06.13.02 - 8:46 p.m.

I played The Sims Online today. It felt weird to be playing a computer game at work, but TSO is in alpha and they asked everybody to help playtest it for an hour. I've been kinda stressed out lately, so I thought playing TSO would be a good way to relax. It's funny though, you spend a lot of time in that game trying to make money by working for the man. You can be a pizza maker, or a telemarketer. You can probably even be a stressed out software engineer. Who would have thought that a game that consists primarily of making an imaginary person work, go to the bathroom and buy groceries would be so wildly popular? "It's a great escape from reality, in that... uh... my virtual guy has a goatee."

TECHNICAL REQUEST: if anybody knows a good way (in C++ on Linux) to send an XML transmission to a PHP page, receive an XML response, parse & process it and then send another XML transmission back, please let me know. The only way that comes to mind is to send the XML in an HTTP POST. But how do I do that? I've been looking for a good open source C++ library for HTTP transfer, but the only ones I can find are in C. Right now I'm leaning towards Libcurl, but if you have a better idea let me know. I wish I could find a C++ library, so I wouldn't have to link C functions into C++ code. For the XML parsing, I'm thinking of using Xerces. But I'm afraid I won't be able to make the HTTP stuff work. Or that it will be too slow or insecure. I wish I had more faith in this project, or myself.