Hi

Hotlink: Planet Lisp

Bill Clementson's Blog: Who is this guy?: "In the beginning, there was Planet Lisp, and life was good."

Definitely a link to something that I want to look at later. It's got various feeds and information about all sorts of things lisp-y and things that I want to learn.

Bill Clementson's Blog

Bill Clementson's Blog talks about all sorts of things lisp. And he uses Emacs. Which hey, isn't that bad, despite what some people have said. I'll be using it more to do the blog posts once I get a module to do blogger from xemacs on cygwin.... :)

Remote File Editing

Bill Clementson's Blog article Remote Lisp Development with SLIME/Emacs mentions "TRAMP (the remote file editing package that most people use with Emacs for accessing remote files)".

Now wouldn't this be nice for editing web pages remotely, so you can insure that you have an emacs environ that you don't have to always be tweaking on each new machine?

I'm thinking of doing something like this on the local machine, but as it is windows, it'll be a bit more trick. Granted the Make the Machine a Ubuntu box is very much still in the queue of things I'm going to do soon.

TRAMP and editing remote files

Bill Clementson's Blog: Remote Lisp Development with SLIME/Emacs (link) mentioned that "TRAMP (the remote file editing package that most people use with Emacs for accessing remote files)". I am definitely thinking this would be a handy feature and something that would really make things easier for those one shot web page edits.
Granted this machine is windows that I'm posting on, so it'd be emacs for windows, but that Make my machine Ubuntu project is still very much in the queue.

shitinabox.net - FAQ

shitinabox.net - FAQ: "Exactly, we care nothing of your revenge..we just want your money in exchange for helping you achieve it"

Bill Clementson's Blog: The Most Important Idea in Computer Science

Bill Clementson's Blog: The Most Important Idea in Computer Science: "Lisp is the most important idea in computer science."

Remember that. And be afraid. Well, not afraid. Think about this. Lisp is it's own compiler. It's a pimp language that scares people with ()'s. And it can do darn near anything and a lot of the libraries to do it are already out there. And shoot, Reddit is written in it. And that's sweet.

Super Hero Vault

Ignore the fact they were growing weed (link). It's the fact that they had this interesting set up at their home that let them almost be like super heroes. Except that they were selling drugs. That's not cool. But damn, imagine the kind of secrets other people have under their house....

Spanish language

So was browsing the Creative Commons Deed link and saw a reference to Castellano. Now the one thing that I have to confess to is that I'm a language fiend. It's partly cause I'm a cryptography fiend and also an anthropology geek. Nothing is more exciting than uncovering information held in a different form, I guess. Anyways I see a reference to Castellano, and I well click on it, never having heard of this term. Turns out it that it's a formal version of Spanish. I now refer you to the excellent Wikipedia article Names given to the Spanish language.

Tekumel :: The World of the Petal Throne

Tekumel :: The World of the Petal Throne Give in. Go look at it. Serious mind warping goodness and a rich world that isn't based on the European stories that a lot of the rpg's are based on.

IE no greek gods. Oh there are gods, but they are aztec-y. Yeah that prhase makes me cringe, but it's the best way to describe it. And imagine a world where no one really knows that they used to be super-high-tech world but the remnants are there. It's post holocaust, without those pesky 'day after' syndrome.

Tags

What I need to do is figure out how to make tags for this for not only Technorati, but also for people that want to get only those "articles" that pertain to the items of interest. Plus then I can make some posts "personal" and people could skip them or read my wacky views.

Writely - The Web Word Processor

Writely - The Web Word Processor(link) sounds like something really neat. I am wondering if it uses RubyOnRails to do it's thing. In any event, I'm definitely thinking things like this are great for podcast shownotes or resumes and cover letters.

I mean imagine people being able to add to the show notes of a podcast with things like ratings for games, further explanations on tech hints and then it *might* be downloadable by the audience. I have to go check that last point.

Guardians Of Order

Guardians Of Order(link) makers of such great things as "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" and publishers of "Tekumel".

Go look up Tekumel. I dare you. I have my copy, which I bought at Portland's greatest bookstore (well in my opinion), Powell's. Oh, and any city that has a technical bookstore with tons of books and another store with tons of rpg's and others is just awesome. Although, seriously Powell's, why is some of the anime in the children's section?

Tri-Stat DX

"Min/Maxing and munchkinism are not problems with the game, they are problems with the player"

This is part of the *Role-Playing Game Manifesto* in the Tri-Stat DX system. And I have to say that manifesto, regardless on how cool the system is, is something that people need to read and remember. Basically the manifesto reminds people that, well it's a game and a game isn't fun if it's filled with bad cheese.

Oh and where do you get the tri-stat DX system? You can get it here. I've heard of a couple of groups dropping the system that was mentioned in a game world (like FUDGE) and using this system. Now is that because it was they knew it better or it made the world more interesting, I don't know. But it at least means that the system worked for someone.

Podcast Alley

At Podcast Alley (link) they list all sorts of podcasts. First thought, do they use Ruby or Ruby on rails? Second thought, why aren't some of my fave podcasts higher on their ranks? :)

Anyways, it's a really nice site, and really nice to find various podcasts and see where your's is in the ranks.

