A spectacular concert at the Coca-Cola Roxy with opening Atlanta bands Cadillac Jones and Aslyn followed by a good old Southern rock and roll finish with the star band, Cowboy Mouth. The band is known for its extreme energy and enthusiasm and they certainly made good on that promise today. Adam and I both had a good time. Tomorrow, I throw myself into the Sunday sun.

Good to see old college friends again. Went to see Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, a remake of the Japanese horror film Ju-on, and let me just say that it fails to please. While the film is certainly creepy, its repetitive events, lack of character development, and twisted storyline make this work more of a headache to watch than anything else. The best part of the movie is, sadly, the credits. Die hard connoisseurs of the horror genre might enjoy this film, but if you aren’t in this category, I recommend that you stay far, far away.

I’ve been meaning to try Kool Korner Grocery for about four years now, a hole in the wall sandwich shop on 14th Street, and hadn’t had the opportunity to do so until today when I went along with David for lunch. This deli is known around Georgia Tech for its authentic Classic Cuban Sandwich. Sure, they have other selections on the menu, but to successfully order anything other than this speciality will probably require more Spanish than it’s worth. But at under five dollars a sandwich, you simply can’t go wrong.

Randall Bollig and I attended the Atlanta Slashdot Meetup at the busy Mellow Mushroom on La Vista Rd. I don’t recommend this location simply because of the traffic. Nevertheless, Randall and I managed to strike up some good conversion on PHP, PGP, authenticated SMTP systems, the miserable state of LiveJournal and its users, impressions on my recent travels to Singapore, and of course, the latest Slashdot headlines.

Mark and I had dinner at Apres Diem in Midtown, where we discussed business and the state of IT right here in Atlanta, followed by drinks at the Highlander. There’s a strong possibility of doing some web development consulting with Active Server Pages while I continue to look for stable work.

Added Services_Google support from PEAR to the weblog, a class that is essentially a SOAP wrapper to the Google API. The package is ultimately simple to setup, but the lack of documentation, the use of iterators, and the PHP SOAP extension requirement make this class a little cumbersome to utilize. Still, it gets the job done. Here’s how I use it.

First, I instantiate the Services_Google class and set the Google key, which allows me a maximum of one thousand queries per day:

$g = new Services_Google($key);

Next, I execute the search that I want, where I limit the search to my website:

$g->search("$query site:www.barik.net");

Finally, I utilitize the iterator functionality of PHP 5 on the object:

foreach ($g as $key => $result) {
  if ($result->URL == '') return;
  echo $result->snippet;
  echo $result->title;
}

You get a result for each document that Google returned. You can use print_r on $result to see all the data that each record contains. Finally, the Services_Google class has a bug that causes it loop more times than records. Thus, I do a small hack and forcefully return from the loop when one of the records has an empty URL. That’s really all there is to it.

Upgraded ClamAV on margum to 0.80. This series requires a different set of configure options than before on the shared host:

./configure --prefix=/usr/home/barik \ 
    --disable-clamav --without-libcurl
make; make install

This update was necessary because freshclam could no longer update the virus signatures using the current functionality level. Also updated PHP to version 5.0.2 and Smarty to 2.6.6.

A dose of updates on what’s been happening in my life the past few days, with its ups and downs. Arrived on Thursday and recovered from jet lag by sleeping nearly twenty-four hours. Went to the optometrist on Friday to get a new prescription for my contacts and glasses. Discovered that I don’t have glaucoma and that my eyes are relatively healthy. Fair enough. The battery on my car died, replete with dry, leaked battery acid on the underside of my backseat, but as of today the situation is under control. It seems that my blinker fluid had run out. Ryan, Rusty, and I concluded Friday night with dinner O’Charley’s. Oh, how I’ve missed good old fatty American food. After all, you can never go wrong with chicken tenders.

Filled out an absentee ballot application, prepared figures for an upcoming Nature Medicine publication, re-wrote the photo gallery code, and finally got around to opening my diploma, which came in the mail quite a few months ago. Let me just say that it’s one very expensive piece of paper.

Leaving Singapore this afternoon. It’s been an great adventure, but now it’s time to head home. We’ll fly through Hong Kong via Cathay Pacific, and conclude our flight with American Airlines and Delta through Los Angeles and Dallas. See you tomorrow.