Category: Uncategorized

Hooray! for the Yahoo! API!

Inspired slightly by what Russell did with it in JSP for a video search, I felt compelled to crank out a simple example in Perl, though I choose to do a local search. See the results in my Yahoo! Local Search.

Looking for beer near my house? You got it!

I don’t care what people say, REST is cool. I didn’t even really need to read any docs or look at sample code, as it’s just a matter of building a URI getting the resuls (in XML) and converting it to HTML. Perl does all that quite well.

I will be the first to admit that this is not exactly “production ready” as it only underwent minimal testing. But then again, writing and testing it all took well under an hour…

I think one of the reasons I like orange juice so much is because I hate eating oranges so much.

Whew, all this talk about oranges makes me think about The Oranges Band on Lookout Records…

Jim wants to sell blo.gs! Ouch… I will definitely miss it if it goes away, or gets turned into something evil. But really, I can’t blame him for unloading it, since it was costing him real money. I propose a big round of applause for Jim running it this long, providing a valuable resource to the community.

Hmmm, maybe Yahoo! will buy it? (Jeremy?)

(It just figures, we get GeoURL back, and we may lose blo.gs…)

Ruby is the new thing…

I mean Ruby ain’t new, I seem to remember seeing it many many years back, though I had no use for it.

I’m still not sure I have a real use for it, but this Ruby on Rails thing does look interesting, and people are saying that PHP may lose out to Ruby eventually… Of course PHP has some steam left it in as well.

You know, I’m still a Perl guy at heart, but I ended up getting into PHP because the apps I was interesed in were written in PHP. Perhaps someday the apps I’m interested in will be written in Ruby, and then I’ll take a look at it.

As it stands today this isn’t good:

  bash$ which ruby
  /usr/bin/which: no ruby in (/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/pete/bin)

Besides, if I look at certain companies I know, PHP is just now beginning to make inroads and find more use, so it may be years before Ruby shows up.

No matter, I have nothing against Ruby, I mean, as long as I can avoid ASP and ColdFusion, I’ll be fine. Heck, I’ll even deal with JSP! ;)

Odeo says:

Somewhere in an apartment in San Francisco, we’re making it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content for your iPod (or whatever MP3-player-type-deal you prefer).

Pete says: Hey! Didn’t we do that last summer? I mean, except for the part about an apartment in San Francisco… Perhaps they aim to make it even more easier or something? I mean, we all know where the money is, and it ain’t in creating new things, it’s in waiting until those new things are no longer new, but well established, and then finding ways to make money from them, possibly by making a difficult thing easier, or by making something even more popular…

(You’d think I’d learn that lesson by now and give up on the new things and focus on the money making things, but I guess I’m just dumb like that.)