Go there. Go there now.

Podcast Geeking

So I love listening to podcasts (link). I have several favourites and I'll be posting some of them and their pages in the near future. All of them are great to listen to and chock full of information that I really appreciate.

I have to say that a lot of the time that the podcasts that I tend to continue to listen to are ones that do the following:

• Have good audio
  
• Have Emotionally Stable people
  
• Admit that they aren't the be-all end-all to their topic
  

The last one is a major reason that I keep up with a particular podcast. Otherwise I think that they are being selfish over their title and think that only they can do the job well and the rest of us suck. Thankfully, most of the podcasters out there still haven't fallen into that trap.

Small Batch Craft-Roasted Coffee from Sweet Maria's!

Small Batch Craft-Roasted Coffee from Sweet Maria's and how to subscribe to their service. I got this from CoffeeGeek who's site is the best darned resource for coffee in general. Granted a how to make ristretto link isn't easy to find (for me).

Xandros

So I'm sitting here blogging and I was noticing that when I did a search for Ubuntu that under the google sponsored links there was a Ubuntu vs Xandros link. I clicked on it and was sent to the Xandros web site.

Ok, maybe I'm dumb but they are both debian distros. And Xandros is pay only. Now if that is wrong and there is a live-cd for me to play with I'm all for trying it out. The only thing I hate about some of the distros for linux out there right now is that they are pay-for only (more or less). I mean what's the point of leaving one paid-for operating system to go to another. Now don't get my wrong, a lot of the distros like suse xandros or redhat are great for those people that want tech support or at the very least someone to blame when something breaks.

But that's not me. I use things like BSD's and other Unix systems cause I want control of my experience, I want it cheap, and I want neat new tech that is sometimes really niche. If anyone has a better overview of Xandros I'd love to hear it.

Ruminations on Linux

So, something I've been thinking of doing is installing ubuntu on my computer on the alternate hard drive partition. I've already done so on the laptop, and well I rarely now go into the windows paritions. The only things that I don't know will work in Ubuntu (I can hazard guesses but eh)

*iTunes music, specifically the aac's on the drive, if they even exist
*the podcasts on the ntfs partitions
*network set up might be slightly painful if this network card isn't recognized

All kind of slight reasons to not use Linux. I could do things like set up a webserver on the box and let people know the site or set up jabber servers and other messaging elements. Those are serious draws. And I know the sound will work, since this is an AC97 sound card. Hm.... Guess I could always slot a live-cd and see what shows up and what doesn't. The choices abound. Oh and would X work on this ati radeon 9800....

Mutt with Gmail

This blog article talks about how to use mutt with gmail. Very handy to have. My would someone use mutt when they could go over to the gmail web interface? Well sometimes you aren't at a web browser, or with me, I want to be able to customize various aspects of the reply that I don't have in the web client.

For example, mutt lets you do things like have multiple identities when you are replying to things, sometimes you can have mulitple signatures and some other features.

And heck, I really like mutt.

NetBSD's CGD

Tasty crypto information follows. One of my favourite things mentioned: n-stage crypto keys. So you could have some wacky things like a network key, a disk based key, a password, and another key on a crypto partition that only opens up at certain times.

Keey your stuff secret if you want, but the really nice thing is that you could do this on a laptop and have it so that if the laptop is stolen, all that critical credit card information and pictures of your spouse aren't usable by *anyone*. Also, would kind of eliminate what happened on the National Lampoon's European Vacation, with the video camera..... hint hint.

'aztec calendar' T-Shirt

Here is an example of the zazzle.com shirts and also something that I was looking at getting sometime in the near future.

Can't know this calendar. Now if only I could find Tekumel items.

Zazzle.com

If you want to make super pimp tshirts, one at a time, you should zip over toZazzle.com. It has things like Scooby Doo shirts and lets you really customize your shirts, with things like color, style and logo on a per shirt basis.

Very handy.

Blogger Buzz

Blogger Buzz is something that I think is part marketing and part feature announcement. With that said they had the latest "Blog This!" bookmarklet linked, and it was changed over on Jan 3rd. Wacky.

Cheese

So it appears that a lot of my prior posts went to a pic blog.

Hard
Core
Cheese

Anyways, I've deleted those posts and am going to check and see if there is a new bookmarklet that will go to the right blog.

Code of Unaris

Amazon.com: Code of Unaris: Chat Roleplaying: Books

Yeah, this is wacky. I've seen a copy and the overarching ideas are very very cool. Imagine a game session where you hack what the GM just said so that the event is less threatening or neater than s/he had imagined.

Buffalo Yarn

Here is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. Yarn from the American Bison. Apparently, there is even a patent on how to get and make it. Donein 1991. So this isn't something that your grandmother knit with. Or shoot even your mother.

Supposedly it's quite soft....

Another Wacky way to Authenticate Users

Instead of a password, analyze how they type. This is about as cool, and as scary as the programs that can figure out your passwords by listening to the clicks on the board...

