Something has just changed on my Gentoo boxes; I can now display Unicode characters properly. John Wells’s International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode now displays as it should.
Now there’s nothing stopping me making weak pronunciation-related puns like “… to /Éš/ is human …”
If you are looking for eentsy photoblog software, you could do worse than folderblog. It was just what I needed for a recent project.
I still prefer Gallery for my images, though.
Following on from the ‘head -n’ debacle, here’s another annoying gnuism:
$ egrep -h
Usage: egrep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `egrep --help' for more information.
So I’ve asked it for help, it knows I’ve asked it for help, but it insists that I do things its way. The utility has even sequestered the ‘-h’ option to give me this useless message. It would have been much better to call the usage option whether I gave it ‘-h’ or ‘–help’.
Computers should do what I want, when I want it. In fact, someday soon I want a computer with a DO MY STUFF NOW, LOWLY COMPUTER key, that issues an NMI to make the computer return to what I want it to do. I think that’s what the Esc key was originally for, but all too often, the operating system thinks it has more important things to do than I have.
I’m due to give a presentation now. It was prepared in WordPerfect Presentations. Exporting it to PowerPoint breaks the formatting. Exporting that to OpenOffice breaks it even further.
You’d think that printing from WordPerfect Presentations to Adobe PDFWriter might give bearable results. You’d be wrong; the formatting’s off, words are missing, the whole thing’s really ugly. Bleah.
Now I can listen to Fountains of Wayne Welcome Interstate Managers without hassle.
Oh, and if anyone says that an H120 recorder doesn’t have legitimate use, please see my field recordings.
I got some spam^H^H^H^Htargeted marketing e-mail from thegreenwebhost.ca. Their prices seem deeply off; they charge C$109.95 (about US$83) for 7.5 gig monthly transfer, 2 gig storage and 100 e-mail addresses.
By comparison, I pay 1and1 US$10/month for 50 GB monthly transfer volume, 2,000 MB web space and 500 POP3 accounts.
While I’d consider paying a premium of perhaps up to 50% for green consumer items, there’s no way I’m paying more than 8× the price.
I see that a company called Gold Disk Canada Inc is being sued again over spamming. I do hope it’s not a remnant of the the old Amiga software company of the same name. The Gold Disk I remember used to write neato DTP and publishing tools in Mississauga
I used to think Mississauga must’ve been quite the place, back when I used to compute away in my suburban Scottish bedroom. I guess Cumbernauld (the Scottish new-town equivalent) might sound exotic to denizens of the Land o’ Hazel.
Wouldn’t you know it, but Windows just has to do things its own way. I’ve just started writing periodic system monitoring programs for our met station network, and needed to send e-mail. Under Unix, it was a simple matter of using MIME::Lite, and calling:
$msg->send();
But Windows doesn’t do sendmail, so you have to talk to the SMTP server directly:
$msg->send_by_smtp('your.SMTP.server.here');
That seems to work.
I think I’ve found an open 802.11b network at our workplace; hurrah!
Hooray! I got my first bit of comment spam on this blog. This means two things:
Of course, I’m not going to let any through, but it’s a wee piece of serendipity while I’m waiting for the furnace repair person to come.
I use a Samsung SyncMaster 171s, and it has this weird quirk every now and again. It decides to fade to white with chilling slowness. I used to think it was Windows 2000 crashing, but the system’s okay if I hit the ‘Auto Calibrate’ button on the monitor.
Maybe it needs exorcism.
I finally got my Kingdom of Loathing Mr Accessory: 
.
I have to admit, I’m gaining more than a sneaking admiration for PHP, the web application language that WordPress and Gallery are written in. It does remind me of an even more hacked-together version of Perl, but if it works well, well …
I looked for books, but they seemed to be out of date or very expensive, or both. So I’m sticking with the online PHP Manual.
Unix/Linux has a handy little tool called head that will print the first few lines of a file. Run without options, it’ll give you the first few lines, but called f’rintsance head -20, will give you the first 20. It’s worked this way since basically ever.
Now whenever I run it, I get the following smug little message:
head: `-N‘ option is obsolete; use `-n N‘ since this will be removed in the future
I don’t consider myself an old Unix programmer, but I know that there are probably 12 year old scripts of mine working in former employers’ offices far, far away that will need fixing if they ever get rid of the sane old `-N‘ option. For any sakes, why, man, why …?
The message is also rather ambiguous. Why would I want to use `-n N‘ if it will be removed in the future? I knew all along that I should stick with `-N‘. The right of the people to keep and bear
, anyone?heads, shall not be infringed
Apologies to our neighbours for my testing the Wheelwriter this morning. This is what I found out about it (after having to compile in parallel printer support to the kernel, grr):
Do we need CRs? : yes
Does it talk ASCII? : yes, subset
Bidirectional? : yes
I chickened out and installed the Courier 10 printwheel just so I could use spaces to line things up. I don’t like Courier at all, but at least it’s easy to manage.
It’s strange that, in this age that we are creating information at an unparalleled rate, we’re also losing it just as fast. While IBM Wheelwriter codes from the late 1980s do not represent the lost wisdom of the ancients, it is something of our knowledge, and once lost, diminishes us all.
Therefore, send not for whom the (carriage return) bell tolls; it tolls for thee …
For no really well defined reason, I used to spend hours designing really tiny bitmap fonts on my old Amstrad CPC. Now it seems that Jason Kottke has done the same thing, but in truetype format:
Silkscreen reminds me of the HP49g‘s system fonts. You used to be able to get one of those in a scaleable form, so I wonder how similar it looks.
I’m not sure if Jason’s copyright warning would work very well:
This font is free for personal and corporate use and may be redistributed in this unmodified form on your Web site. I would ask that you not modify and then redistribute this font…although you may modify it for your own
personal use.
Back in my pre-press days, I discovered that a font becomes your design if you trivially modify just 5 glyphs. It’s an artefact of the early type producers lobbying to be able to rip each other off … not something that happens much in these DRM-obsessed days.
WordReference used to have all the Collins dictionaries available online, for free browsing. I was the main dictionary computing guy at Collins when this deal was made, and it was pretty cool to have a good, non-US English dictionary on the web.
I gues the money has run out, as the Collins data has disappeared, and the English dictionary is derived from WordNet. While I think that WordNet‘s a worthy project, it doesn’t quite compare to the Collins English Dictionary.
Oh well, it was good to know you, WordReference.
It’s sad, but it was free: http://scruss.info.
So I think I’ve got all the old articles appearing at their old urls using .htaccess Redirect rules. This is a modification of a method described in the WordPress MT-Redirect method.
I had a directory of the old numerically-named MT archives, so I used the following script to create a .htaccess file:
for f in 000*html do v=`basename $f .html` g=`echo $v | sed 's/^00*//;'` echo 'Redirect Permanent' /blog/archives/$f 'http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p='$g done
which looks like:
Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000001.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=1 Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000002.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=2 Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000003.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=3 ... Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000322.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=322
I put this .htaccess file in the root (top level) directory of my domain, and it all works! Everything I set out to do when reindexing my old MT entries has been completed — see, lookit: http://scruss.com/blog/archives/000214.html