Tinkering with Software & the Web tag:walterhiggins.net/blog 2012-05-12T02:28:12Z Walter Higgins tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/3rdPolicemansWalkman.html 2012-05-12T07:36:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/05/12 07:36</h2> <p>This is a small set of tracks I made over the last 3 weeks while feverishly reading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. It's a great book.</p> <p><object height="425" width="425"> <param name="movie" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fplaylists%2F1977517&amp;auto_play=false&amp;player_type=artwork&amp;color=ff7700"></param> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param> <embed allowscriptaccess="always" height="425" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fplaylists%2F1977517&amp;auto_play=false&amp;player_type=artwork&amp;color=ff7700" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed> </object> </p> <p>The music itself is a mixed bag. I hope you like it.</p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-music">Music</a>, <a href="cat-index-saganism">Saganism</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/Books.html 2012-04-28T15:48:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/28 15:48</h2> <p>Some books I've been reading lately...</p> <h3>Homicide: David Simon</h3> <p>I picked this up for 5 euro in HMV a few weeks back. It's very good. Anyone who's watched The Wire knows Simon has a great ear for dialogue and this book chronicling a year (1988) he spent with the Baltimore PD homicide dept displays the same acute ear for dialogue. If you're a fan of The Wire, this is a good read. </p> <h3>Venus in Furs: Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch</h3> <p>This is considered a bit of a classic (it was written in the 1870s) and is about a man who enslaves himself to a woman (Masoch unwittingly gave his name to Masochism). It's not a great read though it is sometimes funny (especially near the end).</p> <h3>In Praise of Older Women: Stephen Vizinczey</h3> <p>This one is very good. Wise and Funny in the way of some east-european writers. If you've ever read any of Milan Kundera's books and like them, you'll probably enjoy this.</p> <h3>The Third Policeman: Flann O'Brien</h3> <p>I haven't finished this yet but it is wonderful. I think I love it already. Surreal and very funny. </p> <p>I've been reading more books lately - actual physical books made of paper! - and spending less time online. </p> <p>It feels good.</p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-books">Books</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/The-Kids-on-Minecraft.html 2012-04-14T14:42:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/14 14:42</h2> <p>A quick pic of the Kids in MineCraft. <a href="http://twitter.com/notch">Notch</a> should make it easy to create skins from within Minecraft itself.</p> <p><img src="images/2012-04-14_15.02.15.png" alt="Kids in Minecraft" title="" /></p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-minecraft">Minecraft</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/On-GitHub.html 2012-04-14T00:02:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/14 00:02</h2> <p>So I'm over on <a href="https://github.com/walterhiggins">GitHub</a> if anyone is interested. What do I plan to put up there? Not too sure to be honest. I've posted the source code to the markdown helper javascript I use here on this blog. It does basic stuff like indenting a block of selected text, quoting and line-wrapping - that sort of thing. I also plan to post my beloved TinyTemplate perl module. <a href="http://search.cpan.org/~walterh/">CPAN</a> doesn't take kindly to projects with the word 'Tiny' in them any more. Too bad, I think the world could use less software. I've been meaning to update my TinyMake module for a while now - the documentation is plain wrong in places. I think GitHub might be a better home for my odds and ends. We'll see.</p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-programming">Programming</a>, <a href="cat-index-version-control">Version Control</a>, <a href="cat-index-github">GitHub</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/IDM-Is-Creatively-Bankrupt.html 2012-04-08T16:20:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/08 16:20</h2> <p>It's Easter Sunday. Ursula is in the College Library studying for upcoming Law exams. There are 5 children in the house (only 2 of which are mine). Like any good adult guardian, I picked up some headphones and my iPad and spent some time noodling in GarageBand to drown out the noise. This is the result...</p> <iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F42425779&show_artwork=true"></iframe> <p>... This is probably the best thing I've put up on SoundCloud in ages. The bass-line gets interesting around the 1:40 mark thanks to some liberal use of Echo. </p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-saganism">Saganism</a>, <a href="cat-index-music">Music</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/Titanic-in-Super-3D.html 2012-04-08T08:29:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/08 08:29</h2> <iframe width="560" height="315" title="Titanic in Super 3D" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dJxj1mou03M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> <p><a href="http://youtu.be/dJxj1mou03M">Titanic in Super 3D</a></p> </iframe> <p>Too Funny.</p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-humour">Humour</a>, <a href="cat-index-titanic">Titanic</a>, <a href="cat-index-piss-take">Piss Take</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/Exiles.html 2012-04-08T08:02:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/08 08:02</h2> <p>For your reading pleasure this fine Easter morning...</p> <blockquote> <p>I saw Quora&#146;s potential early on &#151; it could have been a giant repository of information, a kind of interactive encyclopedia with views coming from everywhere. And certainly, there are still very interesting questions being asked (this one and this one came in my Quora weekly digest, and were pretty interesting). But it&#146;s all being overrun with meaningless questions. Put simply, it&#146;s just hard to filter through all the noise to get to the worthwhile content. That&#146;s one reason why I visit the site maybe once a month, and just read the weekly digest instead. <br /> -- <a href="http://delw.in/quoras-demise/">Quora&#146;s Demise : delwin campbell</a></p> </blockquote> <p>... and this...