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Computers are strange in that you can do really powerful things with them, but you have to know exactly what to say in order to get the desired result. Or maybe that's not so strange.

Anyway, like most servers, mine has PHP installed as an apache module. That means I can't invoke PHP, or a PHP script, from the command line (to the best of my knowledge.)

But like most problems, it's just a matter of finding the right way to ask:

lynx -dump http://www.digitalmediatree.com/somephpscript.php


does exactly what I want, although through a mechanism I would have never thought to use. Lynx is a text based web browser that can be used from the command line. The -dump argument just suppresses all output from lynx. And the URL given is the page for lynx to open. Of course that page is a PHP scirpt, so the result is that somephpscript.php gets run from the command line. Genius.

This means I can now invoke PHP scripts using procmail. Very nice. Before this I was calling Perl scripts that would then use HTTP::Request::Common and LWP::UserAgent to make a request to the PHP script.

That was a lot of work that is now unnecessary since I discovered the little lynx trick.
- jim 1-15-2005 10:47 pm [link] [add a comment]

Wow. Joel Johnson, the gizmodo guy, somehow got a big interview with Bill Gates out at CES. In part four he asks gates about the 'IP rights people are communists' comment and gets into a pretty good talk with him about DRM. It's one thing to complain about it on some obscure blog, and it's quite another to sit down with Bill Gates and ask him some pretty tough questions to his face. No way would a mainstream reporter have asked some of these things.

Gizmodo: What seems to me - what hurts my feelings - I feel like I, as a customer, want Microsoft to be totally on my side. In that, as far as the people that are producing things, that might want more DRM and might make it inconvenient, I don't understand what it necessarily benefits you to help them.
Nice. And he does pretty well for a while as Gates tries to derail him with a bunch of bullshit. But Joel keeps coming back. Not rude, but persistent.

Unfortunately in the end he misses going for the kill (or maybe he chose not to.) Gates confused him with the "but what about medical records? Don't you want those to be protected?" argument. It almost seemed valid to me at first too, but of course the answer is "of course I want my medical records protected. But I want to hold the key! You're building into the platform the ability for *other* people to hold keys to the bits on *my* computer. Why are you doing that? Shouldn't you be for me?"

It's not very long. Really worth reading since you never see Gates have to answer anyone talking to him like this.
- jim 1-14-2005 11:29 pm [link] [add a comment]

Unmediated.org: "tracking the tools that decentralize the media".
- jim 1-14-2005 8:09 pm [link] [add a comment]

Technorati Tags. Damn they are chruning out so much cool stuff. Thanks to Tom for pushing me to get us hooked up with Technorati more closely. It's coming. And I'm very interested in these tags.

This is one example of the larger debate raging in the metadata world (what? you didn't know?) pitting folksonomies against controlled vocabularies. Back in the day I used to go on and on about 'controlled vocabularies', although I didn't call them that at the time (I'm thinking of all the semantic web future XML stuff I used to talk about.) But now I'm firmly in the folksonomies camp (although I'm not so sold on the name itself.)

The basic debate is about how to add descriptions to the information blurbs we are constantly posting to the web. Flickr and Del.icio.us got it right, I think, in that these metadata descriptions - or 'tags' - need to emerge from the bottom up. That is, you don't start with a controlled vocabulary of allowed tags, you just let people use any words they want for tags.

In short: the downside of this uncontrolled tagging is that some people will choose 'NYC' while other people will choose 'New York City' for what should be the same tag (the goal is to facilitate grouping similar posts by searching for similar tags.) The upside is that if you let people just choose whatever tag they think is best they seem to actually add the metadata!

Or, in other words, controlled vocabularies make sense in a theoretical way, but they don't actually work in practice because people always find the controlled vocabulary to be too rigid. Anyone have a counter example?
- jim 1-14-2005 7:56 pm [link] [6 comments]

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