Fonts

I love fonts, and this site seems to have a lot of them. Yeah, it's dorky, but what do you expect when my handwriting is so bad.

More ruby fun

Interleaving arrays together to form a super array. Kind of in reverse of what I need, but the yield comments made me thing about the idea that I could do something like


class Array
def couple()
(length-1).times { |n| yield(at(n), at(n+1)) }
end
end


Which *seems* to work, albeit throwing complaints all the way. And it does the a,b;b,c;c,d sort of thing with a list...

Working in Ruby

So I'm working in ruby and I'd like to get the following from one list:

lines = %w{a b c d e f}


irb(main):211:0> colors = lines.clone
=> ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f"]
irb(main):212:0> (1..colors.length/2).map {|z| [ colors.shift ] + [ colors.shift ] }
=> [["a", "b"], ["c", "d"], ["e", "f"]]


so either [a,b], [c,d],[e,f] as a list (which I l hate how the above destroys colors inside the loop
or
a,b ; b,c ; c,d ; d,e ; e,f as a list.

I did use the following for the second part:


colors[0..-2].zip(colors[1..-1])


Any hints,tips suggestions would be appreciated.

Livemarks

Watch del.icio.us bookmarks as they are sent to del.icio.us here. Very cool, and lets you pounce on the neat ideas right away.

Finally, a filing method I can get behind

Sure it's a japanese way of doing things, and it requires A4 envelopes, but it makes sense.

The basic premise is that if you keep shifting things you read/access all the time to the left after you use them things will start shifting to the right. As such you get this lovely effect of those files that are super important, but never read, or files that you never read will move to the right where they can be picked up and sent into a more permanent storage.

Very wicked cool. And think of this, books that you refer all the time you could do the same thing. Every time you read a reference, take it and put it all the way to the left. Then those books you read all the time will become always the leftmost book (and it'll be easier for you to see that).

Lifehacker - Geek to Live - 10 Bookmarklets

Via Digg, here are 10 bookmarklets that you can use. For example, no longer do you have to ask what does AFAIK means. The article is kind of neat.

Gimp 2.4 Preview

Down here at Newsforge, where they've done a review of Gimp 2.4. It's going to be a tre sweet piece of software, with neat things like foreground extraction, which I've always had to do with things like bit masks or magic wands. This is much, much cooler. When it comes out, seriously, go get it. And the 2.4 version for Windows shouldn't be that far behind, for which I am eternally grateful.

How to open your home, with a Cell phone

Cue the Evil Mad-Genius music:

Open your Home, with your Cell Phone

It'll take some electronic skills and I'm sure a soldering iron, after all what sort of a tech geek are you if you can't solder something together with your eyes closed?

(FYI, I can't/haven't soldered a thing in my life.)

Web Development Bookmarklets

Which can be found here.
And did I mention that these are really handy. All of them work in
Firefox/mozilla and really help a person get a handle on various
things like what the page would look like if you were to change the
<body> attributes of the css.

For those Java Junkies

Try coding in HECL. Granted, if you are going scripting language, it might behoove you to learn something like perl, but to each their own.

Caffeine Overview

For those of you that are into caffeine and want to know what is the best drink to get, these guys have done a study, and detail flavour, composition, density of caffeine per ounce as well as how much total caffeine there is in the drink (for those of us too lazy to take oz * caffeine/oz).

Interesting, stuff, like penguin mints have 7mg of caffeine per mint and 3 of them is equal to one 12 oz soda (like coke). The thing to remember is that the LD50 of caffeine and it's chemical info is detailed here.

What's LD50? It's the Dosage of caffeine someone can take and die only 50% of the time. And for caffeine in rats, it's around 179 to 200mg per kg. So if you are a beefy boy, and weigh around 180kg you'd have to drink around (at LD50 200mg/kg) 200 16oz cups of starbucks brewed coffee.... Yeah it's gott 200mg per 16oz cup. Which is about 25 GALLONS.

Oh and this is a neat site about coffee, the Coffee Faq. It may not be CoffeeGeek but it's a start.

Google Tweaks

This is the javascript that adds things like a remembered searches....

Userscripts.org - Universal Repository for Dynamic Scripts

This is a collection of all things javascript/greasemonkey like. It's sweet. And there are tons of various things that are available for greasemonkey et al.

Oh, if only I could find the one that saved virtual folders for gmail, that was a sweet user script.

Ajax applications

Ajax is a neat new emerging technology that lets people do things on webpages without having to refresh the page (amongst other things). Slashdot has an article where they detail various applications that are already out there that could be made into an office suite. Myself, I've seen things like scriptaculous, and I've got to say that Ajax is a neat design paradigm. Where else could you get a webpage where if you like items on the page you drag them to the shopping cart and the page doesn't need to refresh and you don't need to stop shopping. This would be really great for impulse buys and pages set up more like stores. Imagine, shopping for items where you never really refresh the page or have to go any where except when you go to "Check Out" and even that would be an asthetic reason, not because checkouts aren't possible....

Restore your Ipod

Or anything with plastic scratches... at least that is what this guy purports you can do with only a can of brasso and a microfiber cloth. Granted I don't have any cloth, but still might be an interesting thought experiment. . .

