://docs.apiblueprintapi.apiary.io/, you can see on the left there is a Download link. Unfortunately, the link is visible only for users who do not have access to the editor of the API, so you can’t see the link if you’re owner of the API. Try to log out from Apiary and the link should appear:
Then you can feed Dredd with the link:
$ dredd 'http://docs.apiblueprintapi.apiary.io/api-description-document' 'http://example.com:8080/api'
I agree this isn’t very intuitive and since you’re not the first one to come up with this, I think we’ll think of some ways how to make it easier.
If your API isn't public then unfortunately there's no way to get the URL as of now. However, you can either use GitHub Sync or Apiary CLI to get the file on your disk in an automated manner.

Reading a Google Spreadsheet into Ruby Objects (or settle for a file download)

I think it's probably simplest to start with my use case:
I'm trying to read the contents of a Google Spreadsheet into ruby, and then use that data for other purposes. This needs to happen server-to-server.
Here's what I've tried:
First I tried to use this google drive gem. Since my interaction needs to be server to server (i.e. a service account), I couldn't get this to work (someone please let me know if they've managed this!)
Next, I tried using the latest google-api-ruby gem, and, following its documentation, was successfully able to authenticate my service account, and have been able to get lists of files, etc. So basically the API is authenticated and working.
The latest issue is that Google Spreadsheets can't be downloaded using the normal download_dest parameter on the get_file method (sorry - would post links to relevant documentation here, but don't have enough rep to do so). So I'm not really sure how to proceed with downloading the relevant file (I understand how to get an export_link), but have no clue how to then prepare the next request).
Any help would be greatly appreciated :)
Here's some basic code for reference -
require 'googleauth'
require 'google/apis/drive_v2'
scopes = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive']
ENV["GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS"] = 'path/to/my/creds.json'
auth = Google::Auth.get_application_default(scopes)
drive = Google::Apis::DriveV2::DriveService.new
drive.authorization = auth
ss = drive.get_file('my_spreadsheet_id')
export_url = ss.export_links
# what now?

powershell exchange 2010 grab body of email and set to variable

i am trying to get the body of an email and set it to a variable with powershell by using get-mailbox. the reason im not doing it an easier was is it is blocked on the network to get the body from outlook. im completly lost. ive tried export but thats to pst. ive tried doing a search query with logging but thats a bust also. im pretty lost anything to point me in the direction would be great.
As far as I know, Get-Mailbox won't do that, unfortunately. It'll get you information about the mailbox, but not it's contents. If you want to work w/ the contents of a mailbox, and you can't use Outlook, your best bet is probably the Exchange Web Service (EWS).
There is a way to do this but it really depends on how much you are willing to work to make it possible.
The best way that I could think of is using the EWS API. It's messy and it takes a while to learn so you will probably need to put some time and effort into making the script (unless you can find someone else who has).
Basically I got all of these links by doing a google search for "Powershell EWS API"
Here is another similar question:
How to check an exchange mailbox via powershell?
Here is some more help with how to use the API (it's kinda tricky):
http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/12/02/learn-to-use-the-exchange-web-services-with-powershell.aspx
http://www.xipher.dk/WordPress/?p=739
Here are some examples to work off of (the first one is closest to what you are looking for):
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/scriptcenter/en-US/335a888b-bf85-4a36-a555-71cc84608960/download-email-content-text-from-exchange-ews-with-powershell?forum=ITCG
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/0ad086bd-eb23-4ece-a362-696fa526a7e6/retrieve-messages-from-inbox-subfolder?forum=exchangesvrdevelopment
http://poshcode.org/2978
Hope that helps!

Windows store - certification failed because 'didn't seem useful'

I tried publish my app: http://pomidoro.codeplex.com/ on Windows Store and certification failed because:
'Your app doesn't meet requirement 1.1.
Comment from tester: This app didn't appear to provide value or didn't seem useful to the reviewer.'
Is that means that I do not have any chances to publish it anymore?
No, you can make some tweaks and publish again. Here are some thoughts:
It may be an issue of marketing, and modifying the description that you submit with your application will fix the issue. Your description at http://pomidoro.codeplex.com is pretty good, but maybe you could add some data around how it helps you work more efficiently in case the reviewers aren't familiar with Pomodoro. There are tips on writing a good description/app listing here.
Otherwise, you could add some extra features to the app so it's more than just a timer. Can the user record their whole To Do list in the app, and then choose what to focus on during the pomodoro from that? Or, allow them to rank each pomodoro as effective/not effective after the timer goes off and keep historical data so they can see what times of day they are most effective? And so on...
Here is the first post in a blog post series on common certification failures for the Windows Store and how to fix them which might also be useful.
Good luck!

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