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27 January 2006 @ 09:11 am
Linking Up  
Yesterday was a good day. I got up early and finished up a subproject for a client. It felt good to get it done. Actually, it's the coolest work-related thing I've made in a long time. Basically, it's a little interface to associate links with a piece of content in a CMS (content management system). You can add, edit, delete and reorder any number of links. It will probably only be impressive to people who've done web work, but in case anyone wants to see it in action, I've isolated the cool part on a page so it can be played with and admired. (Can you tell I'm a sucker for affirmation?) Be sure to have JavaScript turned on. I couldn't have done this without the amazing MochiKit and tool-man libraries. Good, portable JavaScript libraries--imagine that! Enjoy.

After finishing this link work, I linked up with Simon (in town for the week) and we went to lunch at the yummy Taj Mahal, my favorite Indian restaurant in New Orleans. After that we took a short detour to the French Quarter, partly to walk off the all-we-could-eat lunch.





Afterwards, we went to Fair Grinds and hacked a bit on a little project Simon was trying to do. While surfing the iTunes music store (using iTunes), he wanted to have every 30-second sample he listened to downloaded to his laptop. He was trying to do this by listening to the packet chatter with tcpflow, watching it for HTTP requests and then passing these to curl. Since I wasn't sure how to take the pieces of the HTTP request and reform them into a URL on the command line, I did what I always do in these situations--I wrote a Perl script. It opens a pipe to tcpflow and then listens. When it sees everything it needs to build a URL, it does so and uses LWP::UserAgent to grab the song sample. It could still use a few improvements, but it works now in a pretty raw way. It was fun just hacking around for fun. Simon always has lots of ideas about little tools he'd like, so it's fun to do this with him, since his aspirations are sometimes beyond his programming ability. I'm always glad when I can help him manifest his machinations.

At 5, I dashed home to meet Fran for a dinner date. She drove us there in her new ride! Way cool, dude.





It was great to catch up with her over a yummy dinner at Babylon. She's be famously embroiled in the throes of passion for the last few months with her new love, so we haven't seen too much of her. But she's putting herself back into rotation, which we all greatly appreciate. Fran's a dear friend and I've missed her. I understand that all-consuming early part of a relationship and I'm glad she got swallowed by love. It's the best thing in the world to get swallowed by. Still, I missed her and I'm glad she's back on the scene.

After dinner, I came back home and chilled a bit. After 9, I finally got to talk to Chris Mabli.





We've been missing each other when the cell phone rates are best. I'm encouraging him to get Skype so we can talk more and for free. Skype is cool, especially with cameras. I wish the Mac version supported video.

Around 10, Ana and I went out to meet Simon and catch Josh's latest musical outing (last I heard, they were called Mojo Jojo and the Last Triceratops or something like that, but they are starting to resemble Saaraba more and more) at Café Brazil.





Unfortunately, the show was very lightly attended. In fact, I was able to park right in front of the club. And this on a Thursday night. Thursday nights used to be hoppin' on Frenchman Street. I think the low turnout says less about the musicians playing on Frenchman than it does about PLF New Orleans. I hope after everything shakes out that this is still a city that cares deeply about music and dancing in the street and the joy of living.

Café Brazil was where I first figured out how to really have fun with the manual settings on my digital camera. The combination of low lighting with a few bright spots makes it a lot of fun to "paint" with the camera. I spent a good bit of time doing it last night. Since you can't view it happening as you do it, you just have click the button, move the camera around and hope for the best. Simon's been working very hard this week. He nodded off a bit and I stole his sleeping soul with a very steady hand. When I was looking at my pictures this morning, I had the idea to overlay one of the "painted" pictures over the sleeping Simon. I like the result:





The composition isn't the greatest, but I'm trying not to be such a perfectionist these days.

Thanks again to everyone who hung out with me yesterday and to Josh, Boyanna, Danny, John and DJ Scratchmo for funkin' it up! Nothing better than the love of friends, the sound of music and the taste of delicious on my tongue.
 
 
 
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fieldsofgarlicfieldsofgarlic on February 1st, 2006 06:42 pm (UTC)
Yay! I'm excited that the house-buying thing might actually happen!

It was fun scripting with you. Let's do it again sometime!
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