January 25th, 2010 — design
Every time I write this down, I dislike how it sounds, so I’m going to brainstorm for a while.
Templates build composite documents from constituent documents. The example that I mentioned previously was:
<html> <head><title>Greeting</title></head> <body><p>Hello <?php print $name ?></p></body> </html>
Which can be represented as a tree by:
What I would like to explore is a templating system that is drawing from a content tree which organizes binary strings.
January 22nd, 2010 — tinkering
I’ve been playing around with git for a while and today I hit a problem with the new release of jQuery. Version 1.3.2 could be loaded into svgs, but v.1.4 dies.
To check it out, I thought I’d give GitHub a try.
January 21st, 2010 — software
Versioining systems are pieces of software that track changes in files. They exist in a variey of forms, and one of the more popular currently is git which was designed for maintaining the Linux kernel.
The basic building blocks of a git repository are “blobs.” In git, a blob is simply a file:
Continue reading →January 21st, 2010 — software
We'll start with the natural building block of any digital system: the bit. A bit is just a binary digit, a one or a zero. Bits are used to encode information. For example, imagine I have a bunch of red cards and a bunch of green cards. I give a red card to everyone in the country except for the President to whom I give a green one. Since the cards only have two possible states, they are a form of bit. The information associated with that bit, however, is highly complex.
Bits are combined into series to represent larger sets of possibilities. Whereas the President bit could only represent two possibilities: someone is the President (red card) or not the President (green card), a string of n bits can represent 2n possibilities. Almost all digital information in the world today is stored as groups of eight bits called "bytes."
Continue reading →January 21st, 2010 — tinkering
I like to use SVGs in my posts. They’re easy to create in Inkscape, scriptable and anyone who wants to can download and edit them. The problem is that though the specification is seven years old, IE still lacks SVG support.
The SVGWeb plugin fixes IE by inserting a flash applet to render the image.
Continue reading →January 17th, 2010 — seeking
I’ve been revisiting the ol’ life plan since turning 31 two months ago. It’s been almost a year now that I’ve been dreaming of starting a business and what I thought was a hill that I could climb with patience and perseverance increasingly looks like a mountain whose top I can’t even see.
All that I really want to do at this point is write down the ideas so that at least I’ll have those to show for the weeks I spent hunkered in front of my monitor searching for a way to get my sense of hope and desperation into a form that the rest of the world could understand.
January 14th, 2010 — tinkering
For years, I have version controlled my websites, first using CVS and then subversion. As part of my masters thesis, I am moving to git for versioning.
This requires figuring out how to handle my basic use case of allowing me to pull parts of the site and edit them from various locations on the net and push changes to the web server for publication.
December 12th, 2009 — seeking
If anyone knows a geeks with free time in the Baltimore/Washington area, I’m hunting for help. It’s impossible to say at this point how things will pan out, but this is a couple weeks work, at least, and an interesting story beyond that.
I’m trying to get a demo out this week if I can just get the computer systems to cooperate. ☺
November 30th, 2009 — banking
While I was home for Thanksgiving, my dad and I had several conversations about economics that centered around people’s earnings and their rights to them.
I think our issues were largely semantic — we use the word “earned” with at least two distinct senses:
(That’s $62 billion at the historical 8% return from the stock market. Of course all his money isn’t in the stock market, and he likely has less now than he did a few months ago, but the idea’s the same.)
I don’t think that it makes sense to treat these two transfers of money as even remotely similar in terms impact on a person’s life or amount of effort put forth. I don’t really know the terms to use to separate “earning” in investment from “earning” in labor, but I think I would have an easier time talking to my dad if I could create a separation.
November 9th, 2009 — bug
This command should work, imho:
$file = ~/personal/private/.htaccess;
find ~/ -name .htaccess -type f -exec diff $file {}
\|\| ( echo 'Replacing: ' {} \&\& rm {} \&\& ln -s $file {} )\;
It should hunt down all the copies of my .htaccess files that are only there to password protect a directory and make them symlinks to an authoritative version.
There are many ways to accomplish the task and ⟰ is apparently not one of them. ☺