::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

Looking forward to garage sales

News ·Thursday February 15, 2007 @ 22:51 EST (link)

Yep, I'm looking forward to spring cleaning and garage sales, maybe I'll snag a couch for my new office (I moved into my new office Monday, we're at the far end of the building this time 'round). Maybe I like garage sales because it's one of the few places I can still haggle with sellers (the other place I used to haggle was buying lenses at used camera stores; for example, I recall getting my Nikor 105mm macro AF-D for $150 less than the asking price). One just needs to be willing to walk away; there's usually another sale just down the street. Also it's a fun thing to do on weekend mornings.

Honey wanted to get the Our Daily Bread daily meditation emailed to her, but they weren't offering the service any more, so I whipped up a quick perl script using LWP::UserAgent, naturally, pulled out the relevant bits of the page (with regular expressions; there was no need to parse the page), formatted an email with MIME::Lite, and sent it with Mail::QmailQueue. I added it to cron(1) and it's working just fine. I don't think they'd object (they send the paper version for free, and the page doesn't have ads), they just didn't want to be in the business of sending automated email any more.

Two events coming up, both Tuesdays: SPUG hackathon on the 20th and UW 50th anniversary celebration at the Bellevue Arts Museum on the 27th. The last UW event there was interesting and I won a sweater and a baseball cap, so we may go to this one too. (Excuse me while I break to clean up the SPUG wiki front page. That's much better.) Anyway, no, I haven't made a SPUG meeting yet but I hope to make the next one; a hackathon sounds like fun, and I hope rumors of the group's death are greatly exaggerated.

I taught myself a little about LDAP today and managed to muddle my way through getting the ActiveDirectory server to talk to me. Today was the first weekly Word "brown bag" (lunch meeting), each of which will have two people each cover a topic in Word (for example, today was Layout and Email (Word is the default Outlook viewer and editor)), so I was thinking that when I get to my topics (object model and autoformatter, possibly the idle loop too) I may want to use the wiki. But if I do, I'll want to provide a link to the "slides", and right now it rejects users not in the database out of hand (mod_auth_sspi knows their login names, though). Currently I lookup known users' real names in my login table, but it'd be nice to address guests by real name too, hence my poking at Active Directory. I tried Net::LDAP first, but it doesn't do authenticated logins, which would mean storing my password in the wiki code in plaintext (no thanks) so I looked at the RFC 1823 LDAP API, discovered that Windows supports it, and hacked together a few queries. Now I just need to wrap it in a perl module for easy access.