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For anyone who would like to see my new extension in action, but doesn't feel like installing it or does not use firefox themselves, I have made a video demonstrating it:
Here it is. I gave up on trying to play it automagically as swf, youtube does not display it at high enough quality to see the text, and the other options I've tried have not been conducive to switching to full-screen display.
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For anyone who enjoyed my series of posts about bookmarklets, I've taken things a step further and written my very first firefox toolbar extension. It implements identical functionality to the Blogquote and Stylized Blogquote bookmarklets I last posted about; though without hot-linking to my site as the bookmarklet versions do. Plus you get a handy dandy toolbar just for the buttons to activate the blog-quote functions.
Feel free to install it, even just to play around with it. It's my first, so I'm inordinately proud of it. :) I'll probably polish it up more and add more features in the near-ish future.
Feel free to install it, even just to play around with it. It's my first, so I'm inordinately proud of it. :) I'll probably polish it up more and add more features in the near-ish future.
What do people use Java for? I mean... I'm pretty familiar with the uses of perl, python, php, even javascript... but in what situations does Java really shine? The best I think I've heard is its cross-platform compatibility. I've got a book on it and I'm trying to decide if it's worth my time or if I should focus on other stuff for the moment.
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I vastly upgraded the Blog Quote Bookmarklet and Stylized Blog Quote Bookmarklet from my previous post. The links, info on what has changed, and instructions on how to use them are all available here, as LiveJournal breaks when you try to include links to bookmarklets.
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I should have anticipated the fact that LJ would not be able to handle javascript links for bookmarklets. The body of my post is now available here.
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Look out, Gozer! ;-)
So, I was in the mood to geek, and I've got a spare box sitting around, so I decided to give the latest version of OpenSuse a try since I've heard good things. After getting it up and running, I'm already of the opinion that I'd rather run Fedora. And I don't particularly like Fedora. I'm admittedly using an 800Mhz processor, but it still seems slow compared with Ubuntu. And doing anything in it requires me to jump through ten times as many hoops. Just to add community repositories I've had to check "trust and import key" almost a dozen times already. And here's another one...
I'm going to play around with it for a bit more, but I think by the end of an hour or two I'm probably going to blow it out and put ubuntu back on this machine and hope the box doesn't hold this experience against me.
I'm going to play around with it for a bit more, but I think by the end of an hour or two I'm probably going to blow it out and put ubuntu back on this machine and hope the box doesn't hold this experience against me.
MediaWiki is a very useful thing to install on one's laptop for personal note-taking purposes. Doesn't take too much to set it up, and once it's up and running it requires little further maintenance. Your own personal wikipedia for all your note-taking needs. Very useful for cross-linking and organizing countless notes from paper notebooks and disorganized text files, which I am now in the process of doing.
It's also got me using it to finally create a decent .plan file for myself, rather than the one I've been keeping spread out across a handful of livejournal posts.
It's also got me using it to finally create a decent .plan file for myself, rather than the one I've been keeping spread out across a handful of livejournal posts.
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1) I do really well when I stop thinking about what I can or can't do, what I do or don't know, and just jump in and focus on finding a way to do something.
2) I do even better when someone tells me the thing I want to do can't be done, when I damn well know it can be and is actually not that hard.
3) Awk is a very simple and nice language to program in when you're dealing with parsing a text file full of fields of different information into a more easily understandable format or auditing various data points within such a file.
4) Awk does, however, have two main weak points I've found: a) its support for multidimensional arrays sucks ass; concatenating subscripts into a single subscript is an ass-backwards way to provide (pseudo)multidimensionality. b) It doesn't seem to iterate through arrays in a logical order when using the "for (x in array) {do}" syntax, going neither numerically nor in the order they were originally created.
5) It's not hard to port a simple shell script using awk over to Windows.
6) The ability to do this does, however, suddenly make you a computer expert in the eyes of Windows users, to the point that immediately after demonstrating the script people will start saying they need to get you to their house to take a look at their virus-infected Windows machine for them.
7) IT staff at my job apparently prefer to tell my boss something can't be done if they can't do it using the tools they are most comfortable with rather than seeking out ways to do it.
8) People in office jobs seem very confused by technology, even things they use on a daily basis. My boss was not aware you could paste multiple email addresses into a groupwise email in one go. (It just requires semicolon delimitation.) By providing a script that collates a pdf full of email fields amidst other information into multiple semicolon-delimited lists of email addresses, I've made it so we can just copy and paste an entire events worth of participants into a single email in a couple quick motions, rather than needing to transcribe them by hand from a printout. This vastly increases our productivity, decreases our error rate, and the script even counts them for us so we don't have to go back and do it by hand to record on our logs. Oh, and it picks out those accounts who don't have email addresses but have asked us to mail them, so we can research them quickly and easily rather than needing to spot them on our own.