Linux Cryptography

So this site covers some of the basics about linux crypto (including the crypt a file and how to make encrypted partitions). How is this important? Well lets just say that just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean that you have to publish that fact. Crypto is good for you and good for your mental privacy. Remember if someone finds your new patentable idea and you can't prove that you were the first one that thought it, it's going to cost you money. And it will cost more money anyway with the court battles.

Mmmmm.

20 Things for you to know in CSS

Shameless crosslinking. This is a site that discusses such neat tricks as making rounded corners as well as how to make them without using pictures, all in CSS. Very neat stuff. Oh and my "Zen of CSS Design" came in today, so I'm an especially happy monkey.

Intro Chapter to Practical Lisp Programming

Introduction: Why Lisp? Here's some anectodatal evidence. Oh and later on in the book they cover how to make an MP3 streaming server using only lisp....

Why Lisp?

Why not? C'mon, lisp is cool. And hey, it's a new paradigm for programming and there is always a need for programmers to learn new paradigms....

Hungry Girl: Muffin Doings

Sadness, the costco muffins are like 690 calories.... ouch.

Polishing Ruby: Zero to Rails in 2 minutes

Feel the Ruby Love, seriously. You want Rails. You want it now. Couple it with some css, ajax, and xhtml and you'll be thankful how easy it is to create new webapps that can live on any os, any browser.

Konfabulator

Want something kick ass?

Free?

Get This.

What it lets you do is have various widgets on your desktop that tell you things like the temperature and forecast for outside. And if you make them be "Below" widgets they embed onto your desktop so you can have icons around it.

Oh, and you can program new widgets for it. SOme say it is really really easy to do. Oh and for your stock fiends, it comes with a stock ticker....

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7

Upgrade now!.

On an aside, I love Leo Laporte was commenting on a lot of blogs are a waste of time.

Granted, this is a news site/tech feed. But it's cunning disguised as a blog.

Opera's Now Free

Yes you heard it here, opera is free as in beer. Yipee! Now there is no reason why anyone has to stay with IE and it's crap standards.

And I really mean crap standards. C'mon, who really wants to have to do tricks to get PNG translucency to work? I'm just glad they support a subset of CSS.

Granted Opera and Firefox support most everything in the CSS.

Much excitement.

NerdTV

This a neat site. People that are on the tech trail giving television interviews that you can then download and watch. It's like iptv but sponsered by PBS and like some iptv, only available via the internet.

How's this done, bandwidth-wise? Well through the bandwidth sharing, peer to peer client BitTorrent. It's really neat. And the speeds you can get to download things is much faster than some of the speeds the respective servers could handle normally. IE PBS might not have a pipe that can handle hundreds of 1MB connections all at once, but with the miracle of BitTorrent, they don't have to. Cool stuff.

Digg

From this awesome site's copy:

What's Digg? Digg is a technology news website
that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical
editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but
rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the
homepage, the users do.

It's very Cool. And via digg, I found the following link to firefox wallpapers here.

Trailers @ apple

Oh if you want to spend some time seeing what's going to come out in the theatres, why don't you head on over to The Apple Trailer section. Most of the big name movies are there and it's always nice to see them in the privacy of your own home.

Only drawback is that you'll need Quicktime which, while bundled with iTunes, doesn't mean each and every person has it.

Oh, and if you want a good browser, and you don't want firefox, for some reason, you could always get Opera. I'm using it right now to write this entry (and it's fast).

Lulu.com

This site has an interesting premise. Print on demand books people want. So instead of doing pre-determined runs of books, as someone wants a book it's printed out. And, from what I hear, the printing doesn't suck.

And they have several Mac OSX type books (including one book on Applescript).

Neat neat stuff.

Searching Blogs

Ever wanted to search blogs for some information? Well look no further Google now has this service. Vanity google yourself, or just see what other people have said about tech on occasion. It's handy, and has RSS feeds for the searches. So you can pick a topic and see what all people post about it.

CSS and IE6

Did you know that IE6/5 does *not* handle transparent png's for backgrounds correctly? Nope, you have to play tricks with them. Supposedly they will have png support in IE7, but still how can you really force readers of your website to go to IE7?

Oh, and here is the link to the IE7 blog (or at least yet another one).


Oh and here's my favorite quotes from the mezzoblue article:

Lack of support for min-width and max-width

Again comparing to all other browsers on the market, IE is the only one that doesn’t support the CSS2 properties min-width and max-width (which have been a standard since 1997, incidentally). These are incredibly useful for controlling larger areas of type, particularly when setting line length limits to aid in readability.

The trick to getting around min-width in IE is actually pretty easy. IE treats width as if it were min-width. By exploiting the fact that IE doesn’t support child selectors either (more on this later) we can create a simple bit of code that doesn’t allow a browser windows....

To edit the Style of the Sheet II

Go and use the "edit styles" bookmarklet they offer. You can find it here and it's the best thing since sliced bread. It has literally cut down on my css development cycle by leaps and bounds.

