EtherPEG (http://www.etherpeg.org/) is software for the Mac the listens in on local network traffic, identifies any images being downloaded, and displays them. Driftnet (http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/) is Linux software that does the same thing, but offers better command line integration. Xscreensaver (http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/) is the screen saver/console locking program I use to keep people from using my laptop when I'm getting a refill at my local coffee shop.

Xscreensaver has a display mode called 'webcollage' (http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/) that can use driftnet to show modified images from the network as the screen saver display. So when I'm away from the laptop it pops up pictures from all the websites that everyone else on the wireless network is looking at. At least in theory it does. Actually, I couldn't get it to do that at all.

I like mixing drinks, despite having no real skill for it. The commercial bar-tending courses seem to rely extensively on flashcards for the learning of drink recipes, so I though a UNIX fortune file of drink recipes would be a natural fit for learning.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good, public drink listings in a format I could parse. Eventually I found one in CVS from this project: http://drinkmixer.sourceforge.net/ It's not huge, but at least its a start and easily added to.

I got sick of having to edit the launch file whenever I ran my Poker Timer (https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00038.html), so I wrote a quick CGI that generates a JNLP file which launches the app with the specified settings. You'll need to have a 1.2 or higher Java Virtual Machine installed (http://java.com).

So we've got a Perl interpreter dynamically producing a JNLP file that tells a Java Virtual Machine what to do. Talk about an unholy alliance.

I said I wasn't going to do it, but I ended up doing so anyway. I've written a Poker dealing IRC bot. It's not terribly modular and it only supports TexasHold'em, but it works. It requires Perlbot 1.9.5 which is available on source forge. Here's an excerpt from play:

<Dealer> Board now shows: AH 2C 9D 2D
<Dealer> joe, action is to you. Current bet is 0.
 * joe bets 20
<Dealer> joe bets 20.
<Dealer> Ry4an, action is to you. Current bet is 20.
 * joe peeks
 * Ry4an calls
<Dealer> Ry4an calls.
<Dealer> Board now shows: AH 2C 9D 2D 2H
<Dealer> joe, action is to you. Current bet is 0.
 * joe checks
<Dealer> joe checks.
<Dealer> Ry4an, action is to you. Current bet is 0.
 * Ry4an checks
<Dealer> Ry4an checks.
<Dealer> joe has been called and shows: 7D 8D
<Dealer> Ry4an shows 10C 6C and wins 70 with Trips (2 A T)

Anyway, I've attached the code in case someone wants to take it and make it better or update it to the newer versions of perlbot.

There are no new ideas in the message, I just don't know if the existing components have been previously combined in the way I'm proposing. If they have been I couldn't find anyone talking about it. Anyway...

Most websites live forever in obscurity getting a few hundred hits a day at best. However, if that same website gets linked to from a popular super-recommender like slashdot.org or boing-boing.net the hits can jump from 100s per days to 100s per minute. This phenomenon is called the slashdot effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect). On a server built with a low hit volume in mind it's pretty devastating, generally resulting in complete denial of service.

A few years back I was working in an office where my workspace was so noisy I kept slipping away to find quieter places in the building to work whenever I has a task which could be completed away from my desk. To avoid looking perpetually absent I wrote a quick script that would display (if available) the contents of a file named I-AM-AT and the how long it had been since I'd last pressed a key.

As seen in the previous posting my friends and I are on a bit of a poker kick lately. As mentioned a good while back we sit in an IRC channel all day while working. I thought it would be fun to find and run a tiny little IRC bot that would deal poker for us. You know a few hands over lunch. No real money of course, just a little diversion. There exist IRC bots that do everything from serve virtual drinks to search google for you. Making a bot that deals poker should be well within the realm of the medium. I expected to find ten poker dealing bots in the usual places and if I was lucky one of them would be decent enough to be usable.

Some friends and I have been playing poker a couple of times a month for the last year or so. Our play is terrible, no one cares, and we usually spend more on beer than we win. It's a good time.

In November a few of us decided to head to the local card club and try our hands at play in the wild. We decided to enter a tournament. Tournaments are a great way to start out playing at a card club because you know going in exactly how much money you're going to loose from the start. Ninety or so people each pay a fixed entrance free, and only the top nine of them get any prize money at all. Tournaments all offer good initial chip parity -- everyone starts with exactly the same amount of money so you can't be pushed around by bigger stack from the start. Another added bonus is that for your initial buy-in of twenty or so dollars you get a few thousand "dollars" in tournament chips. They're not real money but they're the closest I'll ever come to saying, "I raise 2000," without having to append, "pennies."

Last November while sitting in the Atlanta airport with not much to do I saw a bank of six different trash cans. They were in a neat row, each was in a different color, and they were all good for only one thing. People would walk up with a piece of trash and then carefully place it into whichever bin it best fit. Is this bottle glass or plastic? The lid is aluminum does it need to come off? Is this a number two plastic or a number four plastic?

I live in a sleep deprived state. Not just because I have a lot to do and resent sleep as the short-term death it is, but also because I enjoy the swirling colors. Maintaining a sleep deprived state requires a good alarm clock. When your brain knows it needs 8 hours and you're giving it 4 it's gonna fight you, and given that it's in charge of your perceived reality, it doesn't have to fight fairly.