Working with case-sensitive CD-ROM images on Linux

I bought a CD-ROM, The World of Patterns. It’s supposed to work on ‘Any computer with an Internet browser and a CD-ROM drive’. Guess I don’t just have any computer, then …

The disk — an interesting mathematical/artistic study of patterns — is arranged as a tree of HTML files, with internal links and images. This is how the folders appear on my computer:

├── art
│   ├── islam
│   ├── preislam
│   └── pstislam
│   ├── latt
│   ├── other
│   └── quilts
│   ├── modern
│   │   ├── large
│   │   ├── patch3
│   │   └── patch4
│   └── usa
├── info
├── maths

All neatly lower case, as one might expect. Unfortunately, the internal links are hard-coded to access links such as /art/Islam/over.htm, and Linux, being good and literal, can’t find the upper case ones.

Unfortunately, the majority of computers quietly ignore the case of letters on removable media. Linux’s insistence on being correct is at odds with what is generally considered useful. But there’s a way around this. You can give the mount command options to tell it to be more chill about case:

sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop,check=relaxed,map=normal,norock,nojoliet disk.iso /mnt/scratch/

This works for me quite well:

Screenshot from 2015-09-08 10:57:54

The CD-ROM is interesting, if a little dated. The author has gone on to produce the website tilingsearch.org, a huge database of historical tile patterns.

image rollover in wordpress, no plugins required

I’m seeing quite a bit of traffic to this post. I suppose I should explain that this was a quick hack to see if I could get image rollover to work on a friend’s wordpress.com hosted blog (and no, I couldn’t). This little example doesn’t do preloading, either, and I really don’t have any intention to develop this further. Sorry …

<img title="this" onmouseover="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/that.png';" onmouseout="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png';" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png" alt="" width="192" height="116" />

This does not work on wordpress.com hosted blogs; it gets stripped out.

Update: You probably want to install the plugin Ultimate TinyMCE, which does the job rather well.