- Ozy and Millie: Millie’s Binder
- Best way to fix unencoded ampersands I’ve found yet —
I’m just not quite “with it” on lookaheads and assertions yet. Ever pondered
how PERL as a language is icky, but the regexps which are the core of it are
used in almost every language quite productively?
- dot-mobi got approved? What the?
I can’t see how this is a good thing (cf. wg),
but for me it’s the fact that
mobi on my Ericsson T610 takes an extra click,
without fixing any of the issues com has (namely, o, m are on the same
button):
com = 3 taps, 2 taps, 1 tap (on two buttons total)mobi = 1 tap, 2 taps, 2 taps, 3 taps (on three buttons total)
How is an this better?
- Learning Floats - a
quite well-written article on one of the most confusing topics in the history
of standards-based web design (which, admittedly, isn’t much).
Django - a “pretty much awesome”
framework in Python which is good at what it does, namely, abstract databases
and provide MVC separation. Try to avoid comparison with Rails, because they’re different.
Although I’ve taken some cues from this to make PHP a little more hospitable,
a lot of what Django, Rails, et al. are doing is really difficult in PHP
due to things like the create_function memory leak.
- Although documentation on PHP’s class inheritance and overloading is a bit
sparse, there’s a little bit I found in the zend list archives.
- Character Codes for use in GAIM on Windows (hold down Shift+Ctrl+HexChars)
- TXP References
- Ico export plugin for Photoshop to keep full alpha transparency, which I remembered was possible after seeing the favicon for SquareSpace
- Gentoo <-> Debian conversion
It’s Friday. End of the week. And the last day Kate’s going to be at COBA for
the next four months. We’ve hired three people to take her place (half-kidding,
our expansion just happens to coincide) and things have been a bit interesting
with five people in one 10-foot-square cubicle (read about it at
Kate’s).
We’re sorry to see her go, but are looking forward to reading about all the
crazy hijinks we’re told will ensue. To Kate: have a great trip! To everyone
else: be sure to check <plug:shameless>http://thatonegirl.net/</plug:shameless>
for updates.
We’ll definitely miss things like the Battle Hampster,
everything French, and the mantra “Make it more pink!” (I know I’m going to be
corrected momentarially, once Kate’s feeds refresh, but in my defense, I’m
paraphrasing).
Tux typing on Kate’s behalf
I'm told that the penguin (another of the many promos brought back from Linuxworld
by Dr. Mr. Conover also
spoke with several departments on campus on behalf of J&K.
Office Stuff
Random stuff that happened to be photographed while at the office
UNT has a single-login system set up via LDAP so, in theory,
for any online university resource, you should only need to
remember one password. This system works pretty well, except
for one major defect which keeps manifesting itself on my
account.
There’s a DOS situation: once a valid username is discovered
(not too difficult, /[a-z]{3}[0-9]{4}/ and the
Account Management site
validates it for you), you simply need to pretend to log in
as that user a couple of times in order for their account to
be locked. The password that user had may never be used
again.
I’ve had this happen to me no fewer than 20 times over the
last six months, and I begin to wonder if someone else thinks
their username is the same as mine, and keeps trying to log
in. The biggest issue is that this happens outside working
hours, and usually at times when I also want to
check my account status, like right before the semester
starts. It’s to the point where I’d like to request a
username change, but as far as I know, this is not an option
the university provides. They also don’t keep logs sufficient
to show whether or not I’m indeed being harassed by someone.
Now if I really wanted to mess someone up, I’d rig up a little
one-liner to look up someone’s euid from either
ldap://id.unt.edu/ or http://info.unt.edu/
and attempt to log in to any number of places such as
http://ams.unt.edu/.
Too easy? It is.
Okay, I lied. Turns out they do have intermittent Internet connectivity here.
I write this from the floor of the BYOC area at QuakeCon 2005. Things have
been mostly sane today, with the exception of Norah Jones playing on
the giant speakers in a room whose walls are made of concrete so at the far
end, we got only the sub-bass intact…
I arrived for checkin at 10:30 or so, and got to the checkin table just after
noon. Not a bad wait, I suppose, but keep in mind I was lugging a computer,
monitor, plastic bin, and keyboard through about 500 feet of 4-foot increments.
I now know why people switch to SFF cases.
James showed up around 4 and had about a 5 minute wait in an ever-shortening
line. Mental note.
Booth Info
I went over and talked to a forlorn Linksys wireless guy, who tells me SRX is
a “buy” right now, that they won’t be coming out with anything
better until a trade show several months down the road. It’s amazing
how talkative people are when they aren’t just giving out shirts.
