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.

GPSDrive (http://www.gpsdrive.de/) is nifty software for Linux that turns a laptop and a cheap GPS receiver into a vehicle navigation system. It displays maps, records tracks, logs speed traps, and all the other little features you'd expect in a system trying to divert your eyes from the road.

It also sports a built-in system for networking with other GPSDrive enabled systems on the road to mutually plot one another's locations. The system, called friendsd, uses a simple UDP server to record and report the position, speed, and heading of other reporting systems on the same server. Of course, this reporting only works if the laptop has access to the Internet but with the various cellular and wi-fi systems available that's not so much a stretch.

Being a telecommuter, the closest thing I have to an office is an IRC channel. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is like a chat room minus the emoticons and pedophiles. While normally the office IRC channel is the very embodiment of maturity, there are two silly things about it that have always annoyed me. The first being that everyone gets to pick their own name, and the second being they can change their names at will.

There's a program on freshmeat called email2sms (http://freshmeat.net/projects/email2sms/) that runs emails through a series of filters until they're short enough to be sent to a cell phone as a SMS message -- which typically have a maximum length of 150 characters. The script is mostly just a wrapper around the nifty Lingua::EN::Squeeze Perl module.

Squeeze takes English text and shortens it aggressively using all manner of abbreviations. It leaves the text remarkably readable for being about half its original length.

This weekend I had a great time canoeing with six friends. We camped, swam, paddled, drank and just generally goofed around for a weekend. Two of us had brought along Garmin eTrex GPS units which I'd not previously had when canoeing. They really added a lot.

I built an 18 point route approximating our course before hand and loaded them into the GPSs. With that info and the GPS's natural data collection we were able to always know our current speed, average speed (3.2 mph), max speed (mine = 10.5 mph), distance paddled (total = 29.1 miles), and elapsed time (10 hours 31 minutes of paddling).

I get and send a lot of email. Many of the emails I send are responses to emails I received. When I respond to email I almost always quote the email to which I'm responding, and when I do my email client (mutt) inserts a line like:

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 11:40:25AM -0600, Justin Chapweske wrote:

Knowing the time of the original message and the time of my reply provides enough information to track my response times to email. I used the inbound message ids to make sure only the first reply to an email was counted.

A chump bot (http://www.w3.org/2001/09/chump/) sits in an IRC (Chat) channel and remembers any URL (web addresses) that people say. It displays them on a web page for later reference. I spend time in #infoanarchy on the freenode network (freenode.org) where someone runs a chump bot whose output is visible here: http://peerfear.org/chump/

A wiki is website anyone can edit. Every page has an edit button on the bottom which anyone can press to edit the page. They grow organically and are great for group collaboration. Some friends and I set one up and track plan most of our group activities using it. The most famous wiki is http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiWikiWeb

I run a lot of mailing lists on mailman, http://www.list.org/, servers. Most all of these lists are configured so that only list subscribers are allowed to post messages. I do this because these lists get a lot of spam messages that I don't want to get through to all subscribers.

Unfortunately, when a non-subscriber posts they're not automatically rebuffed, but instead I, as the mailing list administrator, get an email asking if I want to approve their message anyway. If I don't answer that question I get get a reminder every 24 hours. The reminders can be turned off, but there are some of mailman's questions that I do want to have brought to my attention (ex: subscribed posters who have exceeded maximum message size, etc.).

It took most of a weekend to do it, but there's now a nice website for the Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project at http://sarinity.com . I'll be moving it to its own domain eventually, but that'll be a week or so.

The look is entirely owed to the Open Source Web Design site, http://oswd.org. I love being able to just go snarf a well coded template for a new project. Those people are doing a real service.