Chris Barna's Weblog Politics, Culture, Occasional Musings on Life.

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Yes, like any other self respectable Mac/Windows user, I have downloaded iTunes 4.5, and like some reviews, I am lost on what you could call new “features.” First, Party Shuffling, I don’t get it. It’s a cool little playlist that I can see the last x ammount of random songs played, and the next y songs that I will listen to in the future. Also, it remembers which song you were on. There is only one reason I could think of for something like that, if you were to continue a party over 2+ nights.

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p>The updates to the Music Store are getting there but still not as good as one would have wished they were. First, I bet iMixes are a dud. There is no point! I mean, it could have worked on something like MP3.com, but definetly not a Music Store built into it’s own application. Next, I love the free songs. They may not be the greatest songs, but hey, they’re free and “legal.” They should be giving away William Hung, but instead it’s Avril, or Courtney Love.

Now I can finally say I have gmail. I didn’t get the invite I had organized over IRC, but Drew did invite me. My new email is ctbarna@gmail.com. I’d like to see how it handles spam, like the many other people that have gotten theirs and posted it to their blogs. At first I was a little disappointed by the service because it failed to work with my APT installed version of Firefox 0.8, but I overcame it by downloading directly from the mozilla website. It’s a great service, the logo is especially fine. I think they could have cut down on the javascript though, it makes the site act cool, but it is ever so annoying.

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p>Update: Oh yeah, Drew and I were talking about selling gmail invites on eBay today, well I guess people have beaten us to the idea. Pretty amazing that somebody has bid $56 on something that they could get for free.

Last night, I was talking to people over IRC, and it ended up that one hooked me and a couple other people with Gmail invites. Well, I’m still waiting and I’m wondering where my Gmail is. I slept on it, thinking it was nothing big, that I’d get it in the morning. This morning I wake up and… no Gmail. What’s up? Somebody said it was instantaneous, but I guess not for me. It doesn’t take that much time to route an email, does it?

Do you ever get the feeling that your lost? Yeah, well I’ve had that feeling for the past week, and I finally turned it into something productive. It’s pretty sad because this happens to be the week that I have like 3 essays due. I hate it, I feel empty and nothing seems interesting except for my own copy of a great George Orwell book. Computers seem empty and boring. Hey, but I did make a kick ass design in about 5 minutes, 3 of which were spent looking for the graphic.

A change in name, a change in face. What’s new? We all need change sometime, better sooner than later. Anyways, the new face isn’t entirely up. There are still some things I have to do with the code like add the auto-discovery RSS along with links on the sidebar. The new design was inspired by typepad, mainly. The image on the top is Istanbul. Anything else you want to know?

Is it just me or did the spell his name wrong? Isn’t the common spelling of his name “Kurt”?

Another semi-eventful weekend has passed and yet again, I feel that I haven’t fulfilled everything I’ve wanted to do, or even anything that I want to do. I get so caught up in what I have to do that I make no effort to do something enjoyable. I didn’t go swimming, or go to any friend’s houses, instead, I went to a movie I didn’t want to see, a “social” I didn’t want to go to and a “fair” that I had to get up early for and probably ruined my day. The time I spent out of the house was always doing something that I had to do.

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p>I wonder if anybody else feels this way. I’m sure they do, but nobody is able to put it into words. The irony of it, was I probably had loads of free time this weekend. I know today, I found myself doing nothing for 4 hours, that’s 4 hours I could have been at the pool in my complex, swimming and having a grand old time, but instead I chose to watch T.V. and frustrate myself with a computer. Great, what am I doing with my life?

Today was set up as a day of silence to protest the discrimination and harassment experienced by gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Allie did it today. It’s kind of weird how many people made fun of her. Maybe it’s that I live in a higher-class part of town? People seem pretty conservative at my school even though Southern California is supposed to be extremely left. Anyways, I support them, even though my peers may not.

I was reading the new york times and came up with an editorial about the source of anti-Americanism in the middle east. I strongly agree with the point he makes, except I’ve been saying that for a while, just nobody listens to me. The Palestinian issue is the main reason they dislike the United States, most people in the Middle East would be happy to settle the issue, but it’s entirely based on us. The funny thing is, we could probably settle the dispute in a snap if our leaders weren’t so closed minded an biased.

Wow, I just finished watching, the black and white horror movie, “Night of the Living Dead.” It is a lot like Signs in the sense that there are unknown creatures attacking people and the only place they can run is inside their own homes. The end wasn’t very good and the music is kinda cheesy. The movie was a little creepy at times, but overall pretty good. It’s currently in the public domain on archive.org, I don’t want to get it right now though.

Yesterday, I saw “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with a couple friends at a local theater. I loved the movie, it was a little odd, but very original. Jim Carrey (who happens to be Count Olaf in the new movie based on the Lemony Snicket books) has really matured and I really like him now. If you want to know what the Alexander Pope poem that was mentioned in the movie was, you can find out here. I’d recommend it to anybody that enjoys movies that you go away from contemplating.

Following, I have an example of a client/server interface using the XMLRPC::Lite perl module included in the soap-lite package on CPAN.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# ------ server.pl ------
use strict;
use XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP;

my $server = XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP::Daemon
    -> new (LocalPort => 9000)
    -> dispatch_to('tf');

$server->handle;

# the package to handle it.

package tf;

sub help
{
    return "This is trackforward, more news to come.@_";
}
# --- SNIP ---

And the client:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# ------ tf_client.pl -------
use strict;

use XMLRPC::Lite;

my $testmethod = XMLRPC::Lite
    -> proxy("http://localhost:9000/")
    -> call('tf.help')
    -> result;

print $testmethod."\n";

I’ve been trying to figure out RPC::XML all day, but I kinda gave up a few hours ago. This is still pretty cool.

Okay, mental note. If you want to ditch those annoying *~ backup files in emacs forever, add:

(setq make-backup-files nil)

To your .emacs and it will never make them again.

For those of you who don’t read my del.icio.us page, the Movable Type 3 beta testing will start next week. I signed up, you should too.