The Complete New Yorker DVD was released last week. As an avid reader of The New Yorker, I’ve been anticipating its release all summer long; my copy arrived a few days ago, and I’ve been itching to crack it open but haven’t found a spare moment amongst all foliage, elections and BASH hacking.

In the meantime something interesting has happened: if you do a Google search for New Yorker DVD you’ll find one of my earlier blog posts is the first result. It’s higher than the magazine’s own page about the DVD, and higher than Amazon.com’s product page:

Back at [[reboot]] all the talk was about “the long tail” and I’d no idea what it meant; over lunch, [[Dan]] and [[Steven]] helpfully explained that it’s about the long drawn out part of the “power curve.” Steven’s example was that the total revenue to Amazon.com from selling one or two copies of obscure books millions of times over exceeds the revenue from selling millions of copies of Danielle Steel books (and the like).

Presumably this also pertains to marketing: [[Johnny]] said that everything he knows about the New Yorker DVD he’s learned about from weblogs, not from the “formal” publicity campaign. I wonder if they’ll sell more copies because of thousands of little mentions by passionate bloggers than from their full-page magazine ads.

I’m continuing my frantic release (aka procrastination) schedule for the [[Plazes]] Launcher BASH shell script with a new version this afternoon: here’s the updated version (version 0.4).

This is the first version of the script to approximate the behaviour of a “real” Plazes.com Launcher — not only does it handle initial registration with the Plazes.com server, but it also handles the updates every 4 minutes and re-launches every 8 minutes specified in the Plazes API spec.

This version is also laid out somewhat more modularly, and includes the option to log events to a file.

In theory there should be no reason this shell script can’t now be used as a day-to-day Plazes Launcher (setting aside, of course, that it has none of the fancy features that GUI launchers have).

The [[usual bunch]] were at lunch at the [[Formosa Tea House]] this afternoon and as we were checking out we were told about two new sub-Formosas that are opening, one on Water Street and on in the Ellen’s Creek Plaza. So now you’ll be able to buy lumber at Home Depot and stop for a stuffed bun on your way home.

I’ve modified the original Plazes Launcher BASH Shell Script to add Linux-compatibility. Here’s the updated version. This version also fixes a couple of bugs that only became evident under Linux.

I’ve not made any attempt to be “smart” about OS detection — you need to manually set an “OS” variable to either “linux” or “mac”. The only difference the setting makes is in the grabbing of the MAC address of the default gateway; I’ve added support for the output of the netstat and arp commands as they exist on my RedHat install (arp 1.88, netstat 1.42).

In theory, as long as OpenSSL and cURL are installed, this new version should work on a Linux-based mobile device like the Sharp Zaurus (mine is due to arrive Any Day Now, so I’ll be able to test shortly).

In anticipation of doing some work with mobile devices, I’ve become interested in building a lightweight [[Plazes]] launcher — something that doesn’t require a Perl, PHP, Python or any other “scripting language engine” overhead. At the same time, I don’t want something I have to compile — like a C or C++ launcher — partly because I’m lazy, and partly because I’m not smart enough.

The tentative result is a Plazes Launcher BASH Shell Script, a Plazes Launcher that, true to the “little bits of code glued together to do powerful stuff” UNIX philosophy, takes advantage of a whole bunch of [probably installed on your system already] standard UNIX tools to do what needs to be done:

• The MD5 hash of the Plazes.com password is created using OpenSSL
• The netstat and arp commands are used to grab the MAC address of the default gateway.
• The grep, cut, sed and wc commands are used for various string manipulation duties.
• cURL is used to send a hand-crafted XML-RPC request to the Plazes.com XML-RPC server.

In its current state, the script is Mac OS X-specific because it assumes the output of netstat and arp as it emerges from the OS X versions of those commands (and maybe from all FreeBSD-based systems — I’m not sure about that, though). It should be trivial to modify for other Unices.

Of course, like my earlier Plazes GUI Launcher for Ruby, this BASH version doesn’t do all of the things a Real Plazes.com Launcher should — like error detection, display of useful information, pinging the Plazes.com server every X minutes and so on. But it is a lightweight starting place.

Maybe it’s just that it’s late on a Saturday night and I’m still in the [[office]], but I found this pop-up from Adium hilariously funny:

I’ve released another update to the PlazesPHPBlog code, which builds on the version I released yesterday. New in this version:

• Option to display random Flickr photos for a Plaze (rather than just the most recent ones).
• Switched the Flickr tag search to use plaze{hash} instead of plaze{name}, based on this suggestion from Stefan.

I’ve upgraded this blog to use this new version, so you see it in operation by looking in the upper right-hand corner here.

I’ve enhanced the original bit of code that I wrote to drop my current [[Plazes]] location into a blog sidebar. You can grab the updated version for these additional capabilities:

• The script now caches the current Plaze every time it’s called; when you go offline, this cached Plaze is reported as your “last known location.”
• Using a patched version of Addicted to Flickr, the script now looks to see if there are Flickr photos of your current location and displays hyperlinked thumbnails if there are.
• More comments, less hardcoding.

I’ve upgraded this blog to use this new version, so you see it in operation by looking in the upper right-hand corner here.

Comments welcome.

