Upstart Stratford (Prince Edward Island) taxi company Taxi Taxi has added a Toyota Prius to their fleet. You can order it up by phoning (902) 393-9966.

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.