Now all I do is start it up on a page that I want to manipulate the css and then once I get it the way I want it, I take my changes and retype them into the static css....

2 Thumbs up, er something.

To edit the Style of the Sheet

(And this was borrowed from one of my del.icio.us bookmarks, so please feel free to search for developer tools)

<lots of pain and evil javascript code that blogger then attempted to render>



Oops, guess I'll just post the link for posterity.

Update:

Did you know that Blogger won't take < or > in their code if not dereferened into ampersand-gt-semicolon?

Odeo, it's not just yodelling

So this is a neat site that does
podcasting software. It's definitely something for those of you that
don't want to do iTunes or some other podcasting software. And they
offer all sorts of podcasts on their site already. There is software for
mac and windows and it looks dead easy to get and install.

Join the podcasting bandwagon. What with the free music and tons of news
from various viewpoints it's definitely something that everyone needs
to go out and get.

Downloads for WoW

Man I started this download about an hour ago, and it's still going (42%). Wow, I really think that we need to to figure out a way to host this to another network sharing protocol. I know the bandwidth alone is driving people to their knees at the WoW camp.

Any suggestions? Other than don't play wow...

SessionSaver

After just having recovered from another power outage, I cannot recommend highly enough, the wonderful extension to firefox, known as SessionSaver. With that and CacheFixer (or by it's lonesome) it saves sessions between crashes. And the best part is that it's fire and forget. Install it, tweak a few options if you like, and then from then on if you have a crash, your pages will be back.

I've been using it on all my machines as of late, so that I can more easily pick up where I left off. Oh and I did mention that I had the ability to undo a close of a tab or even a window? How can you not love that?

Ooh, and you thought you knew caffeine?

Klah Recipe, lots of caffeine, and other xanthines!

Lots of pain! Can't wait to try it out.

TWiT - the podcast

In this day and age of podcasting, someone who wants to speak about tech are about a dime a dozen. However, this half dozen talk all about it. Sure sometimes what they talk about is too low level for some, I think everyone can figure out what they are saying after a few more sentences.

Remember Podcast Alley is one of the places that you can find all sorts of podcasts. Oh, and Pod safe network is an ok source for music that won't have you worrying if someone going to bust into your house with automatic weapons.

Education/Technology - Tim Lauer: del.icio.us Archives

"Creating Custom Podcast Feeds Using del.icio.us" is a neat article writing about how some people are using the power of del.icio.us to create podcasts.

The basic idea is to mark mp3's that you are interested in and then since del.icio.us can make rss you can then use the url that this particular tag makes to form a url you can then feed iTunes or some other podcast enabled program.

Very awesome. And apparently, the parent blog entry has that poster doing things like putting in auto-generated audio that can preface the mp3's. Wow!

Del.icio.us Linkroll

You'll notice on the sidebar now that I have Del.icio.us linkrolls enabled. Now you too can see what the old norseman is doing on the web and linking to.

I first read about this neat feature from the del.icio.us blog which describes some of the neat new features that they are putting into the blog and sometimes how to use them.

Why did I wait to put it in? Well honestly, it was momentum. I hadn't thought that people were going to use this, and then I started to see that there were other people using it on their blogs. When I saw this I knew that this would be a feature that wouldn't go away sometime soon.

Feedburner/Atom

Ok, so now that I've become a bit more savy, I've come to realize that the RSS on the side of this blog isn't really RSS, it's Atom. Whoops. So accourding to this help article I can go to feedburner and set up a rss feed (I think it's 2.0). Anyways, this is the service that slashdot.org and Uncle Willy use so I think I might go ahead and pick it up. Offer the two and see what happens. Comments?

Time between posts

You know what I need to do, is trim down on these times between posts. Sorry folks.

Anyways have you been to Reddit? If you haven't, you should. It's a place where people can put up links to anything (generally news stories) and then each person can mod the stories up or down. It's really a neat idea and works quite well. And, of all the handiness wasn't enough, it's also written in lisp. Can't beat that with a stick.

Ahi Tuna

Ahi Tuna, or yellowfin tuna is delicious. Internal heat of 125 degrees or cook them on medium high for 4-5 minutes per side per inch. Very tasty, and kind of expensive in the frozen north where there is no sea.

Word Verification

Oh so this is a neat feature. Word verification. Sure it's another step that people have to overcome, but still it tends to cut down on scoms. Oh, not that I would know overmuch. Sometimes I feel like it's more a Lion Trap.

Oh the other neat thing of note? Apparently part of the blogger action is done in dynamic python. I wonder how they keep the server load low enough. I had always thought that python uncompiled-ly was going to take a performance hit until it was byte code.

Granted, I don't program python anymore. I tend to write ruby.

Other Neat RIP features

* It uses Xpath
* It can use regular expressions (more or less) to filter out sets of pages on a site
* It can filter simular items on a page

So what does this buy you? Well the first two points are more hard core than some people think about. They are presented in an easy form to you but they are really quite powerful and let the browser do all sorts of neat tricks. And the last one? Well remember that most of the ads on a site are all of one size or another. So when you get rid of an element and say all simular elements, they are all gone.