Hrumph, nVidia.
nVidia had a bunch of “gaming laptops” set up which were quite impressive,
and all the hardware vendors have something set up to show how their
technology makes Quake 4 run better. I wish they were giving out
the multiplayer demo that’s running on those machines.
Ghetto Con
There are a good 20-30 people from the Ghetto Lan
here so far, with a few more yet saved. They’ve got “live video” of the room,
but it only works in Winamp. The area we’re in is about the 6th row from
being the furthest back possible, so we’ve got a walk to the main door, booths, etc.
As a plus, though, whenever the organizers call out “swag!” we aren’t caught in
the middle of the rush.
Various things have been blocked throughout the day, to include AIM, ICQ,
and World of Warcraft. Yahoo and MSN messengers seem to work, and they’ll
be blocking Steam in an hour or so. Maybe then people will be forced to play
other games.
They really ought to implement something to reduce bandwidth usage (It’s a 10Mbps/5Mbps connection, I tested it this morning),
and get a more reliable gateway, it’s gone out twice tonight. I bet
that http-replicator could be used with almost no configuration to handle
downloads from a good number of places (think Enemy Territory content
dl’s), and for the rest, there’s Squid.
I’ll be off at QuakeCon in the BYOC area with
the others from the Ghetto Lan.
I’ll bring back pictures, but be without Internet for several days.
I took off from work today to help my cousin Eric
move into his apartment at UTD.
Partially in celebration of Kate leaving later this month to have fun
without us in D.C., partially because it’s been so long since I promised to
put them up, and partially because I’ve been shamed into doing it,
here are prime examples of Kate’s “Office Art” exhibition.
I shall be not held responsible for anything bad that should befall you after
seeing these. Proceed at your own risk. Chances are, Kate’ll counter with
the pictures of the horribly bad “art” which I, too, placed on the whiteboard.
Before we proceed, a note on the future: We no longer have a whiteboard in
our area. We now have a window that kind of works, but it’s just not the same.
Plus it’s the first thing that people walking in will see, so it has to stay
basically, you know, sane.
- DSCN4013: A Kung-Fu thing from the art department. I went to see something Beth made but she wasn’t there at the time and I couldn’t seem to find it.
- DSCN4021: Yes. No. I think this was Kate’s writing, so it counts. Below that, you’ll find a prototype we’d drawn up for the Murphy Center site.
- DSCN4035: War-Ning. The disclaimer we have to agree to when we log in at COBA, with a bit of a beatnik feel because we have to pause once in the middle of the line with our dual monitors.
- DSCN4038: Kate! No more French! Kate, working on the Murphy Center page and enjoying no more French, apparently. That didn’t last long, as she continued it for Summer II. Murphy Center header in the background, and I think that’s Ray in the IM window. Note desktop wallpaper with the Coach symbol. She’s really not obcessed.
- DSCN4040: Larger No more French. Yeah, July, that’s when it started again. Shows how long I’ve been holding onto these pictures.
- DSCN4041: The Cute Box. It’s a little joke we’ve got here (I think started by one of my mannerisms) that everything fits into a box. Kate wore some shoes she thought were cute… I didn’t think they were cute… hilariaty ensues. Except it didn’t. Note “Idea!” circled on the left. I don’t know what that’s all about, but it’s Charlie’s writing.
- DSCN4236: A LIME. I think that’s a super-secret codename for something that the armed forces uses. No, the signature has not been blurred to protect the innocent, that’s the way she wrote it.
- DSCN4241: Kate drawing some stuff on the board. See next pic. I think Cameron took this one.
- DSCN4242: The aforementioned LIME, re-captioned to look less top-secret, along with an apple and, um, read for yourself.
- DSCN4309: Ray! And Trogdor! And pants, thank goodness. Ray has some pictures of this event too but they’re on LJ and it’s friends-only. I can’t be a friend, nor a ‘they’, because I refuse to create an account on a system which is written in Perl.
Phew, I think that’s all for now. I’ve got some more of our prototype drawings, but I’m plumb out of “Kate’s Artwork”… until I offload the camera again.
Yes, you’re right, it’s a slow news day here.
I was first introduced to Python about three years ago by someone who
worked at the College of Business with me, and fulfilled the much-disdained
position of “Perl maintainer.” Moe was an advocate of doing things,
basically, “the right way or not at all,” and this, he explained, was why
we should rewrite Windows RegEdit in Python to make it scriptable. I’m not
making this up, that was an actual project that came up at COBA.
