GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Thursday 22 March 2007

Masthead photo ideas

For some time, I've wanted to set up my own weblog in such a way that it would have a set of "masthead photos" that would rotate throughout the year, with possible constraints -- some holiday-specific, to be run for N days preceding, say, valentines, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc; some simply related to the season; and some just nice pictures.

Some sources:

black bg with Xmas-lit boats
Anticip___ation
Somehow, the China Cove lit-up arch gotta be there
stuffed puppies
Ben's photo of trail tread from a segment of the John Muir Trail

For awhile, I've had some mock-ups of some of these on one of the URLs that lead to my home Mac, when it's awake, but those addresses appear to be broken at the moment.

[Edit: my dynamic IP address changed, and I didn't notice, and I don't have any automatic update for it set up. So these banner shot test designs (minus Anticip___ation, but plus Lake 10,199 even though it's not my photo) are at http://zia.mine.nu for now, whenever my Mac is up and running.]

Unfortunately, it appears that some folks at Google had a similar idea (themes for their personalized homepages), so once I get mine deployed, it'll look just a bit less original. Oh, well -- at least they'll mostly be my own photos.
11:50:10 PM comment/

Wednesday 28 February 2007

virtual server

Cool, that was easy — now I have my mac running both the new site and a virtual server for experimenting, the latter addressed via my old dyndns site zia dot mine dot nu. Now to locate that layout/CSS that I came up with a few weeks ago.

Downloaded liftweb, but haven't really had the time yet to try deploying something using it.
12:57:32 AM comment/

Wednesday 21 February 2007

Fixing Steve Yegge's rants

I am among many who find Steve Yegge's rants quite entertaining, but who also find them long enough to print rather than read online. The problem with this is that there's a bug somewhere, in the CSS, in Mac OS X, or in Firefox, whose result is that printing one entry out leads to one page containing only a useless header page, one page of content, cut off as it falls off the page, and one useless page of comment entry form. With some help from Eric Meyer and a bit of binary debugging, I tracked it down to a CSS property that says

   overflow: hidden;

which makes me suspect that Firefox is doing exactly what it was told to do -- hiding the "rest" of the page(s) because the entry overflowed what would fit on one (printed) page. Since I don't really grok javascript, greasemonkey, or hoodwink'd yet, I wrote a shell/ruby script to fix the rants to make them printable. Finding the things to fix is made vastly easier by the excellent Firebug plugin for Firefox, which is roughly a WYSIWYG CSS editor and validator for remote web pages.

Anyway, meanwhile, here's that script. It's brittle, but works for today:

#!/bin/sh
# Later, make it ruby -i.bak

# That first one is really the only thing needed to fix the printing problem.
# (Which was that it would only print one page of the rant.  S.Y. could
#  work around this bug by publishing normal-sized blog entries, but
#  I'm not holding my breath.)  The other gsub lines remove the sidebar
#  and widen the main text.
ruby         -p -e 'gsub( /overflow: *hidden;/ ) {|m| "/* #{m} */" }'      
                -e 'gsub( /width: *67%;/, "width: 95%" )'                  
                -e 'gsub( /width: *25%;/, "width: 0%; display: none; " )'  
            "$@"

Sorry, I can't do much about the content, but I find them entertaining enough that I'm not tempted to try. :-)

Usage: save the page, and then run this script with the name of that saved file as an argument.
9:04:35 PM comment/

Saturday 17 February 2007

Broken record

Whee! This posting today breaks my personal record of number of days in a row making reasonably interesting weblog postings. (Was 32, today's is #33.)

So for today's meat: here's the explanation of the Morse code thing of a couple of days ago: put the codes in "number of symbols order", so E and T (. and -) are first, IANM are next (.. .- -. and --), and so on. And note my ordering: consider the dots to be zeros and the dashes to be ones, and put the letters in binary order. Now to make a mnemonic out of that, just make up sentences in such a way that the next letter in the sentence that isn't already assigned a meaning gets the next available meaning. One complication is that four of the four-symbol patterns are not used. That's what the exclamation marks mean in the "Have Fun! I will!" part. Those mark two of those omissions. (The other two, ---. and ----, follow Z and can thus be ignored.)

So why does this add up? If we have enough bits to count up to 31, the four missing patterns should leave 27, but we come out even with 26 letters! Where's the missing missing pattern?

Answer: The question is kind of like the missing dollar in the old hotel-room change puzzle. The question is misleading, and the answer has everything to do with leading zeros. In fact, four bits should get you sixteen choices, not 31 nor 32. But we *hear* the leading zeros, so we count from zero again at each length, giving us

     2 (e and t) +
     4 (i a n and m) +
     8 (three-signal ones) +
     16
     --
  == 30.  Minus the four skipped patterns is 26.    
       --.-  .  -..  :-)

11:45:11 AM comment/

Friday 9 February 2007

Home Sunset

Now that I'm on a roll, aiming (apparently) to break my posting-days-in-a-row record (don't worry, it's only in the low thirties), I look at my referrer stats once in a while. They're dominated by google searches for various nicknames from various cities, due to my city nicknames page.

But I kept seeing this one home sunset photo that I shot in 2002 showing up. Weird, why would this nice but relatively obscure picture, that I hadn't really thought about for years, be referenced, on average, once or twice a day via google image search? The question didn't bubble up to being interesting enough to pursue until today. So ... I ran the google image search for home sunset. Whaddaya know, that shot is (currently) the first result shown. An inadvertent case of SEO, I guess.

12:22:15 AM comment/

Tuesday 6 February 2007

Radio Out Of Space

Yikes, I guess I just ran out of space (40 whole Megabytes) on the Radio Userland server. Must be time to move onto a modern blogging/content management system. For now, I took the 8 Mb of images and moved them over to got.net, but a lot of links will eventually need to be updated, so older images will be broken for a while.

Meanwhile, I tried to fix an extremely minor problem with my Radio U. desktop display -- it refuses to show the goofy little orange question marks. They are teeny GIF images, that live under the Radio U. folder, in www/system/images/qbullet/help.gif . The file itself exists on my disk, in the right place, and it seems to be valid (looks fine in Preview) and have the right permissions, but the Radio desktop simply won't display it.

I had a symlink in /Applications , that pointed to the "Radio Userland" directory, and was named "Radio%20UserLand". Radio wouldn't accept that. Then I tried to move it out of the way and make it an (old-style Mac filesystem) Alias.

Haven't had to *be* root on any Mac OS X system in a hell of a long time. (I'm sure there's some command-line "make alias" command, but I hadn't the patience.) Anyway, because I was denied write access in /Applications, I had to sudo to move the old "Radio%20UserLand" symlink out of the way, and then do some funkiness to make an alias. (For the record, it's Command-Option-drag to the desktop, then rename the alias to the name I wanted ("Radio%20UserLand"), and finally sudo mv to move it back into /Applications . And after all that? It still didn't work. Boo. Maybe if I really rename the directory to have the percent stuff in it. Nope, then Radio won't start up at all.

Oh well, guess I'll live with it a while longer.
12:52:41 AM comment/

Thursday 18 January 2007

Blogiversary whooshed by

Yep, my five-year blogiversary was Tuesday, and I didn't even notice. I even posted something! (The overall chances of that would have been worse than ten to one, last year!) Oh, well, I guess time flies when you're having fun.
11:09:37 PM comment/