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Um. Here’s a guy playing a ladder. He’s very good at it. ToneLadder.

I find it’s better not to think to deeply about this one.

Via, again, MAKE: Blog.

DigitalSpirit - Emetteur FM. It’s in french, so you get great lines like “Après insolation, révélation, gravure, grattage, gommage et étamage à froid (ouf)”. Or you can let google take the fun away with an automatically translated version.

via MAKE: Blog.

Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon on TIME.com

“I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.” - Neil Gaiman

From this other inverview we find the original is apparently from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor.

I am a newbie, I have a problem, so you must help me! || kuro5hin.org

“One of our goals was to find a method for preventing an open war between newbies and advanced users. […]

1. Don’t give the full solution. Instead, limit yourself to the half of the standard answer.
2. Try to explain the beginning in as many details as you can.
3. Give a general description of objectives that must be completed to solve the problem.
4. Try to encourage the user to check the manual or the Internet. I used a word “encourage” instead of “redirect”. Keep that in mind, please.
5. If necessary, give some keywords (but not the search phrase!) or hints.”

Wired News: Young People With Old Ears

“Novak and colleagues have been randomly examining students and found a disturbing and growing incidence of what is known as noise-induced hearing loss. Usually, it means they’ve lost the ability to hear higher frequencies, evidenced at times by mild ear-ringing or trouble following conversations in noisy situations.”

ICFP 2005 Contest, and the fun cops and robbers problem.

To test the solutions’ flexibility they do this: in a second phase, the problem’s rules are tweaked and the programmers have just 24 hours to change their code. More weight is given to the second solution’s performance. A haskell entry won, followed by one in dylan. via James Britt via PlanetRuby

ICFP: International Conference on Functional Programming. “ICFP 2005 provides a forum for researchers and developers to hear about the latest work on the design, implementations, principles, and uses of functional programming. The conference covers the entire spectrum of work, from practice to theory, including its peripheries”

Some beautiful and clever generated images and applets by Jared Tarbell in thisGallery of Computation | generative artifacts.

Look for the thumbnail index once you tire of the pretty interface. The “substrate” applet is a nice starting point.

via O’Reilly Radar

Rails Debug Popup

via ones zeros majors and minors

RedHanded: Ruby 1.8.3 Has Been Released

techdirt: don’t take my picture “Some Georgia Tech researchers have come up with some technology that detects the presence of digital cameras then shoots a targeted beam of light at them to prevent them taking any legible photos.”

full article at zdnet.

The 28 Hour Day.

Free good science fiction for download | MetaFilter.

I also notice that Cory Doctorow released a fourth novel in July 2005: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Something good for me to read while travelling on the long weekend here.

Ji Lee printed 50,000 speech bubbles and plastered movie posters, advertisements and whatever with them in NYC, then came back and photographed what people added: Ji Lee Pleaseenjoy - Speech-Bubble Stickers.

faves so far: [1] [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]

via metafilter via boingboing

Ruby Quiz - Ruby Jobs Site (#47)

A nice interface design primer from Amy Hoy.

Here’s what I do to provide users with an offline copy of a usemod wiki in two forms: 1) chm, and 2) a simple zip of all the pages as linked html pages.

Note that you can read chm’s on mac os x with tools like Chmox (although this doesn’t seem to have any search capability, yet!)

The plan

1. wget all the pages, renaming them as necessary
2. run microsoft’s HtmlHelp Compiler (HHC) to generate the chm - distributable 1
3. make a zip of the html pages - - distributable 2

The script

Here’s a script that coordinates it all: usewiki2chm.bat:

#step 1 - wget all pages
set URL=http://localhost/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?action=index

wget -nv -r -l 1 -L -E -np -nH -k --cut-dirs=1 \
-R "*action=*","*back=*" %URL%

#step 2.1 - make hhp project file for hhc
echo Making hhp file
type hhp-fragment.txt > wiki.hhp
dir /b *.htm* *.css >> wiki.hhp
echo [INFOTYPES] >> wiki.hhp

#step 2.2 - use hhc to make chm
echo compiling hhp file
\programs\htmlhelpworkshop\hhc wiki.hhp
copy my-wiki.chm \some\publishing\location\

#step 3 - make a simple zip
echo also making simple zip of all the html pages.
rmdir /s /q my-wiki-pages
mkdir my-wiki-pages
move *.html my-wiki-pages
del my-wiki-html.zip
\programs\7-zip\7za a -tzip my-wiki-html.zip my-wiki-pages\*
copy my-wiki-html.zip \some\wiki\backups\publishing\location\

This script requires a file called wiki.hhp to be present in the current dir. The contents of wiki.hhp is shown later.

The script explained

Step 1 - wget all the pages

I use wget to request and store all the pages. The wiki provides an index of all pages, which makes the wget operation much simpler. On your usemod wiki, the index is available under LocalWiki:Index, or externally as cgi-bin/wiki.pl?action=index

Here’s the wget command:

wget nv -r -l 1 -L -E -k -np -nH --cut-dirs=1 \
-R "*action=*","*back=*" http://host/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?action=index

and here’s what those options mean:

• -nv non-verbose (less logging)
• -r recursive
• -l recursion level 1
• -L follow relative links only
• -E save all text/html documents with .html extension. (good for cgi-bin generated materials)
• -k After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them suitable for local viewing.
• -np no parent - don’t ascend to the parent directory
• -nH no host directories.
• -R don’t follow urls of given pattern action (we don’t want to pull down dynamic generated stuff like diffs)

If you don’t want to overload the wiki with page requests , you can use -w (seconds) to specify a wait between pages.

The pages will be downloaded to the working directory.

Step 2 - Use HHC compiler to make the chm - distributable 1

I am simply constructing a hhp project file, and passing it to the hhc compiler. This is a plaintext file which lists pages to include, the output filename, etc. Some of these details vary, so I construct the hhp file dynamically each time, appending a file listing to a basic pre-prepared hhp file.

hhp-fragment.txt: Content of HHP file fragment - will be appended to with a list of all wiki file names:

[OPTIONS]
Auto TOC=3
Compatibility=1.1 or later
Compiled file=my-wiki.chm
Contents file=toc.hhc
Default topic=wiki.pl@AboutThisWiki.html
Display compile progress=No
Full-text search=Yes
Language=0x809 English (United Kingdom)
Title=my wiki


[FILES]

Step 3 - make a zip of the html pages - distributable 2

Finally, there’s a bit to make a zip of the set of html pages (which also tidies the downloaded pages out of the current dir).

Free Ruby on Rails hosting. railsplayground blog.

Via lasse, via Jason Yip

Brendan’s Roadmap Updates: Python for XUL scripting.

In future Mozilla-based browsers, you will be able to write XUL applications and extensions in Python, as well as Javascript.

Via comp.lang.ruby via Ruby Weekly News.

Install makeanchorsvisible.user.rb for mousehole.

This simple script makes named anchors visible, letting you link to or bookmark a section of a page. This is useful if a long page has named anchors but no table of contents linking to those anchors, and you want to make a link to the middle of the page.

The task is really much better suited to a js bookmarklet. I just did it for learning purposes, picking at the other user scripts and have commented it pretty heavily.

Once installed, try it on the REXML tutorial.

TaQ’s Tutorial de Ruby. 160 páginas! Ele ainda está a desenvolver o livro, mas já é muito útil.