Tweet…

Ahoy! I wrote this entry because I had a few people ask me about twittering from the command line in Linux. So here ya go!

Make sure you have Curl installed… If you dont use apt-get to get it. Make a file called twitter paste the code below in it. Replace the user info with your Username and password and put your new file in/usr/local/bin, I guess you can put it where ever you want, Just remember where you put it.

Make sure it has execution permission. I used “chmod 777 twitter”. Then just type in Twitter from the command line and it will give you an imput field for your update.

Twitter uses the simplest API I’ve ever seen.

echo -n “-> “
read text
curl –basic –user “Username:Password” –data-ascii “status=`echo $text|tr ‘ ‘ ‘+’`” “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json”

*Shakes fist at Adobe*

There is something about Adobe’s back and forth support of the open-source, that makes me all cranky. They had a killer delay for Flash Player 9 and they still don’t support the flash player for x64 architecture. On top of that they promised Apollo would be released across all three platforms, come to find out release date that they would ship the Linux version shortly after. Well here we are ladies and gentlemen 3 months later and no word at all about x64 support or Apollo.

I feel used. They announced the Linux support and Apollo got my undying love until release date. Even then I still downloaded all the cool little apps for windows, but I have my limits. I feel betrayed.

With Pownce releasing its Mac and Windows version, leaving Linux out in the cold, only leaves adobe’s stubbornness to blame. I shake my fist at you Adobe and if Apollo fails, I will not feel pity.

Pownce?

Yep, I have vast amounts of web 2.0 startup accounts that I just don’t really use… However I am really excited about Pownce. File Sharing? IM? Twitter like service? I am so fucking there, although I really hope they do some RSS feed based stuff like jaiku. I would love one place where I can do my some IM, Twitter like stuff, News Feeds and social networking. Myspace is history, I’m tellin ya.

They are invite only but as soon as I get one I’ll pass some along to whoever is around.

Sisyphus

 “There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.” -Albert Camus

This is an excellent quote from the Albert Camus book “The Myth of Sisyphus“. You could take this in two ways, love in a realationship and love of life. Like Sisyphus does, you should live both of these expierences to the fullest, even though both (Life and Love) are inevitably short-lived and at times meaningless.

Sisyphus’ fate of forever push a rock up a mountain is no less absurd than people going to the same meaningless job doing the same tasks and habits, but like Camus says “But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious”.

photo via Luna Park

Context

 Everyonce and a while I find something on the net that makes me upset. Like this article “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”. Let me just quote a paragraph from the article:

“MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.”

While this may upset you like it did me for a lot of different reasons. I looked a little deeper to see how the author could have wrote the well put together essay on something so really freaking absurd. Found a blog post from her saying:

“I think some folks misinterpreted this piece as an academic article. No doubt this is based on my observations from the field, but this is by no means an academic article. I did add some methodological footnotes in the piece so that folks would at least know where the data was coming from. But I didn’t situate or theorize or contextualize this at all.”

It was here I realised that this was just an essay not meant to really be shared with 90,000 people, it was really just something to get conversation going between friends and things. Someone posted it on Digg, Reddit and a number of other news sites and it got around fast.

Context is extremely important when judging someones written work. Danah Boyd, who is really an excellent writer was thrashed with hate mail and other bullshit. Check out her blog here.

photo via: Noqontrol

Menthol

 Everytime I light up a smoke near one of my non-smoking friends I always, without fail get the ” You know smoking kills right?”   Do you really think that I wasnt subject to the same “Smoke and everyone you know dies” commercials as you? Certianly smoking is a better vice than the other stuff people do for fun. Let me pick my own poison.

 Yep, I am aware that smoking causes cancer. Why do I smoke then? Lets set it straight now. I like it. Plain and simple, I enjoy it. Especially as a social thing. Brand of choice? Marlboro Menthol Milds

Another thing, I think women smoking is sexy. Photo via Wisdoms

Great Wall

“Flickr is the latest casualty of China’s ongoing battle to control the internet. Wikipedia and a raft of other popular websites, discussion boards and blogs have already fallen victim to the country’s censors.

Yang Zhou is no cyber-dissident, but recent curbs on his web surfing habits by China’s censors have him fomenting discontent about China’s “Great Firewall.”

Yang’s fury erupted a few days ago when he found he could not browse his friend’s holiday snaps on Flickr.com, due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing website.

Yang just thinks it’s a pain. “I just want to look at some photos! What’s wrong with that?” says the 24-year-old accountant, typical of millions of young urban-dwelling professionals who are increasingly aware of and fed up with state intrusions into their private life.”

Yeah, damn commies! They are in need of a great cyber revolution…

Absurd Climate

 Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that “the science is settled.” At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C.

The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn’t seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don’t question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of “stopping global climate change.” Liberal MP Ralph Goodale’s June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have “a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous potential for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around the world,” would be humorous were he, and even the current government, not deadly serious about devoting vast resources to this hopeless crusade.

“Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.” via Finacial Post

“How much has the planet warmed up over the past century? Most people reckon between two and three degrees. They are not even close. The real figure, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is 0.6C.It’s not surprising most people get it wrong. We are bombarded by stories warning us that global warming is out of control. The most extreme warn us we will be living in a tropical Britain where malaria is rife and Norfolk has disappeared altogether.” via Marquette Warrior

The artical goes into more about how we should be more worried about the inevitable global cooling stage of our planet and consider ourselves lucky we are in a warming phase. These people and their “scare tactics” just upset me.

Seven Hours

“Passengers on a Continental Airlines flight had to hold their noses for hours as sewage overflowed from toilets while they were high over the Atlantic.

“To be blatantly honest, I was more nervous than I had ever been on a flight,” said Collin Brock. The University Place man was on board Continental Airlines flight 1970 from Amsterdam to Newark, New Jersey last week when things went bad.

“Ive never felt so offended in all my life. I felt like i had been physically abused and neglected. I was forced to sit next to human excrement for seven hours,” said Brock.”

I’m not even sure what to say. Could you imagine sitting through this flight for seven hours? Nope even a lame $500 voucher they got wouldn’t remove the emotional trauma that would occur for me. Every time I looked at an airplane I would get sick. Gross.

Funny Faces

“ANTIOCH, Calif. (AP) – Kim Mayorga was confused when her 2-year-old started making funny faces and pushing away the apple juice he had ordered at Applebee’s. The explanation came when she opened the lid of the sippy cup and was hit by the smell of tequila and Triple Sec.

The restaurant staff accidentally gave Julian Mayorga a margarita Monday. He grew drowsy and started vomiting a few hours later and was rushed to the hospital.”

“I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it,” the mother told the Contra Costa Times on Thursday, “but then he got sick.”

The apple juice and margarita mix were stored in identical plastic bottles, and the manager mistakenly grabbed the margarita container to pour the boy’s drink, said Randy Tei, vice president for Apple Bay East Inc., which owns the franchise restaurant and nine other Applebee’s in the San Francisco Bay area.”

Really, there are some things that just shouldn’t happen. Giving a toddler a margarita instead of apple juice is one of them. This is one of the few instances that you shouldn’t tip your waiter, or maybe with slighty different circumstances this diserves a larger tip?