Not even the Pipes and Drums of the Royal 48^th Highlanders of Canada turned up to 11 wakes up recalcitrant, sluggabed houseguests.

Hope you had a good night's sleep, Todd and Wy... :-)

I had this idea a couple days ago. I use a Jabber client to talk to Tracy, co-workers, etc while I'm at the PC (as Jabber is simply a protocol, there are many of clients; the one I use is called Konverse). I also frequently listen to music in MP3 format, typically streaming from my home PC to a Linux MP3 player called XMMS. I dot his when I'm at home, and when I'm at work.

Well, to make a long story short Jabber supports this notion of a "presence". You can be merely "Away", or you can be "Extended Away", or "Normal" or "Do Not Disturb". Like when you are going to lunch, you can set your presence to "Away" and then even put in a little bit of text to explain where you are going to go eat. When you are going to a two hour meeting, you'd select "Extended Away" and then enter something like "Another goddam meeting to go to" as your text. You get the idea.

A couple things about this handy presence thing have occurred to me:

1. I sometimes set my presence so that other know where I am, but I forget to more often than not and I rarely enter any explanatory text for my presence whereabouts
   
2. When I'm leaving my desk I almost always either pause XMMS, stop the currently playing selection, or quit the app altogether depending on how long I'm going to be away

Starting to see a connection here? Me too.

It turns out that XMMS has a number of handy features, two of which are of interest to me. First, it has a very nice set of keyboard shortcuts. You can almost do more by using keyboard accelerator keys than you can by clicking things with the mouse. I use shortcut keys a lot (like ctrl_tab to go between desktops, alt+tab to go between windows, etc). So I find myself using alt-tab to go to XMMS, then using one of these keys:
    z = Previous Song
    x = Play
    c = Pause
    v = Stop
    b = Next Song
And then typically I lock my screen. Very handy.

The second thing about XMMS that concerns me lately is that it has an API. Meaning you can write applications that talk to it. Or get info from it. And since I can write applications and can read XMMS's API spec, I can talk to XMMS. Or get info from it. Even via Perl.

I said earlier that Jabber was merely a protocol (as in a "messaging protocol"), not an application (as in AIM, ICQ, etc). Lots of people have written apps that use the Jabber protocol. Some people have even written Perl modules that can talk to Jabber servers.

So I always forget to set my presence (causing people to repeatedly type "Hello, are you there?" and whatnot on Saturday when I'm not anywhere near the office PC that Konverse is running on, or when I'm at lunch) yet I almost never forget to dim the music. I can get info from XMMS and find out what is playing, whether it's paused, stopped, or even if the app isn't running. I can write a small process that sends Jabber information, specifically presences. Then this all means that all I have to do is write a small app which runs in the background, detects when I'm logged in, polls XMMS and sets my presence appropriately.

I'm thinking that if I'm playing music, I'm "Normal" (ie, able to talk). And why not have my presence info be the song title or something frivolous (I get the song title, playlist order and number, encoding rate, and lots of other info as a by-product of finding out the state of XMMS and I have to send something when I set a presence -- so it's not like it's extra work to send the title as the presence text)? When the music is paused, then I'm just "Away". Maybe set the presence text to "Music's paused, Bill's away for a bit..." When I've stopped the music, I'm "Extended Away". Presence says like "Music ain't playing, he ain't there." If I've quit XMMS, then I'm "Do Not Disturb" and the presence is "It's quiet time."

The only wrinkle is that I don't know how I would go about listening to music when I also don't want to be disturbed (like maybe it's a Miles Davis kind of day). I suppose I could simply shut down Konverse. Or I could use my app as a small wrapper script which I could pass messages to. Either way, the whole thing is frivolous, but that never stopped me before.

The subject says it all: MS BOB. Huge boongoogle. Although it didn't really die.

Interesting story about BOB. You every wonder where you got that paperclip in Word? BOB. Ever wonder who the project lead for BOB was? Bill Gates' wife was responsible for the paper clip. Really, it's true.

Melinda French Gates was a project lead on MS Bob (you have to remember MicroSoft Bob -- it was that cartoony software that slowed your machine to a crawl and insulted you while balancing your checkbook or reading email). When Bob was revealed to be the complete and utter turkey that it was always destined to be, guess what got some of the "usability and human interface" stuff? Office. Guess who happened to also be, ah, "seeing" The Boss? Melinda. Why wasn't Bob just canned, like any other project that wastes millions and failed completely? You have to wonder if Bill G wasn't getting pillow-talked into something. In fact, MS Bob was the first consumer product Bill Gates released personally. People do the strangest things for love.

Anyway, a lot of what Bob had to offer didn't get canned (as it should have). It got repuposed and wound up in other MS products. Take a look at the screenshot on this page. See that dog in the lower corner? That was Bob's dog Rex. (I wish they had a picture of the dragon named "Java"; I wonder if McNealy every knew about that?) Looks like that paper clip, eh? Bob's ghost is in other stuff, too. MS Agent had a re-incarnation.

