November 9th, 2002

cURL! Just /usr/sbin/tcpdump -a -s 16384 -w $SERVER.log host $SERVER and walk through the site using mozilla. When done, just kill your tcpdump and strings $SERVER.log | grep -A 30 HTTP |less will show you how to traipse through SERVER's site using cURL. Handy functions are:

sub URLEncode 
{
   my $theURL = shift;
   $theURL =~ s/([\W])/"%" . uc(sprintf("%2.2x",ord($1)))/eg;
   return $theURL;
}

sub URLDecode 
{
    my $theURL = shift;
    $theURL =~ tr/+/ /;
    $theURL =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9]{2,2})/chr(hex($1))/eg;
    return $theURL;
}

sub curl{  # $url, $data, $referer
    my $url = shift;
    my $data = shift;
    my $referer = shift;
    my $jar = ".cookies.dat";
    my $curl = "curl -A 'Mozilla/4.0' -s -i -L -b $jar -c $jar";
    
    if($data ne ""){
        $data = "-d '$data'";
    }

    if($referer ne ""){
        $referer = "-e '$referer'";
    }

    open(C, "$curl $referer $data $url |");
    my @lines = ;
    close(C);
  
    return(join('', @lines));
}

Recently, I've found my TV channel of choice to be /(BookTV)|(C-SPAN2?)/. I'll sit down to chow some food and the boob tube will beckon for me to use it. It's good practice to argue with the people talking their various points, especially Dinesh D'Souza author of Letters to a Young Conservative. I note that I also have all of George F. Will's books to read, still. Well, that and watching MTV to see what's current in consumer culture, wondering if Madonna will turn into another Cher/Elizabeth Taylor, while noticing that No Doubt's 'underneath it all' is a fun and disgusting romp, that Michelle Branch is still cute, and that posthumous videos ( now Nirvana's "You know you're right" ) make me wonder if we're not being silly about our nation's need to heal.

I woke up this morning and for some reason, I had to listen to Nirvana's 'SON OF A GUN' on 'INCESTICIDE'. Reading the liner notes, I note that Kurdt writes that he likes the Vaselines and I noticed that my favorite songs on that album were written by Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, i.e. the Vaselines. I then promptly fired up my anti-capitalist mind-altering drug of choice, mutella and grabbed some of their songs. It made my morning.

Geoffrey Moore was a director at large of the National Bureau of Economic Research. While there, he authored a bunch of influential/seminal/ovoid? articles that were collected into Business Cycles, Inflation, and Forecasting. He maps out business cycles in the US economy, and defines his toolkit for measuring and potentially forecasting the economy. He also does a good job of going over definitions. I've taken some econ classes, but this book bridged this disconnect between the theory of college and the practices of the Federal Reserve Bank.