Prolific Programmer on the Internets!

I don't hide my politics on this blog. In my opinion, the Republicans incessantly whinge about government incompetence when standing for election. Having achieved power, they proceed to prove themselves right. The Democrats are only marginally better. So, when people like Andrew Feinberg go on incessently about how Congress has an impact on our industry without convincing me. But, he has convinced Robert. Indeed, Robert is now gushing about what Andrew arranged for him. Now, here's my view and I can be, nay have been, criticised for it, but here it is: government actions impact an industry with the provision that you can't move. As an generation-0 immigrant myself, with a perfectly decent place to call home, I don't accept it. See, I'm part of the generation E, the world is my playground, and therefore no one country's government has any detrimental impact on me. I will grant you that the US government has a bigger impact than most (I mean who gives a rat's posterior if Zimbabwe bans the BBC vis a vis the US wanting to bomb al-Jazeera). You need to expand your purview and remove your arbitrary restriction and you'll realise that government actions don't matter half as much as the government says they do.

Local San Francisco website, and one of my favourite reads, SFist, reports that the San Francisco Chronicle sourced the blog on a news story regarding Bay to Breakers. So the next time, people blame blogs for the death of newspapers, you can now point to a paper sourcing a blog! Congrads, SFist, and keep watching the 4^th estate!

Contrary to popular belief, the news is not about conveying information, according to Seth. The media sells drama, not information, not education, but drama. Drama engages people. Think about what people enjoy talking about. Looking around my workplace, I hear people mentioning Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton. Not really relevant to the computer industry, but there it is. So, "just like all marketers, they tell us a story".

George Galloway accuses Channel 4 of echoing Fox News.

I just saw the news of the shooting in Oakland near Macarthur BART. One of my closest friends lives across the way from this station. It would be really nice if there were links to a Google Map for addresses, wikipedia links, links to sources.

A potential client-side solution to this is Hyperwords, who refuse to get back to me about my application for employment.

Local news should be presented in this way serverside, though. That would be cool.

You're familiar with the streaming media, right? It's the same as a download. Indeed, one can actually capture the stuff in its native format. After the flip, I've included perl code to do just that! For those too lazy to cut and paste, it's at the usual place as well.

use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use File::Temp;
foreach my $page (@ARGV) {
    my $pagedata = get $page;
    my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;
    $tree->parse($pagedata);
    $tree->eof;
    my @base = $tree->find('base');
    my $base_url = '';
    $base_url = $base[0]->{'href'} if @base;
    my @embeds = $tree->find('embed');
    foreach my $embed (@embeds) {
        my $target = $embed->{'src'};
        my $newurl = "$base_url$target";
        my @newurl_parts = split (/\//);
        my $filename = $newurl_parts[-1];
        my ($fh, $fname) = tempfile("$filename");
        print $fh get $newurl;
        close $fh;
        print STDERR "$filename saved as $fname";
    }
    $tree->delete;
}

This clip is from the incredible current affairs show from Australia called Dateline. The entire show is 48 minutes long and may be heard here.