[[Olle]] pointed out Addicted to Flickr (via del.icio.us) and I used its goodness to revamp the “Recent Photographs” section of the blog’s sidebar.

Then I got carried away and decided I should try to patch it to support Flickr’s tag search API method. The result is Tag Search for Addicted to Flickr.

It’s “premiere week” on American television this week, the week where ABC, CBS and NBC unveil their new shows for the 2005-2006 season. And I’ve been watching.

There are three Lost knockoffs — shows in the “scary unknown monsters meet Party of Five” model: Threshold from CBS, Surface from NBC and Invasion from ABC.

In Threshold the scary comes from outer space in form of a massive pile of whirling glass shards that emits a sound that makes people have bad dreams. In Surface it’s massive tarantula whales that lay eggs and generally cause a big fuss. And in Invasion it’s hurricane-induced soul-stealers that take over families in the Everglades.

None of the shows is as inventive as Lost, but Threshold is the best produced and has the best character development (if you can call it that), but it still amounts to little more than “NCIS with aliens.”

Since I learned on Monday that Two and A Half Men is the number-one rated sitcom in America I’ve decided to opt out of that genre entirely and confine myself to endless re-runs of Seinfeld and The Simpsons. And even they are getting tired (don’t tell Catherine). I did watch the season premiere of the (American version of) The Office and it was much less annoying than I thought it would be. And apparently this will be a “very special season” of Will and Grace as it is the last one. Everything else seems to be some variation, as [[Johnny]] says, of the “overweight Dad, svelt Mom, and crazy kids try and make it in this crazy mixed-up world” (I’m pretty sure Johnny didn’t say “svelt”).

Which leads us to reality TV (yes, yes, [[Kevin]], I know it’s not “reality”). Last week saw the debut of the latest Survivor, this time in the jungles of Guatemala. Not much new to report here except for an unusual amount of sickness in the menfolk that results in lots of vomit and writh shots. Host Jeff Probst seems to have lost a little of his spark and, despite the spiders and ants and crocodiles, the location doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the game. Of course I’ll keep watching regardless.

This week it was the two versions of The Apprentice, the old one with Donald Trump and the new one with Martha Stewart.

Stewart’s is a kinder, gentler version of Trump’s (contestants don’t get “fired,” they “don’t fit in”). It’s only been two days since I watched it, though, and save for the endless walls covered with paint chips, I can’t remember a single thing that went on, which means it can’t be rating very high on the “water cooler conversation” scale.

Trump’s show is simply more of what we’ve become used to: lots of Trump, lots of brand enhancement deals (last night was the fitness chain Bally), lots of racially-charged internecine bickering. In the end it was the strident Hispanic woman who got fired, mostly, it seems, because she self-identified as “someone who can’t work with women.” Ho hum.

Last night was the 98th season opener of er, the show that refuses to die even though they have used up absolutely every single plot device that can lead to “chaos in the emergency room.” All of the glam stars of the past are gone — Noah Wyle was the last to leave, at the end of last season — so we’re left with Goran Visnjic (who used to be great, but how long can you string out the “my kids are dead and I have no soul left” angst?) and a cast of second-rate actors fumbling their sutures and central line kits. The show might surprise me — I’ve given up hope before, only to be surprised — but it’s not looking like it.

To get some idea of how old er is, recall that it premiered in 1994, the same year that CBS debuted Chicago Hope. And who remembers Chicago Hope? It was cancelled years ago in a blaze of Christine Lahti.

The best thing about Chicago Hope was Mandy Patinkin, and his new show, Criminal Minds, debuted opposite er last night and I managed a pretty good job of watching the two shows at the same time (something made easier by the fact that I knew exactly what was going to happen on er, so I only needed to tune in every once in a while).

Criminal Minds is in the CSI mold — tormented and eccentric but brilliant crime-fighter finds bad guys using science and mind voodoo. Patinkin is well-suited in the lead, and the rest of the cast is better than a show like this deserves (Matthew Gray Gubler from The Life Aquatic was particularly good), but the show doesn’t cover any new ground, and after an hour the Churchill and Nietzsche quotes got tired and I forgot why I started to watch. If the show succeeds it will be because Patinkin makes it succeed, but don’t hold your breath.

Otherwise I’ve been watching a whole lot of MSNBC, mostly because it’s the only 24 hour news station we get (well, there’s CTV Newsnet, but it’s so bad as to be unwatchable, and CNN Headline News which always seems to be airing either sports or “showbiz” news). Watching MSNBC these days means watching wall to wall hurricane coverage presented by Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Tucker Carlson and Rita Cosby. Collectively they are slightly less annoying than their dopplegangers on CNN. But only slightly. Carlson and Cosby are the worst of the bunch, mostly because they seem to have no journalistic training nor skills. Matthews is good on politics, horrible on live coverage, and Olbermann, who makes everything sound like a game of something, is completely compelling.

Next week is The Amazing Race, Without a Trace and The West Wing. Still no end to the [[Compass]] lockout, so I’m blissfully unaware of anything happening here on Prince Edward Island. Our friends at the CBC had a rally yesterday afternoon; didn’t hear about it until after it was over because, well, the way you hear about things on Prince Edward Island is on the CBC.