Have I mentioned that if they gave this project to anyone but me, they'd probably still be counting the 2478 participants in the first pdf report we received by hand? My script, even in its more basic original form, allowed me to count all of the participants for each event, separate them into four categories for the four kinds of packets we are mailing, and start fulfillment for them about five minutes after I got the report rather than sitting around counting all of them by hand while already in a major time-crunch to start mailing.
Geeks rule. ;-)
Edited because I just realized that I forgot to include the thing that made me start writing this post in the first place:
5.5) When porting an awk script to run on windows from a Mac, one finds that tab formatting is not universal, and an entirely different number of tabs is required on Windows in order to make it display the same way it does on the Mac with the original number of tabs. Also, every quotation mark needs to be filled out in triplicate. ;-)
2) I do even better when someone tells me the thing I want to do can't be done, when I damn well know it can be and is actually not that hard.
3) Awk is a very simple and nice language to program in when you're dealing with parsing a text file full of fields of different information into a more easily understandable format or auditing various data points within such a file.
4) Awk does, however, have two main weak points I've found: a) its support for multidimensional arrays sucks ass; concatenating subscripts into a single subscript is an ass-backwards way to provide (pseudo)multidimensionality. b) It doesn't seem to iterate through arrays in a logical order when using the "for (x in array) {do}" syntax, going neither numerically nor in the order they were originally created.
5) It's not hard to port a simple shell script using awk over to Windows.
6) The ability to do this does, however, suddenly make you a computer expert in the eyes of Windows users, to the point that immediately after demonstrating the script people will start saying they need to get you to their house to take a look at their virus-infected Windows machine for them.
7) IT staff at my job apparently prefer to tell my boss something can't be done if they can't do it using the tools they are most comfortable with rather than seeking out ways to do it.
8) People in office jobs seem very confused by technology, even things they use on a daily basis. My boss was not aware you could paste multiple email addresses into a groupwise email in one go. (It just requires semicolon delimitation.) By providing a script that collates a pdf full of email fields amidst other information into multiple semicolon-delimited lists of email addresses, I've made it so we can just copy and paste an entire events worth of participants into a single email in a couple quick motions, rather than needing to transcribe them by hand from a printout. This vastly increases our productivity, decreases our error rate, and the script even counts them for us so we don't have to go back and do it by hand to record on our logs. Oh, and it picks out those accounts who don't have email addresses but have asked us to mail them, so we can research them quickly and easily rather than needing to spot them on our own.
Have I mentioned that if they gave this project to anyone but me, they'd probably still be counting the 2478 participants in the first pdf report we received by hand? My script, even in its more basic original form, allowed me to count all of the participants for each event, separate them into four categories for the four kinds of packets we are mailing, and start fulfillment for them about five minutes after I got the report rather than sitting around counting all of them by hand while already in a major time-crunch to start mailing.
Geeks rule. ;-)
Edited because I just realized that I forgot to include the thing that made me start writing this post in the first place:
5.5) When porting an awk script to run on windows from a Mac, one finds that tab formatting is not universal, and an entirely different number of tabs is required on Windows in order to make it display the same way it does on the Mac with the original number of tabs. Also, every quotation mark needs to be filled out in triplicate. ;-)
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Work is becoming more annoying. The storage area where I have been allocated space for my project is something of a multi-purpose room. Every time I go back there, it seems someone has multi-purposed my area into a new configuration. This morning the tables I had set up last week had been replaced (with better tables, so I'm not complaining too much) and moved into a new configuration sometime before I got in this morning. After a long day of shuffling things and rearranging them, we're almost set for the initial dry run tomorrow. And then, I walk back into the storage area, and find that my tables have been moved, even the one with all the paperwork laid out on it, for a yoga class to meet there. Don't even know where two of the tables are, including the one with the paperwork, I could only see two tables from the vantage points I had into the room. I really hope the paperwork does not get lost or mixed with the paperwork for other events, and I hope that the tables end up back in the configuration I put them in when the yoga class is done.
On top of that, I apparently have a choice to make this evening. I can either spend my evening going, by hand, through a 188 page printout and categorizing all registrants one by one into one of four categories to get totals I need for my project... (because it's apparently too much work for them to make a report that just gives me the totals, so they just print out a listing of registrants instead and make me do the work)... OR, I can spend my evening creating a script to parse the pdf file and do the counting for me. Any takers on which I'm likely to be doing? I'll give you a hint... this is not the only time I will need these totals, and regular pdf reports of this kind are my only means of getting them. Yeah, scripting it is.