I don't know what got me on the topic, really. Just a random thought. Maybe it was that negative ad campaign they started recently. Do I want my server run by the guys who gave me BOB? Yeah... I think the Bob fiasco sheds some light on what goes on at MS. There's really no reason to wonder about the pape clip. I'm sure Melinda will insist on touchy-feely stuff being included in every MS product. I love it when someone thinks for me...

Ever wanted to make your own Klein Bottle? Well, I've got instructions right
here.

OK, so it's not a song or anything...

I admit it: I'm a complete slut when it comes to titanium. You make a bread box out of titanium, I'd buy it. I'd buy a titanium paperweight probably. I wanted a titanium wedding ring, but Tracy said no on that one.

So Nokia is making a titanium phone and, predictably, I want it. Even if it'll only work outside the US...

It occurred to me on the drive home tonight that quite a few of people have been getting into MySQL lately. A couple people have been asking about reference materials and I thought it might be handy to send out a general notice thing. (Note: this was originally an email sent to a mailing list at work.) I have a couple books, two web sites, and a personal online cheat sheet to recommend.

Web site #1:

Very good stuff for beginners. It aims a bit low for more advanced stuff, but presents quite a range of material in a very readable way. I've found myself going back to it for things I don't really have to remember (but maybe should). Very tutorial-ish. If you go in for that sort of thing, then the site should be useful. I do, and it is. Oh yeah, DevShed also has a good set of PHP (and various other) tutorials.

Web site #2:

This is from O'Reilly, and is maybe a bit more advanced than DevShed. The format is a little harder for me to accept, and maybe is kinda light, but if you want to learn about something "hard to search Google for" -- like why a statement that contains "... where (table1.field1=table2.field1)" is the same as an inner join -- then this is the place to go. Illustrates more conceptual information, which is nice once you're past the basics and want to get a higher level view.

Book #1:

If you're planning anything webbish with MySQL, then you should look at PHP. This book is real good at walking people through both MySQL and PHP, which is no mean feat. Well worth the read, good as a reference. I'd buy from bookpool.com since they are really cheap.

Book #2:

Perl does a lot of work, MySQL lets perl do even more. I've got a soft spot in my heart for perl just because it's so versatile. If I met a new "web programmer" tomorrow, I'd be half-to-three-quarters tempted to recommend that (s)he learn perl instead of PHP. Knowing a little perl helps in other areas, and can do a lot in the dynamic web site area. This book is about half full of practical examples and recipes, which I've found interesting. The strangest chapter, for me, is one which details an "online product registration system", which when combined with an ecommerce system (that is detailed in another chapter) comprises just about what I did in my last year and a half at Eudora, using exactly the software they mention. Except I had to make it up as I went along, like the author; I did some things very differently (we used VPN/tunneling and port forwarding all over the place). It's always nice to be validated in print. :-)

My Cheat Sheet:

Oddly, what started this email is going to get the shortest entry in it. It's a real simple list of MySQL stuff that I cribbed a while back and have added to in various ways. I use this to remember the mundane for me. I'm going to be adding more to it in the near future.

And finally, the horses's mouth. Not a recommendation, just stating the obvious. :-)

Oh yeah, don't let any of this get in the way of a good Google search. There are bazillions of resources out there that have good info. These are just ones I know off the top of my head. And if you find one, feel free to share.

I admit it: Since I was ten years old, I've always wanted a lightsaber. Almost as much as I've wanted life-sized Boba Fett and Stormtrooper costumes. I don't want to wear them -- although that would be a required option, for no reason at all (I mean, where would I wear them to/at?). No, I want them to be on full-sized mannequins. My Uncle John had a big, stand-up suit of armor and I always loved it as a kid. I thought it'd be cool to update that concept for the Star Wars age. And admit it: Boba Fett is just too goddam cool, and the Stormtroopers make great evil soldiers (especially -- or maybe because -- they are white). But I've also always wanted a lightsaber.

I found a site that has really nice lightsabers. I want the Defiance one (Tracy calls it the "DeFinance") with a green saber part. Why? I have no idea. What would I do with it? Not a clue. I guess I want one for the same reason I wanted a remote control tank. And what's wrong with wanting something completely frivolous? It's no worse than people buying art, I guess...

This sticker made me laugh. I have no idea why, it just did. I don't even like Marxists all that much. Oh, OK, I know why. As soon as I read it, I had this woodcuttish, Giant-esque, cartoony image of Che, ah, "gettin' down wid da indigenous ladies", if you know what I mean. Little beret flopping around and everything. I thought it might be good fodder for a flash animator.

I never said it made sense, just that it made me laugh. And I probably ought to get this one, but it seems a little pretentious.