Prettify Project Gutenberg Books

Uncategorized

I’m dead tired, but before I go to sleep I wanted to inform you of a neat tool you might dig. Month before last at the Houston Palm Users Group (which I lead) we did a bit on creating ebooks. I covered the Palm Markup Language which is a sorry excuse for a markup language. To balance out how bad PML was, I wrote a little tool that would convert Project Gutenberg texts to a format more sutable for ebook reading. See the problem with the Gutenberg texts is that they are plain ASCII files which wrap every 76 characters or so. What this means on a PalmOS device is that you get a line and a half of text, and then a break, and it makes reading anything a major pain.

So what HPUG DocIt! does is combine paragraphs of text into one line so you don’t get funny line breaks everywhere, except where you want them between paragraphs. It’s pretty basic, but I’ve found it incredibly useful and a number of members of the group have as well. Even though the only other time it’s been mentioned was at the meeting and on the HPUG website, it converts about a dozen documents every day. Anyway I’d just like to put this out there as a service. The interface should look pretty familar to Texturize users, with the additional option of being able to upload text files. If there is interest there is definitely a lot of room for improvement in this tool, for example it could convert the ASCII faux text styling (stars for bold, underscores for underlined, etc.) to HTML equivilents, and it could also determine when the nend of a line is a hyphenated word and deal with the break accordingly. But for now, it does one thing and it does it well. Enjoy.

WordPress Preview

Uncategorized

Partly as a personal todo list, and partly as a special bonus for Photo Matt readers, here’s what’s currently done or in development for WordPress .72, slated for release on [date]. This is in no particular order.

  • Improved quicktags — create ordered and unordered lists easier, <ins> support WITH datetime attribute, possibly cursor aware.
  • HTML Sanitation — Bad code checks in, but it doesn’t check out.
  • MetaWeblog API support
  • Multiple category support
  • Completely revamped options system, never edit a configuration file ever again.
  • Password-protected entries
  • Movable Type import

There are going to be some under the hood changes mainly paving the way for multi-blog support. Also significant is the documentation efforts that have been ongoing. A few other changes mostly related to RSS may or may not make it in, depending on how quickly everything comes together.

Calling Houstonians

Uncategorized

Just in case you are like me and get all your news through non-local online sources, I would like to inform my neighbors that there is a big freakin’ storm heading this way. This has been a public service announcement.

What’s crazy is this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Let’s take a trip down Photo Matt memory lane to last October, when a category 4 hurricane was heading this way and I found out much in the same manner as this time, through instant messaging. That entry contains a humorous comment from 6 months after the post was written, I guess from some random search engine visitor stumbling by. She’s right. I should update my weather more often. Perhaps I need one of those nifty weather boxes in my sidebar that were all the rage a couple of years ago.

Update: It wasn’t that bad.

I Spy CSS

Asides

The inimitable Joe Clark’s Ten Years Ago in Spy has a brand-spanking new all-CSS layout from yours truly. As Joe said, “Take that, Alex Isley, Christiaan Kuypers, and B.W. Honeycutt!”

I didn’t do a strict before and after comparison, but I estimate at least several K have been saved. The biggest savings should come from the table, which had an elaborate system of classes that I was able to all but eliminate thanks to the flexbility provided by Joe’s semantic markup. Enjoy, and take some time to browse the archives, it’s quite entertaining.

Who Let the Blogs Out?

Meta

Woof. I had definitely noticed it, and Christine pointed it out as well, but the links on my sidebar haven’t updated since the end of June. Obviously I broke something, but I haven’t quite figured it out. That list is how I navigate the blogworld, so if I haven’t been by your place lately or left any comments that’s why. I feel so out of touch! I tried out Feed Demon but it seemed as unintuitive to me as all the others I’ve tried. All the different websites I visit, each with its own unique design and navigation scheme, all that is more comfortable to me than any aggregator I’ve tried.