On top of that, I apparently have a choice to make this evening. I can either spend my evening going, by hand, through a 188 page printout and categorizing all registrants one by one into one of four categories to get totals I need for my project... (because it's apparently too much work for them to make a report that just gives me the totals, so they just print out a listing of registrants instead and make me do the work)... OR, I can spend my evening creating a script to parse the pdf file and do the counting for me. Any takers on which I'm likely to be doing? I'll give you a hint... this is not the only time I will need these totals, and regular pdf reports of this kind are my only means of getting them. Yeah, scripting it is.
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I've just learned that at approximately 22:26:05 EST on my birthday, there will be an annular eclipse of the sun. What that means is that the sun and moon will be exactly lined up, but the moon will appear slightly smaller than the sun so that during totality it will appear as though the moon has a ring of fire around it. Sadly, it will not be visible in America, but... how often can you say something like that is actually gonna happen on your birthday, even if you don't get to see it?
Ok, two quick (I think) questions for my tech-savvy friends:
1. Does anyone happen to know what the current US laws regarding writing security-auditing tools are? I'm not saying I'm planning to write any, my plate is more than full at the moment and I'm not yet that experienced with programming anyway, but I'm curious what US laws in that regard are since I know some other countries have been cracking down on such things. (ie, Germany, which has caused the KisMac project to move to servers outside of Germany.)
2. This one is probably going to sound odd, but does anyone know of a good tutorial on how to write formal white papers and RFCs? Is it just considered "technical writing", which means I should probably run out and get Technical Writing for Dummies or The Complete Idiots Guide to Technical Writing, or is there a unique format and style guidelines for each of them? I'm mainly asking this one because I've always found my effectiveness in a given field increases dramatically when I possess the correct tools to communicate in that field and understand how to use them properly.
1. Does anyone happen to know what the current US laws regarding writing security-auditing tools are? I'm not saying I'm planning to write any, my plate is more than full at the moment and I'm not yet that experienced with programming anyway, but I'm curious what US laws in that regard are since I know some other countries have been cracking down on such things. (ie, Germany, which has caused the KisMac project to move to servers outside of Germany.)
2. This one is probably going to sound odd, but does anyone know of a good tutorial on how to write formal white papers and RFCs? Is it just considered "technical writing", which means I should probably run out and get Technical Writing for Dummies or The Complete Idiots Guide to Technical Writing, or is there a unique format and style guidelines for each of them? I'm mainly asking this one because I've always found my effectiveness in a given field increases dramatically when I possess the correct tools to communicate in that field and understand how to use them properly.
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Forget about Parallels. VMware, one of the leading names in virtualization technology on Windows and Linux, has created a Parallels clone for the Mac, called VMWare Fusion. And, drawing on their experience in the field, they've done a better job with it than Parallels ever did. VMWare Fusion makes it possible to realistically run two operating systems simultaneously on your Macintosh, without undue reduction in either OS's performance. (Some reduction is of course impossible to avoid due to the load this places on memory.)
And the best thing? VMware Fusion has a beta currently available for free. And, should you choose to buy the software, they're currently offering a 20 dollar rebate which places them solidly at $20 less than Parallels for the time being.
Oh, and did I mention? There's experimental support for DirectX included.
http://www.vmware.com
And the best thing? VMware Fusion has a beta currently available for free. And, should you choose to buy the software, they're currently offering a 20 dollar rebate which places them solidly at $20 less than Parallels for the time being.
Oh, and did I mention? There's experimental support for DirectX included.
http://www.vmware.com
Well, I managed to track down the email address of my favorite immortal on the now defunct Ansalon the Original, and sent her a quick note. Don't know if the address is still valid or not, or if she checks it, but I figured it was worth it to potentially find out what happened and to take one last chance to thank her for all the work she put into it over the years.
I'm still trying to decide what to do with myself. I'm very much in the mood to MUD. And I really miss some of my favorite aspects of Ansalon. I refuse to play on the other half of the split, though. A) I want to show support for Chislev, my favorite Imm, and B) a lot of the changes they've made there are just crap and I have no interest in touching them. Especially when they've removed some of my favorite areas, and made standard newbie items too godawful powerful for any real advancement to be done at low levels anymore. When I'm killing characters at level 5 (admittedly, with help) that my old level 9 char would have needed stronger help with, something has become seriously imbalanced in the game. Of course, the fact that I can approach level 9 after just an evening or two of gameplay also seems very off to me. I've gone so far as to ritually commit suicide with my character on the other Ansalon by walking into one of the old deathtrap rooms that's been around as long as I've played on Ansalon, pre-split, before deleting him.