Well, Python went on the back burner (relative to PHP, which was more applicable
to business-type needs, and therefore useful to COBA) until the beginning of
this summer when I started researching it further. Many projects I like to
use I found out were written in Python (Gentoo’s emerge,
Bittorrent, and more recently, Django), so I checked into it
after advocating a number of smaller-platform languages, such as Ruby (which I
got my brothers into, but without an appreciation of the complexity of C, the
simplicity was lost), and Objective-C (which is a fun language, and I love the
syntax, but the documentation is a little too lax for me to look things up).
In fact, Obj-C is proably the closest I’ve seen in terms of languages to compare
Python to. In a way, it’s similar to most C-derivative scripting-type
languages, like Perl and PHP, but in Python, everything is an object, or at
least looks like it’s in an object due to the way modules are imported.
In PHP, I felt like the syntax for classes didn’t really encourage people to
use them. In Python, classes are almost like mini-namespaces which allow
grouping of related functions (while I do dislike the verbose self parameter
in class functions, it’s something I got used to, and not nearly as annoying as
Perl’s “parameter passing” (hrumph) scheme).
Why switch?
Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of console scripts to do various things. The
language I’ve used for most of them is PHP, and for the most part, it’s a
severe case of everything looking like a nail. Some things are a bit difficult
in PHP (for example, you need to explicitly open stdin, and zipping arrays
— alternating elements from two different arrays to fill a new one — is hard).
It also occasionally has some really stupid warnings (fread throws a warning
with bs=0? cut me some slack!) and some things are coded (IMnshO) wrong
(feof(invalidhandle) returns false? And false==0?). One of the great
things I loved in Obj-C was the fact that there’s a thing like null, except it’s
not (in Obj-C, that was Nil), which exists in Python as None (with
implementation differences, like you can send messages to Nil, and they’ll
return Nil, which perpetuates what’s likely an error, whereas Python will toss
an exception ASAP).
Python is the most perfect prototyping tool I’ve found so far for the
commandline. Perl is a mess, unmaintanable, BASH is difficult to work with
(2d arrays anyone?) and PHP is, to be honest, the wrong tool for the job.
I was able to develop a quick script to parse through PNG files this morning,
which I refactored into a class in about five minutes, counting design time.
Documentation? It’s actually fun to add in docstrings in Python,
for some weird reason. I can’t explain it, but I feel compelled to add
in a string to each function just for the heck of it. And rather than
remembering some obscure syntax, it’s a human-readable string, which is
auto-parsed out into the special doc member.
I then tried to translate the code to PHP after it became apparent that this
script was useful to other people (who might not have Python), and probably
spent longer dealing with PHP issues than it took me to write it in Python,
period. This was even with my previous port of argparse
to simplify commandline handling.
Python is my friend. And, another added bonus, it aint’ Perl.
On a whim earlier today, I started checking into png transparency in IE.
Yes, again. I originally gave up on it, given that the behavior slowed down
the browser immensely last time I tried it, and binary transparency just
doesn’t seem worth it.
Earlier this week, I had made a discovery: there was a png file
that displayed correctly in IE. I was astonished, until I saw exactly how
it was displaying correctly. It had a solid background which matched the
background it was placed against. Instead of being fully alpha transparent,
it was simply being alpha-transparent on top of that color. Of course, we
couldn’t tell the difference, as long as that background color stays the same.
So, in the interest of making PNGs “less bad” in IE, I made a quick prototype
program in Python to dissect the files and show me the contents of the chunks
of the png (which, of course, required lots of spec-reading). There’s one
chunk ID (bKGD)
which contains an RGB value (at least for truecolor RGBA images) that is the
“standalone” background color. IE, as it turns out, is incorrectly reading
this.
Chunk Types in a File That Doesn’t Work
IHDR (Image Header)
gAMA (Gamma Value)
tEXt (Photoshop taking credit, comment basically)
IDAT (Image Data)
IEND (EOF)
Chunk Types in a File That Works
IHDR (Image Header)
bKGD (Standalone Background Color)
pHYs (Physical Dimensions)
tIME (Modification Date)
IDAT (Image Data)
IDAT (Image Data, Continued)
IEND (EOF)
I don’t know why this is not better-known, as I’ve only found a couple of
references to it, the better one being http://www.phoenity.com/newtedge/png_degradability/.
The version which works best at the moment is also the ugliest,
a php script which will modify a file for you to edit/add the background
color of your choosing. It’s in subversion at /lab/trunk/png/changebg.php,
and will be soon replaced with a Python version. Already, the Python
reader for PNGs at /lab/trunk/png/pngfile.py is shaping up nicely,
and (including one previous iteration) helped me solve a couple of bugs before
they got out of hand. (Among those being that I initially misread the parargaph
on generating crc’s in the spec!)