Oh and it has a "Undo last RIP" feature. So that if you go ahead and rip the entire page away, it'll let you get it all back.

So, do I advocate ditching all the ads, the very lifeblood of the internet today, the thing that lets us use all these services for free?

Not really. Esp when they are Google text ads. Quick to download, wordy ads that let me know what the business does or purports to. I click a heck of a lot more google-y ads than I do any of the other "Shoot the Monkey" Ads. In fact I've never shot the monkey.

Splog

So apparently splogs are spam-blogs. At least accourding to some authors. Whoops. I guess the spam-comments on my site should be called scoms. Or maybe spomments or spom.

Lazy for Programmers, sure but Dumb?

This is in reply for this article.

Ok it's kind of compelling the reasons to keep things easy. Don't overthink items. Never assume. But the poster keeps using the words "stupid" and "dumb" to convey this attitude.

I disagree, and would suggest a different set of words: rustic and simple.

Being rustic isn't a bad thing. It's keeping things simple and taking the straightest path to the solution. Don't worry about fixing the barn doors when the barn's on fire. Simplicity is the act and art of not trying to show-off that you're greater than anyone else and how cool you can make things.

Look at quaker furniture. It's not sought after because it's got so many new-fangled features. It's simple, solidly made work. It does what it does and can't be also used as a cappucino machine. Sure they are put cleverly together, but people easily overlook that (kind of like how cleverly the google.com start page is put together).

The rest of article makes sense. Go for the low hanging fruit and when there aren't anymore, maybe you shouldn't start straining for the higher ones. But I imagine people trying to get "dumber" in programming and I just don't feel it can be a good thing when people really should trying to solve something simply and cleverly.

RIP - addenda

Oh, looking at boingboing, I think it's interpreting on the fly as the page loads. SO there were various items that hadn't loaded yet that just got dropped before the end of the page. So it's kind of like some of the other adblockers where it stops the spam before it gets to you.

RIP - Remove Items Permanently

Go here. Get this. Seriously, install it and go to town.

I hadn't realized that there was something out there that could internally be so powerful but still let people do things like "right-click an item and say RemovePermanently".

It's holy hot-damn sweet. Anything that lets you do things like remove banners based on their size is just the ticket for the sites you go to.

The only drawback is that it's a after-the-fact removal. Meaning that there are times that you'll load a page and then items will disappear. But still that's not a big issue when you really think about it.

Oh and it lets you do things like export the various things you've "ripped" and save them on a disk or hand to a friend so they don't ever have to put up with some of the ads that we all have had to for a long time.

Yahoo Mail vs Gmail

Ok, the only real thing I can think to easily compare is the total space they give out for free.

* Gmail: 2.5GB
* Yahoo: 1.0GB

While I'll never approach either in the near future, it's definitely something that I wonder about for both companies. Given the current state of technology and the funds that are going into both, is it really the case that every single user could have the full quota? Or is this like the time I was in Computer Science as a student and they gave all of us something like 120% of the total, so when 90% of the people almost hit quota no one could spawn files or make new entries into existing files.

CSS changing

So, I *might* be changing bits and pieces of the css that makes up the layout of this blog. Why, you may ask, when it has been so easy to read and so pretty to look at.

Well I like it too. The only problems I have is that it doesn't take up a lot of the screen (just the middle) and as such it tends to make it so that people have to scroll down a lot just to get a little bit of the article I've posted read. Which, frankly, reduces reader count. I like reader count.

Any suggestions on good CSS sites/templates will always be appreciated.

Blog Spam

Ok, that's just funny. Sad, but funny. I post to the blog, and voila I get a comment saying "Geez you've done such a good job setting up your blog, come see this Payday Loan site". What sort of wretch goes about writing software to post to blogs. Can't they at least do something like "If there are words about a heart attack don't post"?

Granted I could see consumer targetted splogs based on what was written in the blog and in the comments that go before them. But then again that would take effort, and intelligence, and I'm starting to think all they want is a cheap buck.

Scare

So, I had a family member's heart stop beating and stop breathing while in surgery. Now that was scary. If I'm a bit frazzled, that's the main reason why. Amazing how fragile the human body is.

Nice quote

"The only difference between a dripping faucet and a Japanese water garden is perspective".
--Kevin Kling

Ruby on Windows

If you are looking for a Ruby for Windows, click here. It's got an IDE and an Fox installation so you can do gui progs.

Dijjer

Could this be true? Browser based peer to peer? That would make it so much handier I can't begin to tell you. Granted I'll have to peak into how they are doing this. It's almost "too easy"...

Ruby Links

Del.icio.us links for ruby. Now seriously, go out and get ruby. It's got tons of libraries and a decent community.

Start Here

And any language that spawns comparisons of it's internals to mayonnaise can't be all that bad.

Lisp links

Norseman's Lisp Links off del.icio.us. Oh yeah. Feel the love.

Perl Jobs from Monster or Why Some people shouldn't write Job placement Copy

Ok, I have a bot on monster that searches for jobs. The two categories that I search for:

1. Perl
2. Ruby

If I could I'd say something like "Please Jesus, no jobs as a sysadmin for windows boxes or sysadmin in general" but sadly this option just isn't there.

