>People are the software

I’m finally beginning to understand that the tool you use to publish your site is based on the kind of person you are. I really don’t think technical considerations figure into it much. The cultures of the blogger, greymatter, moveable type, livejournal and slash/slashdot are quite diverse. However, inside any one of the personal publishing cultures it’s somewhat homogenized. As features between the various systems mutate and reproduce to create new offspring the people who adopt them create, or perhaps uncover, new cultures.

I'm wireless in the SXSW

I’m wireless in the SXSW tradeshow area. I’d like to personally thank Apple, for all the good things that have made life worth living.

I never expected everyone I’ve met to be so warm and open. I’ve got a lot more websites I’ll be reading on a regular basis.

Hymie sent me a link

Hymie sent me a link to an article on “A New Germ Theory” that is fascinating. One of the more controversial points Paul Ewald makes is that homosexuality may be caused by a virus rather than a genetic component. If it were genetic it would not be as common as it is because homosexuals only reproduce about 20% of the time so the genes that cause it would have disappeared over time. He also makes the same point about schizophrenia being caused by a virus rather than genes because people with schizophrenia don’t reproduce as often as non-schizophrenics. Unlike his wishful thinking about homosexuality several scientists believe they may have discovered a virus which causes schizophrenia. It’s a fascinating read which provoked more questions than it answered.

Stupid lj client hasn't been

Stupid lj client hasn’t been connecting for the past few days so I haven’t cross-posted some things. Nothing interesting unless you are into perl, XML, or XSLT though.

Hmm dfwfrag.com looks kinda cool. I think it’s time me and my cube pay a visit and put some folks in the Unreal Tournament hurt locker.

I’ll be living the good life in Austin at SXSW once Friday arrives.

Hmm dfwfrag.com looks kinda cool.

Hmm dfwfrag.com looks kinda cool. I think it’s time me and my cube pay a visit and put some folks in the Unreal Tournament hurt locker.

I said I'd do this

I said I’d do this awhile back and I forgot. Okay, I didn’t forget. It’s a case of nasty code embarassing me. I’ll take my medicine though. You can look at my comment code if you wish. It has no documentation but it’s pretty simple. Considering the XInclude spec has a new xi:fallback element I’m going to change the way the comment count stuff works once that’s available in LibXML or I figure out how to add it myself.

Alright, I took a stab

Alright, I took a stab at a netflix queue parser program. In a nutshell- netflix.com sends emails to mattflix at csbgroup.org which go to me and this program- This program then tries to parse the email to figure out if its a DVD they are shipping or receiving- Then it updates an XML file which keeps track of all my Netflix DVD shipments- That XML file is what gets updated in the right sidebar I need to tweak my XSLT file a litle to incorporate some changes to the XML file though. Right now it displays any movie that is listed in the XML file and I only want it to display ones that Netflix hasn’t received.

It appears that the government

It appears that the government wants to get in on the XML action. They are looking for information on how to use “XML applications to interoperability among command and control (C2) national security systems.” Somehow I get the feeling that interoperability is a process and culture problem and the XML magic bullet has no answers. I was particularly galled by the “submit your proposal as a Microsoft Word document in email” requirement. PDF is made for stuff like this and it works on non-Windows platforms reliably.

Oh I wrote the Blog

Oh I wrote the Blog find and replace thing I spoke of a week ago. It’s in perl, which is kinda nasty, but it was so gosh durn easy. I’ll post it up here later today after a few bug fixes.

I'm so dumb sometimes. I've

I’m so dumb sometimes. I’ve been manually keeping my netflix queue up to date because the task of writing a program to log in, create an HTTPS session and parse their HTML to get the movie names automatically just didn’t seem worth it.

It didn’t dawn on me till this weekend that I can set netflix to email a dummy account on my server which delivers mail to a program. Then that program can parse the email and build the netflix queue.