The Codebelay Blog

My answer to this question is, “No.” You are not interacting with people. You are interacting with their simulacra…

Who did you hang out with the most this week? Honestly, it was my co-worker from India. I sat across from him and went over how the XML interface worked for shipping and receiving computer hardware.

Yet, the very people I look forward to hanging out with the most are the ones whose simulacra I am most acquainted with.

Shouldn’t I be hanging out with my co-worker who has more reality than the images that flit across my screen?

I’ve done so much on the Internet, that I explain life (the real) in terms of technology (the unreal). For a lot of techies, this is the case. Are you a techie and bothered by this?

If you liked The Truman Show, then you’ll like Justin.tv, a real life version of the movie.

If you could watch anyone’s life 24/7, whose life would it be?

I just started using isightcapture, a command-line tool for creating pics from your isight on Mac OS X. It’s pretty easy to use.

Save isightcapture to your bin.

Type isightcapture name_of_your_pic.jpg and voila, a pick of you.
You can also crontab it with

5 * * * * isightcapture $HOME/Pictures/icons/crontab.jpg

Hey, did you know you can put your favorite dashboard widget on your desktop without having to hit F12?

Check out the Top 15 hidden terminal commands for Mac OS X.

It is eeee-l33t.

I’m trying to use php’s mail command to send emails to myself.

Unfortunately, the logs bring this up:

553 5.1.8 …

Domain of sender address jbarcelona@sovrainshrine does not exist

(at 16 Mar 2007 22:31:09(GMT))

IP:207.106.84.164

Which makes sense b/c I’m behind a firewall and the server I’m using is only resolvable from behind my firewall.

So what information do I need to put in the header to make this work?

Yes, I’ve read www.php.net/mail but the examples just don’t work.

UPDATE: 3/21/2007

I just downloaded PHP Mailer, and it’s been working like a charm.

The advice here goes beyond plain ol’ networking skills and a winning smile.

1) Talk to promoters. I learned this one from Jakob Heuser who talked to a promoter that got us into the Facebook party which was invite only. Jakob also knew how many people he wanted to get into the party in addition to himself, and so he asked for additional invites. SxSW wins notoriety for having way too many female promoters leading to parties with way too many dudes in an already way too many dude market. Well, it helps having my winning smile to sort me out from the rest.

2) Get on the VIP list of every club that you think will be hosting a cool party. You do this by visiting their website, and asking to be put on their VIP list. You also do this by calling the venue.

3) Once you’ve done step two, you need to show up the evening before. Talk to the folks who work the door. Ask who is working the door tomorrow. I did steps 2 and 3 the day before South by Southwest started. The result: Fun, fun, fun and a stack of business cards that I’ve been entering into my address book for the past 2 hours. Next time I’m at Fry’s, I’m getting a card scanner

Now go out there and get to some parties.

I’ve been messing around with Perl in-between conferences at SxSW. What’s delighted me is how little I have to code because of CPAN, an archive of Perl Modules.

In order to write a simple RSS aggregator all I had to do was:
1) Create a class for fetching and saving the RSS.
2) Use a Perl module with web client functionality. (LWP::Simple)
3) Use a Perl module that can parse RSS. (XML::RSS::Parser)

my $lostdogs = Fetcher->new();
$lostdogs->feed("http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/ccc/nby?query=lost%20dog&fo
rmat=rss");
$lostdogs->getfeed();
$lostdogs->savefeed('lostdogs.rss');

Now what if there was something like CPAN for JavaScript? Wouldn’t it make building all those AJAX apps easier? You wouldn’t have to be committed to either Dojo or YUI or Prototype.

Jakob Heuser introduced me to Tantek and Matthew Levine. My conversation went something like this:

Me: How’s it going with hiring PHP guys?
Tantek: We’re always hiring great talent.
Me: Really?
Tantek: Do you know about microformats?
Me: No.

At this point Tantek turned away from me and our conversation ended.

But Matthew Levine jumped in to help out by asking, “Do you have a website?”

Me: Yes
Matthew: Let’s add a microformat to it right now.

In less than half an hour we geeked out the right sort of microformat for my website and put it up on my contacts page.

It’s because of helpful folks like Matthew that SxSW is so enjoyable.

If you don’t know about microformats, I will not turn my back to you, and will no doubt help you out in the same way that Matthew did.