DiscworldMud beckons, and does hold some interest for me, but I'm not sure it's quite the right style of game for me. I've tried a few other Mud's now too, and so far nothing is clicking. I'm halfway entertaining the idea of trying to set up a small Mud myself and working to develop it into something of the same spirit that Ansalon once had, without borrowing from the premises or actual design of Ansalon. Even if nobody but myself and maybe eventually some friends plays on it, it might be good for me. Dunno yet. If I go that route, I'm going to have to do some serious thinking about whether I want to rely on the same codebase as Ansalon just because, or whether I want to look into a saner build system. (I never really cared for Ansalon's build interface, though for a while I tried to build for them. Never got far, I was a lot younger and ended up just not having time for it. Hopefully if I go this route I won't run into the same issue.)
I'm still trying to decide what to do with myself. I'm very much in the mood to MUD. And I really miss some of my favorite aspects of Ansalon. I refuse to play on the other half of the split, though. A) I want to show support for Chislev, my favorite Imm, and B) a lot of the changes they've made there are just crap and I have no interest in touching them. Especially when they've removed some of my favorite areas, and made standard newbie items too godawful powerful for any real advancement to be done at low levels anymore. When I'm killing characters at level 5 (admittedly, with help) that my old level 9 char would have needed stronger help with, something has become seriously imbalanced in the game. Of course, the fact that I can approach level 9 after just an evening or two of gameplay also seems very off to me. I've gone so far as to ritually commit suicide with my character on the other Ansalon by walking into one of the old deathtrap rooms that's been around as long as I've played on Ansalon, pre-split, before deleting him.
DiscworldMud beckons, and does hold some interest for me, but I'm not sure it's quite the right style of game for me. I've tried a few other Mud's now too, and so far nothing is clicking. I'm halfway entertaining the idea of trying to set up a small Mud myself and working to develop it into something of the same spirit that Ansalon once had, without borrowing from the premises or actual design of Ansalon. Even if nobody but myself and maybe eventually some friends plays on it, it might be good for me. Dunno yet. If I go that route, I'm going to have to do some serious thinking about whether I want to rely on the same codebase as Ansalon just because, or whether I want to look into a saner build system. (I never really cared for Ansalon's build interface, though for a while I tried to build for them. Never got far, I was a lot younger and ended up just not having time for it. Hopefully if I go this route I won't run into the same issue.)
A few years back, my favorite Mud split in two, both claiming to be the original. I didn't know about it at the time, I wasn't playing. When I finally did go back to it, I chose a side in the split, following my favorite immortal. Then another hiatus. Now, I've tried going back... the split with my favorite immortal no longer exists. It's been defunct for a while now, apparently. The "original" mud still does, though much of it has changed and IMO not for the better. I could keep playing on it, but honestly the spark that was once there is gone. The few minor technical improvements are greatly outweighed by some rather idiotic changes (newbie equipment, for example, has become so good that it's almost impossible to find better equipment before you reach clan levels at the very earliest. And a great many high-level weapons and armor are available in various shops in the main city to simply be bought now. And whole areas that I loved are simply gone.)
This is a Mud that I was addicted to for a long time. A Mud that I managed to play at times in school in non-computer-oriented classes, I was so obsessed with it. It being gone.... kinda hurts. I know that's silly, but it does.
Guess I'm in the market for a new Mud... perhaps I'll try the discworld mud again, though not having read the books does make things a bit harder for me to follow...
Then again, there's always DominiaMud... though I still haven't figured out major parts of that Mud, and I've been playing it longer than Ansalon.
Or perhaps it's time to try something entirely new... decisions, decisions...
This is a Mud that I was addicted to for a long time. A Mud that I managed to play at times in school in non-computer-oriented classes, I was so obsessed with it. It being gone.... kinda hurts. I know that's silly, but it does.
Guess I'm in the market for a new Mud... perhaps I'll try the discworld mud again, though not having read the books does make things a bit harder for me to follow...
Then again, there's always DominiaMud... though I still haven't figured out major parts of that Mud, and I've been playing it longer than Ansalon.
Or perhaps it's time to try something entirely new... decisions, decisions...
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One of my neighbors just had a very interesting discussion with me about how he's been the victim of identity theft, computer hijacking, credit card fraud, etc....
This neighbor has talked to me all of five times or so in the year and a half I've lived in this building.
In the course of this conversation, he GAVE ME ONE OF THE SECRET QUESTIONS HE USES FOR HIS BANK ACCOUNTS AND CREDIT CARDS. QUESTION *AND* ANSWER.