Hot Jazz Tonight

Music

The word on the street is that tonight at 7:30 PM at the Pasta Co. on Woodway (map) there will be some burning big band jazz with yours truly and my good friend Rene in the alto section, and the lovely Sarah Williams screaming with the trumpets. Last week was a blast and this week should be even better. I need to get a list of all the amazing people in the band together, because everyone is so talented they deserve individual mention. Come check it out and say hi to me if you do.

Update: Thanks to Josh, Elissa, Jesse, Eddie, Emily’s parents Denise and Bob, my parents, my cousins Norma and Megan, Kelly Dean, and everyone else for coming out.

Hey Hey Hey, Z1A

Uncategorized

I don’t know how to describe my mood except elation. Remember the laptop that broke last week? Well I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to take it in to Best Buy until today. If you remember, my hard drive was hosed. I was bringing it out of hibernation and it hung. When I restarted it I was informed that there was no operating system found. Many hours, recovery disks, and general messing, it seemed that the hard drive was fubar.

Obviously it had gotten jolted out of whack or something, and I went in to the store expecting them to send it away and maybe it would be an easy fix so I would have my laptop back in two weeks instead of a month and a half. However they just checked if they had another Z1A in stock and exchanged it out for me. Sweet! The timing couldn’t have been better because I had just started to notice the wear and tear that inevitably happens.

Anyway now we’re trying to fix Josh’s computer, which he’s trying to upgrade to work with Star Wars Galaxies, however Murphy has intervened and nothing seems to be working right. Hopefully we can work things out though.

Update: Josh’s problem was a bad CD-ROM drive. He’s now up and running with Windows XP (which is running really fast on his machine) and everything seems to be working. He hasn’t installed the game yet that prompted this slew of upgrades (XP and 120GB HD) so it’ll be hilarious if it doesn’t work.

Mozilla 1.4

Uncategorized

THANK YOU Mozilla 1.4 for deleting all of my bookmarks. This could take months to recover from. I must have a copy somewhere…

Otherwise things are good on my front, the rhyming email project has been going well.

Update: I found the bookmarks.html file and was able to import it successfully. Whew!

Rain Rain Go Away

Personal

I usually don’t post lyrics, but today I just couldn’t resist.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring
Bumped his head and he went to bed
and he couldn’t get up in the mornin’
Rain rain, go away, come again some other day.

In The Last Episode…

Music,

A lot has happened since the last time I posted, it’s been a series of very long days.

Tuesday I went into work early to finish up some of the cabling (which is still going on) when mid-afternoon I got a call from John Greiner asking if I could play lead alto with a big band that night. He said they needed another alto too so of course I called Rene and we were all set for that night. I left work a little early to try and get a head start on traffic because I had to pick up my horn and stand from my house (Southwest), pick up Rene (Northeast), and go to the gig (Northwest). It was going to be a squeeze but Sarah offered to give Rene a ride and that made things so much easier.

The gig was a blast! It was the first ever performance of this group, which is basically a rehearsal band of musicians from around town. It had some funny parts (most of us were sight-reading) but it’s a great group and the good news is we’re going to be performing every Tuesday from 7:30–9:30 at the Pasta Co. on Woodway. Come check it out next week!

Yesterday was pretty crazy because the gateway/firewall/mail server here at work crashed pretty badly, to the point where I had spent so much time trying to fix bizarre problems that it became apparent that it would be faster just to set a new machine up. I was also surprised to find out that the machine was only a 166mhz Pentium with a mere 40mb of RAM! Before I saw the box itself I just assumed it was some sort of nice machine because it ran so well. Linux rocks! Anyway we set up a new one with some more modern hardware and I dropped Red Hat on it (something was wrong with our Slackware CDs) and then I spent the rest of the evening becoming intimately familiar with iptables. After that I drove all the way down to Sugarland to help some people out with some computer stuff and setting up a wireless network, and that went very well and it was a pleasant change of pace to have everything work the first time! Since it wasn’t enough having been working or driving for 16 hours that day, Josh called and we went to House of Pies, of course.