</p> <blockquote> <p>Finally, and this was the last straw, in the fall, when there was the smell of snow, we allowed six men and a girl-child of the Waterfall People to enter our home, all six hungry and weak, and I was asked if I could shelter two of the men in my already very-crowded cave, as if it was my job to teach strangers the ways of the Red Valley People, and asked to share my smoked deer meat&#151;even though it was never made clear to me exactly how much smoked deer I should be giving to the People. That's when I began to wonder exactly why I had joined the Red Valley People. <br /> -- <a href="http://www.ftrain.com/rv.html">Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley (Ftrain.com)</a></p> </blockquote> <h2>Related</h2> <p><a href="http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=5007&amp;Itemid=81">The Daily Mash - Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=all">Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs - NYTimes.com</a></p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-the-social-media-exile-essay">The Social Media Exile Essay</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/LegoSpaceships.html 2012-04-06T13:31:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/06 13:31 </h2> <p>I love the rinky-dinky transparent cheese-wedge cockpits on these models. Just ... Lovely!</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoderism/7048514975/" title="NCP Colonial Fleet by Mike el Fabricante, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5451/7048514975_c0417354b0.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="NCP Colonial Fleet"></a></p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-lego">Lego</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/Mixing.html 2012-04-03T17:16:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/03 17:16 </h2> <p>Who says a blog should have a uniform style throughout?</p> <ol> <li><a href="http://walterhiggins.net/blog/InfiniteScrolling">Exhibit A</a></li> <li><a href="http://walterhiggins.net/blog/WebLand">Exhibit B</a></li> <li><a href="http://walterhiggins.net/blog/Pretend">Exhibit C</a></li> </ol> <p>Three different blog posts; Three different style-sheets. The stylesheets are set randomly whenever the blog is updated. I'm kind of fond of the <a href="http://www.jwz.org/blog/">Jamie Zawinski</a>-inspired <a href="hacker.css">hacker.css</a> style but it probably isn't to everyone's taste. Chances are the above 3 examples won't have different styles the next time the blog is rebuilt so browse the archives to see examples of the stylesheets in use. I've been prepping my blogging software for use by my 10 year old daughter, I want to teach her a little about blogging, HTML &amp; CSS so I've depersonalized the software and provided a <a href="default.css">default.css</a> stylesheet for use by someone new to my blogging software - it has sensible defaults that emphasize readability, and provides a good starting point for exploring the different aspects of CSS. I've been beavering away on the blogging software late at night, ironing out the kinks to make it easier for her to use.</p> <!-- partial generated at Tue Apr 3 10:40:05 2012--> <blockquote class="twitter"> <table> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p>10 yr old daughter now has her own domain, SSH and FTP account. Been walking her through unix basics. They grow up so quickly. mmfff.</p></td> </tr> <tr class="tweetinfo"> <td valign="top" width="64"><a href="http://twitter.com/walter"><img src="images/twitter/walter.png"/></a></td> <td valign="top" align="left"> <div class="twitterer">Walter Higgins (<a href="http://twitter.com/walter">@walter</a>)</div> <div class="tweetlink"><a href="https://twitter.com/walter/status/183858772698083328">Sun Mar 25 2012</div> </td> </tr> </table> </blockquote> <p>She's been blogging away for the past two years on wordpress.com and has become really good at expressing herself and presenting her photos. Moving to her very own domain where she has full control will be a bit of an adjustment - I hope she likes her new online home.</p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-css">CSS</a>, <a href="cat-index-web-design">Web Design</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p> tag:walterhiggins.net/blog/InplaceEditingRedux.html 2012-04-02T17:10:00Z <h2 class="timestamp">2012/04/02 17:10 </h2> <p>A couple of weeks ago I wrote about replacing text in multiple files and came up with - what I thought at the time was - a reasonable one-line <a href="TextSubstitution">solution</a>. Behold! Thanks to the power of Unix Golf I present a more concise one-line command (working in Unix and CygWin)...</p> <pre><code>find . | xargs grep -l '{OLD}' | xargs -I % perl -pi~ -e 's/{OLD}/{NEW}/g' % </code></pre> <p>... I call this the <em>Perl Pie</em> solution since it's Perl's <code>-p -i -e</code> flags which do much of the heavy lifting. </p> <blockquote> <p>Perl -i specifies that files processed by the &lt;> construct are to be edited in place. It does this by renaming the input file, opening the output file by the original name, and selecting that output file as the default for calls to <code>print, printf,</code> and <code>write</code>. <br /> -- <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596004923/ref=as_li_tf_tl?tag=xanajavaperle-20">Programming Perl</a></p> </blockquote> <p>This is a much shorter solution than what I came up with earlier; 77 characters compared to the previous solution's 132. I shaved off a couple of characters from the first half of the command by using <code>grep -l</code> to only show the file name for matches - doing away with the need for the subsequent <code>| cut -d':' -f1</code> statement, and thanks to <code>perl -i</code>, there's no need to explicitly open, slurp, and close the file. Less typing means less errors. ;-)</p> <p><h2 class="categories">Categories</h2><div class="categories"> <a href="cat-index-unix">Unix</a>, <a href="cat-index-perl">Perl</a></div> <!-- pre-markdown processing for this page took 0 seconds --></p>