However I got this email today with the following "job". My favourite line from this "Perl Job":

"Mid-level to Sr. Level JAVA (3+ years) development professionals need only apply."

Ok, seriously, on what planet did Java experience get equated with Perl experience? Oh I see:
"Professional working knowledge of internet protocols and techniques (Perl, HTML,
HTTP, TCP/IP)"

Perl is not an internet protocol or technique. It's a language. This copy doesn't induce me to apply, it makes me want to avoid the business both as a candidate and a customer. How technical can a business be if the people they are looking for wouldn't know what Perl is? The incredible irony is that it's a Tech Job Placement company.

Podcast & Spam

Wow, I posted about podcasts and *bam* I get comment spam. By anonymous folks. Shoot, that was amazing. I hadn't really thought that I would have had something like that come up on my blog but you know, I might have hit the main page for just long enough to be hit by the bots.

Wow, the price of fame. I just have to say thanks for why for the comment. I am so going to incorporate that into my daily routime. Always good to hear from ruby folks and especially those that know the architecture.

Podcast thoughts

Podcasts are neat now that iTunes does them so easily. The only problem is that now that I've subscribed to tons of podcasts, including Leo Laporte's casts, I've noticed that if I was sit down and just started to listen to them all it would be 4.8 days of non stop listening. That's like 13 days of 8hour workdays to listen to it all.

No wonder people just listen to a few that they enjoy. Granted from what I heard over at petercooper.co.uk's blog there are some that are only like 5-10 minute segments. I just seemed to be getting the ones that are 1+ hours per cast.

Wow, Podcast neatness

So this is something that is kind of neat. The podcasts that I can get off the iTunes stuff sometimes have video and pictures. Now I never thought this was that big of a deal but as the description said I can see that sort of stuff if I had an ipod that did color. That's awesome. Really really awesome. And with the oscon information that I heard from the apple folks that ipods are all going to be color from now on, I'm so thinking of a new ipod.

Speech recognition and Blogging

Ok, here's an experiment in concentration. Start a blog post. Now plug in something like your ipod into your ears. Turn it on to something that's like talk radio (like a podcast). Try and listen the podcast and blog at the same time. Come back two or more days later and see what sort of blog entries do you make.

So far I've noticed that I've written things like "it seamed like an important result" or "rankin is important". I really do thing it's true that there are parts of our brain that can't really multitask out. Language centers are something that are devoted to one stream at a time and doing two language tasks are the same time (constructing speech and understanding it) is something that makes a person blog less impressively and still not really understand what was spoken to him.

Think of it as the "Hey Honey" effect. Every husband has encountered this. The wife can be telling you about her day and you are reading the paper and when a question is posed you go "Huh?" to one of them. And we all know which one had the priority.....

And we know who is the dog house now. Maybe some meditation can mitigate this or if you kept listening to podcasts and blogged you'd learn to mitigate the symptoms slightly.

Bookmarks

Del.icio.us is the greatest thing ever. You should should go to it, try it out and marvel at it's genious. Nowadays I don't have any of my bookmarks on my machine, it's all up on del.icio.us. It's really is something that more people should use.

For example, when I blew away my old hard drive (which I still need to get the RMA for and return) I didn't even think about my bookmarks. It's getting to the point where things are never really living on my machine except for a few easy config files. So when it's time to blow something away, it's not the tear jerking, hair pulling situation it used to be.

News Services

So, I just found out that possibly Marylin Monroe spent some with women in a sexual way. Yeah I'm behind the times, but that's not what this entry is about. This entry is about newsfeeds in the modern era.

In my view, the things that journalism talks about are independently discovered by three or four different people and reported from the various angles. So when I hear something there are going to be three or more seperate stories, all thought out and verified by various people. Different takes or approaches to stories.

This wasn't the case with the Marylin story. I think that Reuters LA released this story and it was picked up by all the rest of the services. No one then spent really any leg work to see what else was part of the story. All the various stories so far were rehashed versions of the first story. It wasn't original and meant that the person that had the highest ranking in the search engine really seemed to be the only one that really mattered.

That's sad. And I can't begin to tell you how often I hate hearing "left her cold". I mean sure it was a paraphrased sentence of Marylin, but shoot, English is full of language to deal with dissapointment. Left her cold, felt nothing for it, was a big dissapointment, was a let down, wasn't interesting, etc. Granted some of the phrases are the kind that are fire-able for writing. Saying something like "left a bad taste" wouldn't be too good when referring to sexual content or cooking.

Blogging

How many times do you exclaim to yourself, "I'm going to blog this"? Anymore I say it once about every two days. The main reason is due to watching things and hearing things via various news services. Or sometimes I think that I'm going to blog something when the thing I just saw or thought was particulary importantant or insigtful.

Yeah, that's selfish. But still it's what I tend to think.

I wonder if there have been any studies of people and what sorts of subjects they tend to blog on. I think the random sampling would be a right pain and involve a lot of man hours to do so.

