yaleman.org

Desk. That object in front of, many of us perform our daily worship of the gods of capitalism. We work, we study, we relax. The desks I have available to me on my overnight shifts are small, barely room for my work needs and nothing more. Somehow I squeeze my laptop on there, allowing me to keep myself occupied and awake. If it were any smaller, there would not be room for many normal people to sit, while keeping useful storage space in the drawer below. Me, I’m over two meters tall, so any semblence of comfort, let alone ergonomics is destroyed by both my size and the desk’s lack of. Attempting to sit with my legs under the desk would require either dropping my seat to the lowest height setting, or me constantly knocking my knees on the fittings underneath.

As you may have read in my previous post, I’ve installed PHP5 on my laptop. It’s running windows, but don’t hold that against it - it’s still running Apache as the httpd. I’ve heard some good things and some bad things about the latest incarnation of the PHP scripting language - most of the bad things are the fact that they’ve changed the language so much that many people are going to have to entirely re-write their applications. This is a problem, but hopefully only a relatively short-term one - except for the fact that it’s still VERY hard to find any hosting companies that supply servers with PHP5 installed and usable, since most people are still looking for good old PHP4 servers.

Well, there goes that idea. I was going to start work on something like a mini phpMyAdmin for SQLite, but it doesn’t support quite a few things that a project like this would require. I don’t know if it’s possible to pull the information from the database engine itself, but things like table lists and so forth aren’t part of the function list like in the MySQL functions available through PHP. What a pity – some of those functions are really quite powerful, though generally only useful for administration tools.

A busker playing the trumpet, offers to let a passer-by his drum. The man, accepts, beating the drum to his own tune, a melody that while out of synch with the trumpet player, seems to fit. The soulful tunes of the trumpet echo throughout the mall, and the slap of hand on drum bounces from the walls. I wander past, the drummer dances, the trumpet player continues his tune, and people watch as they pass.

Yahoo! I’m officially bored out of my skull. I’ve read pretty much all the interesting parts (and the rest) of the PHP manual that I’ve got on my laptop, I’ve played a bunch of games of Pinball, Minesweeper and Solitaire (I know I’ll only get frustrated with FreeCell) and I’ve done little coding projects on everything I can think of, other than just throwing data in and out of SQLite. I know I could probably start on the solitaire game I’ve been telling myself I would code up for a while, but you know what? I really can’t be bothered right now 🙂

This was originally page on this site, but I’ve since decided to just make it a post. Here goes:

This is a class for PHP5 that allows you to load up a FOAF (friend of a friend) file from livejournal.com and display information from that file.

Simple usage:

require( "xml-foaf-class.php" );
$foaf = new Foaf;
$foaf->do_processing( "filename" );

echo $foaf-&gt;nick;</pre>

Download the source here: xml-foaf-1.0.zip

Well at least I did something useful with my first of a week of overnight shifts, and that was to do some programming. Clairey’s been talking about trying to setup a page to process the Livejournal FOAF (friend of a friend) XML feed, but not getting anywhere with it. I’ve done XML stuff before, and I thought I would help her out, and as usual, with the times that I decide to help someone out with coding something, it turned into a mini-project.

Ok, so I’m working the night shift this week, 10pm - 6am Tuesday through Saturday. I’ve been wondering what it’d be like to work a week straight of overnights, and I was muttering about it on Saturday night because I’m sick of being a service coach. Monday morning comes around, and I get a call from my supervisor at work - would I like to do a week of overnights? Sure, that’d be fine, says me.

I went to the theatre the other night, to see a play based on Terry Pratchett’s novel Interesting Times. I found out about the play through my good friend Denise, as her housemate was playing the part of Twoflower. It was performed in a small theatre called the Brisbane Arts Theatre, on Petrie terrace. A small theatre that has been open on-and-off for thirty years or so, going by what my father remembers, there was enough seating for perhaps one hundred people, and for the final show, there was about 2/3 of the seats filled.