Alright! I managed to get my mail queue down below 90% of quota. Only 134MB 117MB worth of it left to file.

James Nachtwey’s photographs are amazing. Related links @ boingboing. curl command at SuperDeluxo’s wget and curl blog.

Hmm, so it is strange to find myself wishing I had an Audioscrobbler plug-in for my DVD-changer? Hmm, I wonder if there’s any creative way to write off a Squeezebox as a business expense…

(I should just put my Gateway Connected Touchpad back together, I know. Too many toys, too few organizational skills)

Avoiding paying work by doing some… web design (wow, last time I did that was… …a long time ago). Also, mulling over SQL representation of potentially cyclical graphs: using a cluster table to restrict tree building and then baking all the nodes (beats writing a servlet and caching all the nodes I think)

Related: check out Marc Canter’s current blog design – the Laszlo widgets I couldn’t care less about (sorry), but the WebOutliner (especially the inline quoting) and K-Collector integration is hotness.

• Clagnut: Images in liquid columns
• Mezzoblue: ppk comment on browser stat detection (in-depth ppk browser string detection article)
• RE_INVIGORATE – open source distributed traffic monitoring
• Mezzoblue: Accessible Image Replacement alternatives

mathowie gives a shoutout to philg. photo.net was one of the first web sites I went to. I actually remember reading Travels with Samantha and going through the photo resources before happening on WTR. Like Matt, Philip’s writings really shaped a lot of my thinking on web community and development. For a while, I would use familiarity with Philip’s work as a way to judge a developer’s savviness/background. As time went on, I got more and more blank stares… Nowadays I doubt more than a few percent of developers would recognize the name. But a lot of the pre-dotcom webfolk would, I suspect.

Unlike Matt, I did get a chance to thank Philip personally one of the times he came out to Caltech (’98 or ’99?). I had answered a question during the presentation, and when I mentioned I had done the problem sets afterward, I got an off-the-cuff job offer, which was quite amusing. While at the time working at ArsDigita seemed like it would have a dream job, I never followed up. Looking back, maybe was a good thing (see also). He seemed like a nice enough person, and I’m glad that’s how I remember him as. Anyway, thanks Philip, for all you’ve done for the web.

Oh, and I’m so glad I no longer write TCL.

• Lessig export
• Freelance work
• Clean apt
• CC editing
• Website Reorg
  • Redesign
  • new backend
  • org domains, admin
  • Dev schedule/todos
  • G-Forge
  • redo jukebox
• ETCON reg
• Work catchup
• Treoblog

Perl refs:

• DevLearn: Perl Tutorial – clean basic ref
• PLEAC – always a life-saver
• Text::vCard
• Net::vCard
• Nokia Smart Messaging vCard perl script – should actually look at this code sometime
• O’Reilly Spidering Hacks (book)
• Cultured Perl: Tied variables
• Variable Scoping in Perl (shut up)
• Robert F’s Quick-n-Dirty Perl Tutorial
• CPAN FAQ
• perlnewmod – preparing a new module for distribution

I wanted to post up at list a little bit of xmas related stuff:

• History Channel: History of the Holidays
• Idaho Indymedia: A Christian Christmas
• History of Christmas
• The True History of Christmas

So hail to Marduk, Kronos, Saturn, Mithras, all long since forgotten…
And to the new gods… Media, Commerce, and Advertising.

Finally got around to working on that Sidekick address exporter. Finished with 6 minutes to spare. Merry Xmas.

• Sidekick Address Exporter (view source)

So, it’s GPL’d. I may eventually get back to it, there’s a lot left to do, and it’s quite fugly, but I’m sick of it at this point. Hopefully someone else will find this useful, as it’s the only way that I can justify the time spent on this. 🙂

(AFAIK, there’s nothing else that pulls out live data from your hiptop, so enjoy — alpha software, requires Perl, WWW::Mechanize, HTML:TokeParser, only tested on my Panther system. If there’s demand, I may get around to actually getting this in a more usable state, and/or throwing up a web version)

Posted a thread on the hiptop forums.

So here’s a little admission. I’ve never bothered to write OOP Perl before. Just never had the need. I still don’t, but maybe it’d be worth looking into.

• perl.com: Object-Oriented Perl
• Dev Shed: Object-Oriented Programming in Perl
• Object Oriented Perl – the book apparently, by Damien Conway