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.

I often marvel at the fact that car manufacturers don’t make more of an effort to rent new cars to potential buyers. I suppose they do, in a way: Hertz is owned by Ford, for example, and they certainly showcase the cars of Ford and its divisions (Mazda, Volvo, etc.). But you’d think that if you were a “minor” manufacturer like Smart, VW or Toyota, you’d try to figure out a way of putting your cars in people’s hands.

I’m talking about something more than a test drive. Even “take the car home for the weekend,” which seems quite common, at least if the dealer knows you (or you have another car you can leave behind). It seems to me that putting an interested, motivated potential customer behind the wheel of your car for their business trip or vacation would be an excellent opportunity to addict them to your product.

Manufacturers, it seems, do not agree with me. Witness these two email messages, received in reply to a “I’m traveling for a week in New England and want to rent one of your cars from Montreal” query email. First from Smart:

Thank you for your interest in smart. While we appreciate your interest in smart, unfortunately, we are not familiar on whether any car rental companies have the smart brand as part of their rental fleet in Canada. You may wish to do an online search of rental car companies in the Montréal area for further information. My apologies that we couldn’t provide further assistance at this time.

And then from Toyota:

Toyota Canada Inc. is not involved in the rental of Toyota vehicles and as such, we do not have a list of car rental services that have the Prius in their fleet. However, we suggest that you contact some Toyota dealerships within your area to inquire about the rental of the Prius from the dealership. As well, the dealerships may be aware of rental companies that offer the Prius in your area.

So here’s me, a potential customer who went out of his way to find your website and send you an email, a potential customer who will pay you money to evaluate your $20,000+ product. And what do you say? “Not our department.”

Catherine is the first woman I’ve dated¹ who’s not a smoker. During my time in the minor leagues of relationships in the mid- to late-1980s, I went out with a series of women who smoked — some a little, some a pack a day.

As a result, despite an unblemished record of being a non-smoker myself (well, there was that unfortunate cuckolding incident in Cuba, but we won’t count that), in addition to the whole set of “smoking kills,” “smoking is gross,” “smoking causes cancer” associations, I’ve had a latent “smoking is sexy” vibe hanging out in the deep recesses of my mind. Something about beer and cigarettes and sweltering nights and, well, you get the picture.

Today, though, I walked out of the office on the way to lunch and there was an otherwise quite striking woman catching a cigarette outside the office across the street. And I realized that I no longer find smoking sexy in any way at all. It’s a horrible habit with no allure whatsoever. Lauren Bacall be damned.

1. Catherine and I have been “dating” for 14 years next week, which makes me think we need a new word to describe our arrangement.

Nikolaj gets left without overseas wifi because of codesharing:

I’ll be heading stateside early October, hopefully with a visit to O’Reilly’s Web2.0 conference. Ticket booking was a bit hurried yesterday but I opted for SAS due to inflight Wi-Fi and because the price was right. Today I checked the actual itenary and of course, the first leg to the US is operated as codeshare flight in cooperation with United Airlines. No ip - this is outright deceitful to geeks like me.

Edward Hasbrouck has an excellent article on the subject, Airline alliances and code-sharing, where he writes, in part:

Airlines claim code sharing and alliances enable them to offer better services like through ticketing, baggage transfers, and frequent flyer mileage credits between alliance partners. But that’s a lie. None of those services requires alliances or code sharing. The international standards that the airlines themselves established decades ago through IATA permit all IATA member airlines, not just alliance partners, to publish through fares and establish interline ticketing and baggage transfer agreements. Any IATA-appointed travel agency can sell tickets on any IATA airline, including tickets at a single through fare for a multi-airline journey. And even alliance members often give frequent flyer mileage credit for travel on non-alliance airlines, without code sharing.

Code sharing is unnecessary for, indeed irrelevant to, any legitimate purpose or actual service. Code sharing doesn’t enable an airline to fly to any more places. It just enables the airline to mislead travellers into thinking that they fly to places they don’t. I call that fraud.

It says here that VISA Collision Loss Damage Insurance doesn’t cover:

Trucks, pick-up trucks or any vehicle that can be spontaneously reconfigured into a pick-up truck.

The mind boggles.