Completely unprompted.
I kinda feel bad for the guy, he's disabled and I think at least part of that is a mental disability. But I was so not getting involved.
There are days I think you should need a license in order to drive on the "info superhighway"...
This neighbor has talked to me all of five times or so in the year and a half I've lived in this building.
In the course of this conversation, he GAVE ME ONE OF THE SECRET QUESTIONS HE USES FOR HIS BANK ACCOUNTS AND CREDIT CARDS. QUESTION *AND* ANSWER.
Completely unprompted.
I kinda feel bad for the guy, he's disabled and I think at least part of that is a mental disability. But I was so not getting involved.
There are days I think you should need a license in order to drive on the "info superhighway"...
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I've been working on a few things tonight. First of all, I finally got my external USB drive working. Bought the adapter I needed a while ago, finally got around to hooking it up to my desktop and formatting it, then installed the drive back in the usb enclosure, hooked it up to my laptop and repartitioned/reformatted it. Complete success. :)
Then, I booted up Windows XP in Parallels. Great piece of software, that. I had thought that due to all of the free and/or open source virtualization software out there that I would never need to pay for a program like this. I'm seriously considering revising that opinion. I was able to boot up XP from the virtual disk on my laptop hard drive, and tell the virtual machine to use the physical external hard drive as a secondary hard disk. Not to put a virtual drive ON the physical hard drive, but actually to access the disk directly and use it as a normal hard drive from within the virtual machine. And from what I understand, I could have used it as a boot volume for the virtual machine in the same manner. I find that very useful.
Finally, I'm looking into the possibility of moving my WanderingPaths website to its own domain. I'm very grateful to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kyoudai02 for hosting my site these past few years, but I've been thinking for a while now that it would be nice to have my own domain and be able to spread out my projects (wanderingpaths, reiki annex, and a few others yet to be announced) across multiple subdomains. The major reason I had not done so yet was a reluctance to start over in gaining google rankings on a new domain. Today we learned the http://www.heliwood.org account was, for reasons beyond our control, cancelled. If I stay with the twins and share hosting with them, it will involve moving the site to a subdomain of http://www.thehermeticdog.com/ That pretty much removes my reason for not getting my own domain, and so it looks like I will be striking out on my own. (Though I will still be collaborating closely with the twins, and have a hand in at least one project planned for http://www.thehermeticdog.com)
Presently, I haven't settled on a hosting provider yet, or much of anything really. I'm leaning somewhat towards http://www.dreamhart.org as the domain name, but that is very tentative at this stage. I'm pondering whether I want to build a server and host my site in-house or purchase hosting as well as registering the domain. There are positive and negative aspects to both approaches, and so far I haven't decided which would be most preferable for the various projects I have planned.
Input, as always, is welcomed.
Then, I booted up Windows XP in Parallels. Great piece of software, that. I had thought that due to all of the free and/or open source virtualization software out there that I would never need to pay for a program like this. I'm seriously considering revising that opinion. I was able to boot up XP from the virtual disk on my laptop hard drive, and tell the virtual machine to use the physical external hard drive as a secondary hard disk. Not to put a virtual drive ON the physical hard drive, but actually to access the disk directly and use it as a normal hard drive from within the virtual machine. And from what I understand, I could have used it as a boot volume for the virtual machine in the same manner. I find that very useful.
Finally, I'm looking into the possibility of moving my WanderingPaths website to its own domain. I'm very grateful to
kyoudai02 for hosting my site these past few years, but I've been thinking for a while now that it would be nice to have my own domain and be able to spread out my projects (wanderingpaths, reiki annex, and a few others yet to be announced) across multiple subdomains. The major reason I had not done so yet was a reluctance to start over in gaining google rankings on a new domain. Today we learned the http://www.heliwood.org account was, for reasons beyond our control, cancelled. If I stay with the twins and share hosting with them, it will involve moving the site to a subdomain of http://www.thehermeticdog.com/ That pretty much removes my reason for not getting my own domain, and so it looks like I will be striking out on my own. (Though I will still be collaborating closely with the twins, and have a hand in at least one project planned for http://www.thehermeticdog.com)Presently, I haven't settled on a hosting provider yet, or much of anything really. I'm leaning somewhat towards http://www.dreamhart.org as the domain name, but that is very tentative at this stage. I'm pondering whether I want to build a server and host my site in-house or purchase hosting as well as registering the domain. There are positive and negative aspects to both approaches, and so far I haven't decided which would be most preferable for the various projects I have planned.
Input, as always, is welcomed.
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The music most conducive to me doing data entry at work may well be the music LEAST conducive to me being able to program.
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