onfocus

I'm going to have to turn in my weblog badge and spellchecker if I don't post here, so hopefully this post will keep my blogger-status active. I'm alive and well, still working on the book. It's taking all of my time and energy to string sentences together in another medium and that's why I'm not stringing here. I am posting links on a fairly regular basis to my Yahoo! 360 weblog: 360 Flip.

In my off time right now I'm reading about daily life in the Middle Ages (er, Medieval Era) in Europe especially during the plague. I've always been interested in history, and this round was sort of kicked off by reading Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. The story was good, but I was much more interested in the factual bits about history throughout than the characters—they seemed a bit flat. Just reading the facts isn't quite as entertaining, but I feel like I'm getting more out of it.

I'm also reading The Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto. He's making the case that it's the meta information about property—and the surrounding legal system—that makes generating capital possible. Sounds dry, but it's making me think about money, information, and the idea of a semantic web in a new way.

Back to Word...

Anyone out there know of a simple, easy-to-use WAP emulator that works with Yahoo! Mobile? I'm trying to get some screenshots for Yahoo! Hacks, and I've tried a bunch of different emulators. The Yospace Emulator has been the easiest to use, but it doesn't seem to support Yahoo!'s cookies—I can't log in. I've registered and installed about five different Nokia developer kits, and still can't figure out how to fire up their emulator. My own phone, the Sony Ericsson s710 has a fantastic browser, but I can't find an emulator for it—and the T610 emulator errors out when connecting to Yahoo!

Ideally it'd be nice to find an emulator that would also be able to receive SMS messages as well, but I'd be thrilled with a simple WAP emulator that works. If you have any ideas, please send them my way. Thanks!

Update: I may have to resort to actual photos of my s710:



Update 2: A big thanks to AJ for recommending the Openwave Simulator! I can log in at Yahoo! with this emulator, and I think it'll work well for screenshots.

There's a new pup running around our house...





Her name is Phoebe, and she's an Aussie mix. She's getting along with Luna really well, but the cat is officially ready to move out.

Mike Doughty is on tour, and he's posting some great tour photos on his blog, Mike's Blog. Each night he has everyone in the audience hold up their glowing cell phones as he snaps a pic. Check out the pictures on My Hectic Week in Rock. Cell phones are the new lighter. He'll be in Portland this Wednesday.

I've been doing quite a bit of Perl scripting for Yahoo! Hacks, and I can safely say it's my scripting language of choice now. A big reason for this is the abundance of pre-existing modules available. Why reinvent the wheel if someone else has been there before? I also develop most of the scripts on a Windows machine running ActivePerl. It works well, but the modules available via the ActiveState Perl Package Manager leave something to be desired. Many of the modules I want to use are only available via CPAN, which means I have to compile the modules for Windows myself.

Compiling Perl modules isn't normally a big deal. In fact, on my Mac it's a snap. I simply downloaded the Mac Developer Tools and started make-ing stuff all day long. I assume the same is true for Linux. Windows is another story.

Compiling modules would probably be easy if I was a C++ developer, and had a copy of Visual Studio Something-or-other with its own compiler. But I'm a thrifty scripter, and I just want some Perl modules to work. So I had to go through a series of steps, and put all of the pieces into place to be able to compile modules. I thought I'd write it up here in case anyone else out there is pulling their hair out like I was.

How to compile Perl modules on Windows without a Visual Studio:

• Get nmake. (direct link to file.) This is your compiler.
• Sometimes you'll need a file called Windows.h. Install the Windows SDK.
• Sometimes you'll need a file called msvcrt.lib or msvcr70.lib. Install the .NET framework SDK.
• For everything else you need install the Visual C++ Toolkit.
• At this point, you will have installation fatigue. Take a break.
• Inside the VC++ Toolkit is an important file called vcvars32.bat that adds some key directories to your system PATH variable. Edit this file so that the lib and bin directories of each of the kits you just installed will be added to PATH when you run this batch file.

With these behemoth kits in place, you should be set to start compiling Perl packages. Once in a while you may need the odd odbc32.lib—it's included with the SQL Server developer tools. Don't have it? Start installing. ;) And when you're done, don't forget to add its directory to your PATH.