Today we’re getting three new T-1s installed!

Looong Day

Personal

I was at work for 10 hours today doing cabling and other things that need to be done by tomorrow. We didn’t finish, so I’m going in tomorrow morning as well. That actually wasn’t that bad, the work was hard but it needs to be done and it’s not like I’m not getting paid. What really blew though was when I booted up my laptop and it told me “No Operating System Found.” What? Where did it go? What could have happened? Who knows.

On my old laptop I would have just popped the drive out and plugged it into my desktop (I have an adaptor) and seen what was wrong, however a tradeoff of the nice look of this new one is that there seems to be no good way to open it without messing a whole mess of things up. So I’m downloading Knoppix to boot from the CD-ROM and see if I can see what’s up. Honestly I wouldn’t care and just go straight to a recovery CD if it wasn’t for the Vegas pictures that I haven’t uploaded yet that are still on there. I really hope this doesn’t become a recurring issue like the ones I had with the GRX.

On a brighter note, I got my review copy of Andy King’s Web Site Optimization yesterday. I had some time to get started on it and it looks very interesting. I’m going to be doing a review of it for the Web * SIGs here in town and I’ll also post something here. I have to be back at work at 9 tomorrow, which means I have to wake up at 7-ish (hour to get ready, hour to get there) so I better get to bed soon.

Open Key Works

Open Key

The OpenKey system works! I would link to all the old posts, but it’s very late and I’m very tired. Browse the categroy.

Long story shorter, my keys were locked in my car since yesterday, and it seems I had given a key to everone but the people I live with (sometimes called my family) so I couldn’t get in, but key holder Sarah W. (who will have a photolog soonish) drove over and opened the car for me, and all was good.

I’m thinking of starting a gallery of people with their photomatt.net key to collect all the pictures in one place (when I have many people their key it was with the stipulation that they take a picture with the key and send it to me) and also to test out some new WordPress photolog stuff. Soon.

Also, keys are sexy.

And No Play

Personal

Well I just finished up my first day of real work. “Real” in that I went to an office for a set time and worked with other people and I’m going to be getting a paycheck. For years now I’ve worked by myself and for myself, and to be honest I never planned to get a job with a capital J because I didn’t want to be part of that enviroment. This is just a temporary engagement, so I’ll be back to my free-wheelin’ self in a few months, but to be honest I didn’t see this coming.

It was just last week that this offer came my way, and I thought about it quite a bit before accepting it. There are a number of downsides, including that it’s very far away from me (at Veteran’s Memorial and 1960 for you Houston people) and it’s full-time, meaning I don’t have a lot of room for summer things. The time thing was probably the biggest issue, because the oppurtunity cost of relaxation, social time, and other projects is high, but I think it’s going to work out well. The driving doesn’t really bother me because they’re letting me start an hour later so I miss most of the traffic and even though it’s still far away once I get some good music on my stereo I don’t really care anyway.

I don’t really have a formal job description, but from the looks of it I’m going to work on lots of computer troubleshooting issues, their website, some PHP and MySQL backend stuff, and Linux/BSD administration. I was worried about coming in today and I even had the first day jitters when going up to the office, but everyone is really nice and it seems like a great environment. Plus I’ll be working on things I love.

I need to watch what I talk about though, as I found out last night at Diedrich’s with Josh, Julie, Elissa, Ramie, and Chris when I almost put the entire table to sleep by talking about what WordPress is going to do with multimedia in the future. Actually I think Josh was secretly interested but won’t admit it. It’s really interesting, I just need to think of a way to describe it (without showing it) in non-programmer terms.

Back in Town

Meta

Vegas was great, but I don’t even know where to begin. I didn’t have internet access save that one five minute session the entire time so I’m a little more behind on things than usual. There are hundreds of great pictures to go up but for now I’m going to relax a bit and see if I can catch up with my email.