Monkinetic Weblog

The raw materials for tonights culinary exploration:

Jodi posted last night about an Iranian woman we got to spend last evening with. She and her family survived the ten year war with Iraq, and had to flee their homes on the Iran/Iraq border when Saddam's troops came. It was fascinating to hear.

Ok, so going for a 5 mile trail ride at South Mountain (Desert Classic trail) seemed like a really good idea.

Chris Ruzin re-arranged his archive section partly based on my work on the new calendar on this site. Cooooool.

VidMoBlogging by any sane name is still ENG. Electronic News Gathering is a term that came in with the advent of portable video cameras, which meant a news crew could go out into the field, easily grab video and audio of a news event, and bring it back for editing, either physically, or, later on, via satellite.

Others will have more, and better, things to say about it, but I do wish it had not come to this.

Last night I added a second monitor to my TiBook - and I'm experiencing some strange crashes that seem to be iChat related.

I have a client who has recently started IM'ing, and is hooked. He wants to findd an IM app that he can use in his office for interoffice communications, but he doesn't like the ads that AIM includes.

[Via Scoble] Dan Gillmor shows off some cool new phones from the CTIA Wireless trade show. Very nifty stuff.

MacAsylum has released an interesting extension for Apple's December Developer Tools: a set of configuration files called WebSiteProj that adds PHP Website and HTML Website project types to Project Builder.

Livia Labate posts a list of her IA Toolbox on SIGIA-L.

Ok, so I finally got my server log processing chain working the way I want, and I figured I'd better document it 1) because I'm going to forget very soon how to do it, and 2) because I still get hits from Google for the word 'fetchmail' from the last time I mentioned it, so there's obviously an interest.

More on this tomorrow, I'm tired! I've posted a how-to on using fetchmail, procmail, python, and analog to fetch web server logs from an email account, filter them with procmail, grab the MIME-encoded attached log files, and process them with analog, all scheduled via cron.

Gantt and PERT chart maker for OS X.

Emmanual Décarie posts his QuickLinks - a list of various interesting links - every few days. Today I made it on the list, with a link to Corporate Product Support: The Weblog Generation. Thanks Emmanuel!

I'm determined today to get the pipeline working that gets my server logs from email, saves them to disk, and runs analog on them. I want to have reports on the sites I run, but I have to get the logs delivered in email.

Jodi's site is coming along nicely, and she's updating it more frequently these days.

The other day I was working on a script and I wanted to get the titles for a bunch of web pages I had links to. I coded up something that downloaded each page, pulled out the title, and cached it (so that there would be no more than 1 request per URL).

Robert at Celsius1414 posted a mini-rant the other day with the disclaimer "I'm thinking out loud here, use text-to-speech if you want the full effect." Hmmmm.

I had a meeting last night with a potential client, the owner of the local TruGreen ChemLawn. He's out spraying most of the day, so I said "hey, come on over for dinner, I'll feed you and we can talk about your site".