Some time ago I wrote a little PHP script to pull my "Recent Activity" RSS feed from Netflix and then try to glean what movies I currently had at home. The "Recent Activity" feed is an xml feed of what movies have been shipped to you and which ones have been received back at Netflix HQ. By cross-referencing which ones have been shipped but not received back I can figure out which ones I currently have. There is a small problem: the feed only contains five items so if you keep one movie at home and receive and send back two movies, the reception of the movie you still have is out of the feed and drops off my list.

Well, that problem still exists. This post isn't about how I fixed that. This post is about how, with the magic of AJAX (via the SAJAX library), I recently updated it with a little functionality to show my entire queue underneath it without reloading the page.

As it stands now I'm pretty sure it will only work in Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorer. I tried it in Konqueror but the absence of the DOMParser to handle navigating the XML feed, it ain't working.

Some of you may or may not have heard about AJAX, and some of you may be wondering what it actually is. It stands for "Asynchronous Javascript And XML." The quick and dirty of it is this: it uses the newer browsers' ability to reconnect to a webserver and pull new data while the page is live in your browser, without reload. The XML is there simply because it's an easy way to pull a rich dataset when you only have the ability to interchange text.

So that's it, look for it over there on the sidebar right underneath my Netflix queue thingy. I know it doesn't seem that amazing, but I thought it was pretty cool for my first foray into the new buzz in the Interweb world. That's how I roll, Web 2.0 style biatch.

If anyone's interested in the code just drop me a line and I'd be happy to scoot it off to ya. I'm not going to promise it's pretty to look at, but it works.

It's possible some of you have heard about Woot!, but in case you haven't here a quick crash course.

Woot! is an online retail store that sells one item each day (called "The Daily Woot") at an unusually marked down price. The Woot goes up at midnight and is sold until either a) the item is out of stock or b) the day is over in which the next woot is placed on the site. They usually sell high tech gadgetry, but I've seen fondue pots and hair curlers on there before. For a more indepth explanation try their Wikipedia article.

I've been known to hit the Woot from time to time but I've never bit the bullet and grabbed some swag, until recently. Actually, the first Woot I was compelled to bite on was a Monster Surround Sound speaker system they had up on New Years day this year. I had recently lost my computer speakers, along with everything else I've ever owned (thanks Katrina!), so you could say I was in the market. And for a paltry thirty bucks, or somewheres about there, it sounded pretty solid.

Alas, it was not meant to be. By the time I had noticed it they had completely sold out. In the "out of stock" sense, their artistic integrity was still very well intact.

But this would not be the last time the Woot and I would cross paths. For reasons stated earier, I was sans many of my home electronomagigs and a TV was high on this list for early replacement. Brenda has mentioned a 42" LCD she had an eye on over at Best Buy, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,700, an egregious amount to be sure. But lo! A scant few days before we were to take a trip to Red Stick to settle on one, the Woot giveth. A sixty-one inch (!!!) beauty of a DLP Rear Projection TV for less than the 42" Brenda had been looking at. Add in $5 shipping for a 180 lbs TV, and a top notch blender bundled with it, I was sold. The Woot had me.

Now, I'm not a high roller by any means, this is too fucking much to spend on a television. The only way I can rationalize it would be to say that... well, I really can't rationalize it. At all. But holy fuck! I'm going to have a TV the size of God's face!

Lucky we have an extremely low interest loan from SBA, with a pretty reasonable payment each month. This is what they gave us the money for, sorta.

One of the things that sets Woot apart from the rest, apart from their odd "deal-a-day" scheme, is they truly are a funny bunch of bastards. Just read their post that accompanied my purchase: linky-poo. If that's not enough for you, just check out this correspondence I had with them when I initially had a little trouble placing my order:

Dear Woot,
I would like to buy one of the TV's you are selling today (1/12/2006) but my debit card has a frigging purchase limit of $2,500. I have more money in this bank account, but I cannot make a purchase larger than this on one card. Is there a way I could split my payments on two cards?
-Brent

Sorry we are only able to use 1 card per transaction. You may try calling your bank to get the limit raised. Threaten them with bad poetry and tiki torches. This usually works for me.
~E

These are my kind of people.

In the past week I've gotten word from both Scott and MC that they're both interested in rocking Linux on the Desktop. For MC it's because he's sick of the spyware, crashes, and virii that are so inextricably tied to the Windows platform, and for Scott I believe it's because he's tired of Windows and wants to learn about the exciting new world of Teh Lunix.

Anywho, I thought I'd combine both needs and have a Linux install night at my house. I was thinking this weekend, not for any particular reason other than its temporal proximity to right now, but if the parties are interested but would like to reschedule, that's copacetic. Of course, if anyone else is interested in Linux and has a machine they'd want it on, you're all welcome too. You are also welcome if you just want to hang out and drink beer, which will be happening in parallel to the installs.

I've been asking around and it seems like the distro of choice for people first getting their feet wet is a toss up between Ubuntu Linux and Mandriva Linux (formerly Mandrake). I've heard that both are rather friendly distros without going off the deep end like Lycoris or Linspire (both of which require paid subscription services to get any use out of them at all). The opposite end of the spectrum would be my distro of choice, Gentoo, but giving that to them would be like selling a person their first car and then giving them a pile of parts, a wrench, and a manual. A bit overwhelming for your first time out.

I've burned Ubuntu (or more specifically Kubuntu, Ubuntu with KDE instead of Gnome), and I'm about to install it on a test machine to see what it's like. I haven't installed or maintained a distro other than Gentoo in about three years, so I'm well past due to see what's out there these days.

Comments? Questions?