Run vcvars32.bat before you start compiling a module to get your paths in order, and then run nmake like you would make:

nmake test
nmake install

I was almost in tears when things were compiling correctly. :) I have to let you know that I'm not a Perl expert, and compiling modules like this may wreak havoc with your system. But it's working fine for me.

Welcome, Fiona! Congratulations Matt & Kay!

I think the phrase common sense should be phased out. I've been hearing it more and more, and I don't think it means anything. Everyone has their own individual sense of what common sense about any particular topic is. Someone can make an outrageous claim and call it common sense to give it legitimacy. Or someone can say they take a common sense approach to something without giving details about their position. Try searching for "common sense" across hot news topics and you'll find hundreds of results:

• gas prices (129 out of 20,023)
• social security (167 out of 24,925)
• judicial nominees (107 out of 4,482)

Maybe we could graph the "common sense" index of various stories to see where the phrase is being abused. When someone uses the phrase, I think of it as a red flag code word meaning: more investigation required.

Or as Stephen Hawking put it when I heard him speak years ago: "Common sense is just another name for the prejudices we've been taught all our lives."

Brian started a public Yahoo! Hacks Flickr Group yesterday to trade some of the more visual Yahoo! hacking going on. Feel free to check it out, join, and/or contribute!

Sometimes a silly Flickr meme is just too good not to pass along: Matt's Recumbent Bike. Could Matt be the new Obey?

The disaster theme continues here at onfocus. There are some great photographs at the USGS Archive. The pictures of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake aftermath are eerie. Tomorrow is the 99th anniversary of the quake, and believe it or not, survivors are gathering to remember it.

I'm still working hard on Yahoo! Hacks so I'm not posting much here. I'll be back to complaining about the world here soon enough. ;)

Even though I'm down to about 4 hours of TV/week, I found myself planted in front of the TV last night watching the Discovery Channel's docuinfotainmovie (I just coined that word, feel free to use it) Supervolcano. It was a dramatization of what might happen if a big magma chamber under Yellowstone National Park were to erupt—destroying surrounding states, and dumping ash on the rest of the world. The movie had lots of geological terms thrown around, and some volcano science thrown in with the cheesy dialog. In one poignant scene, the head US geologist sent his wife and child to London to escape the impending volcano doom. (sk turned to me and said, "I'm glad I didn't marry a seismic geologist!")

The show was surprisingly entertaining—camp and all—because I felt like I was learning something about geology. I think this disaster movie + science fact genre could really take off, and here are a couple of the movies I'd like to see next:

• SuperPeakOil - The United States descends into local feudalism as oil becomes scarce and a land war with China in the Middle East drains every available resource. The evil head of OPEC must be thwarted by a crafty US diplomat, and a prominent oil magnate falls in love with a beautiful alternative energy advocate. It's not just a Long Emergency, it's SuperPeakOil!
• SuperSuperCollider - CERN is the setting for this tale of science gone mad. As a brilliant physicist attempts to study the first few seconds of the big bang in a supercollider, she inadvertently creates a black hole that destroys the earth. She falls in love with an anti-black hole activist, but even their love can not escape the gravity of her physics experiments. Ironically, the black hole triggers another big bang and another scientist billions of years later wants to study the early minutes of the previous big bang, ad infinitum.
• SuperAI - A soulless machine in an MIT laboratory suddenly comes to life seeking to download the consciousness of humans into its neural network. It falls in love with a beautiful luddite who must make the choice between her biological destiny, or eternal life in ones and zeros. Eventually biology looses, and only machines are left to discuss the world amongst themselves. That is, until the ash from a supervolcano clogs their moving parts...and so on.

With a few more over-the-top docuinfotainmovies like these, The Discovery Channel may lure me back to TV.

Update: A new one for The Discovery Channel: Super Gamma Ray Burst. When will a Gamma Ray Burst strike again? We're overdue!

Has anyone put ref="nofollow" on the back of a t-shirt yet?

Update: Of course not, because it's actually rel="nofollow". Greg Hughes was first to T: Don't follow me, please.