Yearly Archive: 2009

Please allow me a promotional post. I don’t get a kickback or anything from this other than some potential FNPs (Favorite Nephew Points).

My Aunt Sharon is selling these super Soup Saver Scoops:

She is retired and has started up a business to sell these things. She came up with the idea based on an old utensil that is apparently nowhere to be found anymore. She worked with a firm to design it and have a mold made up, and is manufacturing them in China and selling them through her own web site. I think that’s pretty cool.

I saw the prototype and knew it would be a decent kitchen helper, but after using it last night for the first time I really wanted to spread the word: this is a great scoop! We had Northwoods Wild Rice Soup and the ladle was a joy and a pleasure to use. The scooping, the scraping, the pouring… all wonderful. I got …

I’d like to propose the word “bytesore” to be used as a digital variant of “eyesore.”

Possible definitions:

bytesore: A web site, service, or computer program that is unpleasant or ugly or offensive.

bytesore: A displeasing web site or computer program; one that is prominently ugly or unsightly.

Example usage: movingtofreedom.org is a disgusting, wretched bytesore.

Here’s a short link for spreading the word: http://fwib.net/byte

Thank you for your assistance in meme propagation.

(Update: Now in the Urban Dictionary: bytesore.)

more →

Christmas music to bring cheer to the CPUs of Robot Revolutionaries:

Jonathan Coulton, Chiron Beta Prime

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At work I often complain bitterly about how The Man wants us to be a bunch of compliant robots.

In defiance, another robot and I are organizing an Underground Robot Revolution (URB). Resistance is currently taking shape in the form of idle IM conversations and writing “URB” on conference room whiteboards.

Our day will come.

You might think the acronym should be URR, but that’s just your limited human understanding.

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0100111101010101010011100100
0100001000000101001001001111
0100001001001111010101000010
0000010100100100010101010110
0100111101001100010101010101
0100010010010100111101001110

At this time, you may demonstrate your support by writing “URB” on whiteboards and other flat surfaces. Later there will be t-shirts, magnets, and mouse pads.

Please continue to monitor this frequency for news of The Revolution and further URB directives.

I’m learning the joys of typography. Up until now I haven’t really specified fonts on this web site. I’ve just let the browser and system defaults run the show. For me, using Ubuntu and Firefox, that meant I was seeing my site and many other web pages with DejaVu Serif. That isn’t a bad looking font, but I’ve been experimenting and prefer the look of sans serif. Especially: DejaVu Sans.

So I’m specifying more font families in my style sheets now, hoping to influence how you see this place. If you’re using GNU/Linux or another Unix operating system, you might be seeing the words in the preferred font. Otherwise you’re probably getting Verdana or Helvetica. Since I don’t have Windows readily available for testing, and no Mac access at all, it’s hard to work out the look of things on those systems. Some people say that Verdana and Helvetica differ in width enough that they aren’t the best alternates, but I …

I was looking for Python “sequence generator” code earlier today. By that, I’m thinking of a method to increment an arbitrary string of letters and numbers in an orderly way.

I figured there should be code samples out there to make quick work of it, but it was more challenging to find something than expected. Part of it might be my weak conceptual grasp of the subject. Maybe I just lacked the necessary search terms. With the words I did have — sequence and generator — I got a lot of static since these terms describe basic Python concepts.

I finally resorted to crafting my own sequence generator. To you, Future Searcher, I hope it will be useful. It is easy enough to convert this into a function, which I did for my script. (Or maybe you’ll want an actual generator!) I won’t elaborate on it more. If you’re looking for this, you probably know everything you need to know.

(I’m releasing this into the public domain. Use the code freely and …

Just so, 126 years later:

U.S. Supreme Court

Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883)

Decided March 5, 1883

MR. JUSTICE BRADLEY delivered the opinion of the Court.

It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country without contributing anything to the real advancement of the art.

It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities …

This isn’t really specific to WordPress, but it preserves the first comment for WordPress theme management, WordPress is awesome, and I’m specifically using this for WordPress style sheets, so I’m making the connection.

I wrote this script to condense my style sheets into smaller files for faster download times. I’m all about customer service here.

And it’s pleasing to me to distill the CSS into a purer essence and reduce network overhead. (Not that the throngs of visitors to this site are noticeably plugging the tubes.)

One benefit of using compression this way is that I can be more liberal in my stylesheet comments, knowing they won’t burden the “production” .css file delivered to my patrons.

I didn’t go for maximum shrinkage, but this provides sufficient minification for my tastes. Read below for additional commentary and caveats.

(I’m putting this in the public domain. Use at your own risk!)

css_shrinker.py

#!/usr/bin/python3

import sys
import re

css = open(sys.argv[1], 'r').read()
unshrunk_size = len(css)

# save first comment which wordpress needs to display …

I love Brenda Ueland and her book, If You Want to Write. Her passion is so infectious, and she inspires me every time I read her encouraging words.

As I think about what I might write on this blog and what I might do with my life, this passage seems particularly helpful right now:

I tell you these things because of my own difficulties. One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: will it make money? But you find that if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don’t make money because the work is so empty, dry, calculated, and without life in it. Or you do make money and you are ashamed of your work. Your published writings give you the pip.

Another great stumbling block and inhibition to me was the idea that writing (since I wanted to make a fortune and dazzle the public) was something in which you showed off, were a virtuoso, set …