The CBC is reporting that Dr. Ralph September will begin a temporary contract assignment at Souris Hospital.

I would like to formally nominate that as being among the best names of all time, and perhaps the best doctor name ever.

I walked out of my office to eat lunch, and Clifford the Big Red Dog was playing on the television in the living room. Clifford and his canine pals were debating as to whether to go to Rocky Point or to the Dunes for the afternoon.

I’ve been having accessing my local server using the Safari version 1.0 browser. I never had any problems with the beta versions; since I upgraded to 1.0, however, the browser freezes up when POSTing forms to this webserver, which is on the local WAN.

Reading this interesting article about the ‘cents’ symbol [pointer from Ian], I remembered that the first printer I ever owned — it came used, from Langford’s Drug Store — did underlining by printing the characters to be underlined, doing a carriage return (but no line feed), and then running underscore symbols along the same line, where underlining was required. It was an amazing dance to watch.

Which reminds me that for a time, if you wanted to check your email at Trent, there was an unlocked room in the basement of the Science Complex that contained an old DEC line printer connected to the network. You could login to your UNIX account, and use mail to read email, everthing printing out on paper as you typed. Somewhat cumbersome (especially if you ran out of paper), but a handy printed record of all your correspondence was a useful byproduct.

Kids I knew in Hamilton who were two or three years ahead of me in school used to do their high school computer programming assignments by filling out punch cards and sending them to City Hall for processing.

Ironic that now that almost all the physicality of computing has been removed, we see more physical problems resulting from data processing than ever before.

The Edmonton Folk Music Festival takes place in Gallagher Park in the downtown Edmonton neighbourhood of Cloverdale. According to IABC Edmonton:

Most residents of Cloverdale also receive free tickets, a way of compensating them for the extra noise and traffic levels in their neighbourhood during the Festival.

This seems like a possible model for Charlottetown. If the rock weekends are inevitable, perhaps the least the organizers can do is take the edge off and let downtown residents actually see the performers we can otherwise only hear from behind the fences.

I am not a big beach-goer. Catherine would like me to be. And, indeed, we have been to the beach two days running, which is something of a first. It seems absurd, living in the beachy paradise that we do, to not go to the beach as much as humanly possible, if only to ramble around in the shallows.

Beach going is much easier, and much more fun, now that Oliver will wade independently, something he started, appropriately enough, in the Mediterranean south of Barcelona in May. Today at Tea Hill beach he was romping around in the water like a duck. Although, for now, he can only “swim” backwards.

In any case, even with my relatively infrequent beach-going, I’ve seen a lot of the beaches that the Island has to offer, both in the spring and fall and in the heart of tourist season. With the exception of a rather busy day up at Basin Head, I don’t think I’ve ever shared a beach with more than a dozen people. Indeed, most of the time, especially if you visit in the late afternoon, you literally can have miles and miles of beach to yourself.

Which makes this photo of Coney Island on July 4th seem like another planet of beach-going. I’ve never been to Cavendish in the heart of the season… does it ever get that crowded there?

Reminder to fellow Island indoor geekfolk: do not let the summer go by again without noticing; soon the snow will be flying, and you will regret every sunny afternoon spent in front of the screen.

From time to time the discussion in this space has turned to the technical arcana of the web. When this happens, there are usually one or two grumpy gusses who chime in with a comment like “hey, less talk about HTTPS and SSL and more talk about rock bands and breakfast spots.”

For that reason, and in a breathless attempt to keep up with the young lads at silverorange, I’m happy to announce a new ‘blog, Reinvented Labs. This is where you will find technical discussions, code we release for use by others, and other such circus tricks.

Things over on this side of the door to the lab will continue on much as they have otherwise.

Like many other weblogging systems, ours sends an XML-RPC ping to Weblogs.com whenever a new item appears. Weblogs.com is a busy server though, and when we do this is “real time” there’s an 5 or 10 second delay before the ping is finished during which authors have to sit and wait.

As a way of working around this, we’ve set up a “ping cacher.” Ping requests are dumped into a MySQL database by the weblog authoring system, and then a cron job does the actual pinging, checking once a minute to see if there’s any new items deserving of a ping.

To keep things simple and universal, we set up our own XML-RPC server that mirrors exactly the XML-RPC parameter format of the Weblogs.com web service at rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2. Ours lives at www.reinvented.net/RPC2 and, just like Weblogs.com, accepts a request with two parameters, weblogname and weblogurl.

Pings to our XML-RPC service are dumped into a MySQL database, and then a cron job checks once a minute for new items that haven’t had a ping sent for them; if the cron jobs finds one, it sends an XML-RPC message to the rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 and marks the item in the database as having been “pinged for.”

We used the useful inc. PHP XML-RPC implementation (update: this code has moved here, and recent changes may require tweaks to the function names in my code) to build the server and the client.

We’re making the code available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license:

• WeblogsPingCacher.tar.gz [2KB]

There are two scripts included: index.php is the XML-RPC server that mimics the Weblogs.com ping server and ping.php, which assumes you have installed a CGI version of PHP, runs as a cron job.

Our implementation assumes you use MySQL as a database server, but of course it would be easy to substitute any database server with a few modifications.

Imitation is flattery. Following in the model of Google and silverorange, we’re happy to unveil a little corner of the web for talking about the technology that we at Reinvented create.

The rambling boulevard that is the Reinvented blog will stay in place in much the same form. This space is for talking about technology and how we use it. Like our colleagues at silverorange, we’ll also be releasing some of the bits of our code into the public domain so that others may build on them (and, we hope, tell them how to make them better).

The CBC is reporting $25M reward for Saddam, dead or alive.

This seems to me to be an excellent opportunity for my reference librarian friends to use their skills for great monetary gain. Of course it will all have to be on spec, and there is a language barrier, but a 747-load of librarians could, I’m sure, locate Saddam in a couple of days. Even after expenses, there would be enough for a healthy honourarium for everyone.

Espionage for literacy.