November 2007 archive

NautilusSvn and New Emblems

After writing last week about how I missed the Windows-only Tortoise(CVS|SVN) in GNU/Linux and sharing my simple scripts for running Subversion commands from Nautilus, I found Nautilus Svn by Jason Field, an Extension written in Python. (And available under the GPL v2.) It’s very nice, and adds (among other things) a major feature that you want in a graphical source control tool integrated with your file manager: visual cues of file status via icons. It uses Nautilus’s Emblems:

Those are what I have by default with the “Human” theme in Ubuntu 7.04/Feisty Fawn. So what are emblems? I’ve previously noticed the house emblem on my home dir and the lock emblem on system directories (hard to miss them). There is also a tab in file …

Code Format Helper for WordPress (Java Program)

Displaying code on a web page can be tricky, and even trickier if you use WordPress. You may have noticed in WordPress that straight quotes turn in to curly quotes, multiple dashes turn in to en dashes and em dashes, and so on. While this may make our posts look prettier, it does ugly things to code formatting.

(See my post from yesterday on HTML Character Entity References for a table of related characters and encodings.)

Hyphen prettification is one example of where you’ll get in to trouble when trying to show some code. Your decrement –i; may get converted to –i;, breaking your code and causing would-be users to hate you. Or String s = "oops"; will become String s = “oops”;, with similarly unhappy copy-and-paste results.

Using the <pre> tag will take care of …

HTML Character Entity References of Potential Interest to WordPress Users

character ref #ref name
curly left single quote‘&#8216;&lsquo;
curly right single quote’&#8217;&rsquo;
curly left double quote“&#8220;&ldquo;
curly right double quote”&#8221;&rdquo;
en dash–&#8211;&ndash;
em dash—&#8212;&mdash;
ellipsis…&#8230;&hellip;
left angle quote«&#0171;&laquo;
right angle quote»&#0187;&raquo;
single quote (apostrophe)'&#0039;&apos;
double quote"&#0034;&quot;
hyphen-&#0045; 
backslash\&#0092; 
forward slash/&#0047; 
period (dot).&#0046; 
space &#0032; 
non-breaking space &#0160;&nbsp;
ampersand&&#0038;&amp;
less than<&#0060;&lt;
greater than>&#0062;&gt;

I was going to include this table as part of a longer, related entry, but then I thought it might be better posted as a stand-alone reference.

The first several items are things that WordPress will create for you to make your posts prettier. For example, WP will convert normal quotes into curly quotes …

Thoughts on Invention, Innovation, and Patents from ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’

Originally published 17 October 2007 in Free Software Magazine.

I’m working on Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I’ve ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I’d probably make better progress if it showed up in blog-sized chunks in my feed reader every day.) I like sweeping accounts of history, and this one presents many new ways to look at things. It also gets me thinking about the current sorry state of the patent system, with these excerpts:

All this is not to deny that Watt, Edison, the Wright brothers, Morse, and Whitney made big

…

Taro Fields in Hanalei Valley, Kauai, Hawaii

As seen from the Hanalei Valley Overlook near Princeville.

1600 x 1200

Self service wallpaper: 1280×1024 1280×960 1152×864 1024×768 800×600 640×480

Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Shot with: 2 mega-pixel Olympus D-520 camera