Matrix Fixes

1. Make it so I can see my factionmates as easily as my crewmates.
2. Let me button mash in an advanced combat interface
3. Let me email crewmates with materials and information
4. Put in some scripting language to make plugins.

Sure (4) is the most weird request. I just want the same thing that I have in WoW. Trackers of xp, loot, easy ways to reskin the interface, inventory at a glance, maps of the area I'm in with overlays of things (like bad guys and what they drop). There are a hundred different little UI type changes that I would like, but that's no guarantee that there are others that would like that. So, give me a language to plug in my changes and then if I call and ask for help the first thing tech support says is "Have you turned off your plugins" or "We have a signature to the server saying you are using plugins, we don't support that".

It's not too much to ask. Although, to date, WoW is the only game that has had this kick ass feature.

Oh and speaking of features, blogger arbitrarily cuts off posts after a certain character count is reached (I think it's actually line based). Not cool. Give me a popup saying that this post is longer than X lines and may be truncated. Don't just let the thing post and let me think I'm ok.

Testing

A test

.


Well, whaddya know. It worked out just fine. Granted it's not something that replaces being able to make a REST call or something but still, this is pretty sweet.

Utilities

You know what I *really* need?

Some emacs loving that does blogger entries. I had something like it at one time, but it wasn't quite what I wanted (barrier to learning was a tad too esoteric). I've tried the mail-in option and that doesn't seem to work at all.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Ruby

So yeah came across this while browsing why's site. Very cool. I hadn't been put into a situation where I needed to match the same thing on multiple lines (what with the nature of directory based information). But still this is damn cool. Give a regular expression to a string#scan and get back all the matching elements.

Means I can slurp in an entire file and pick out the bits I want. Memory overhead goes down the drain, but still for quick snatch-and-grabs, that has be the coolest thing.

re = /pattern./
STDIN.readlines.join("").scan(re)

too cool.

And the addenda....

ONLamp.com: The Virtual Internship: Take Control of Your Future by Becoming an Open Source Developer: "The Virtual Internship: Take Control of Your Future by Becoming an Open Source Developer"


Oh the thing he should have added on the end: Stop making products that are simple in scope and simple in aspirations. No one wants to hear that "Well I've finished with this product" unless you follow it up with a "And I'm adding to this suite of new utilities that will also be great".

Seriously, end the open source heartache of "I've closed the doors on this project"-itis.

Yeah - politics comment

So I keep getting this email from various Christian fellows of mine saying "God Bless the United States". Frequently it goes on to request a prayer for this nation for the Almighty to bless it and keep it.

Uh, you know I have a problem with that. Prayers are often for 'please keep the status quo' or 'make people go back to the right way of doing things'. In a country that uses the most gasoline products, that doesn't sign the Kyoto treaty, that wants credits for the trees it has to make up for the coal it burns, and the policies it asks others to follow by gunpoint, I find it hard to want God, Allah, the Godhead, or whomever you subscribe to as the divine super-god to keep things the way they are.

I'd rather pray for clean air, responsible politicians, and intelligent designs by people who not only have to make the decisions but have to live with them for the next 50 years. I want politicians to pretend like they have to be the ones that back up their statements personally. I want the government to admit failures. And any failures they make they follow it up with a new solution.

Leadership isn't claiming a mandate by the people, it's going with something that when you look into the eyes of the baby you kissed 15 years ago you can honestly not have to say, inwardly, "Sorry kid."

Leadership isn't sending people to die over and over again hoping that the variation in people that do the killing will make one sacrifice the pivotal one that changes the course.

Leadership is making people forget the bad old ways of doing things in exchange for something new and better structured.

Leadership is making phone calls to people to say you are sorry for their son's death even when you aren't the leader of the armed forces and you didn't sign off on what they are doing currently. Oh, and then going and making sure that the sacrifice isn't forgotten and policies are changed. Each person counts. No life is squandered and noone in the news service or in the public can be allowed to forget it. And the you can't forget it either.

Leadership is saying something difficult, achieving the impossible, and fighting the ignorance. Do everything in the open, and do everything like it was going to be in the open and you won't have to squelch the requests for information. Publish the bad advice, the moronic policy suggestions, the underhanded offers. If everyone knows that someone wants to buy you off, and they didn't, there will be a great deal more respect for you. And the institution you embody.

The Voters may have put you in an office, but their children will pay the price of the decision. Stop letting every child inherit a world full of bad air, bad attitudes, and bad decisions.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But the US didn't start out with a ton of special interests being the ones listened to, where people thought twice about drinking from the river, and citizens were thinking "Let's move to Canada".

Greasemonkey

Yeah so Greasemonkey is very neat. I've got a post in right now to the greasemonkey folks to see if there is some kind soul that will help me alter CSS style elements since I'm just not getting how to do it from the Dive site. It's kind of frustrating. I could take platypus to the pages that I want to have changed but that's kind of cheese.

I just know that someone will just that I blow away the CSS style and reintegrate it my way. Not really something I want to do. I'd rather just alter the two elements and get on with my life. Guess this is how some people feel with computers in general.

Granted I love the challenge of scripting greasemoneky code. Esp without any references.