Taschenputztuch, Swearmint und Schampeljongs
Das Schuljahr ist mehr oder weniger gelaufen, heute habe ich die wohl
letzte Physik-Arbeit meines Lebens geschrieben… sie war unerwartet
einfach. Es gilt also, noch meine
Mathe-GLF
abzuhalten und die übrigen verbleibenden 8 Schulstunden bis zum
Wochenende abzusitzen.
Dann ist Schützen, und nach dem verlängerten Wochenende wird die
Schule ab Mittwoch in eine riesige Ausnüchterungszelle umgewandelt.
(Keine Angst, den SchützaBlog gibts auch dieses Jahr, immer die News
und Quotes vom Morgen danach.)
Und noch die Quotes so weit möglich, live und in Farbe vom
suchtgefährdeten WG:
Diese pubertierende Hähne…
Taschenputztuch
Verpeilt durch die Galaxis
[meint den Anhalter]
Wrigley’s Swearmint — Spewing Gum
Moron 5
[Lehrer:] Nächstes Jahr kommt ‘ne Oberreferendarin.
—
[Schüler:] Ist die geil?
Schampeljongs
Jesus war ‘ne Frau
— Darum hat er auch am Kreuz so arg geblutet.
hängsel & gruntle
Was ist der Unterschied zwischen Benzin und Vaseline?
—
Benzin scheidet die Fette…
NP: The Distillers—Dismantle Me
The Dark Side of Atom
Yesterday antifuchs told me about a problem
with the Atom feed of Anarchaia, that
now and then includes IRC quotes like this:
#ruby-de
12:18 <ionas_> alles was nicht analog ist ist lossy ;p
12:18 <ionas_> und alles was analog ist geht schnell kaputt ,p
In raw HTML, this looks like that, this code is directly taken from
the generated HTML:
<div class="ircquote">
<span class="channel">#ruby-de</span>
<div class="line">12:18 <ionas_> alles was nicht analog ist ist lossy ;p</div>
<div class="line">12:18 <ionas_> und alles was analog ist geht schnell kaputt ,p</div>
</div>
In default IRC style, I quote the nickname with < and >, but
antifuchs tells me he doesn’t see any nicks when he looks at my blog
with Bloglines. Weird, I think, and
decide to have a look at it.
Just for fun, I subscribe to my blog in
NetNewsWire and I see, …no
nicknames! Now, how is my Atom feed generated? The snippet looks
about like that:
<entry>
<title>25</title>
<!-- ... --->
<content mode="xml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<div class="ircquote">
<span class="channel">#ruby-de</span>
<div class="line">12:18 <ionas_> alles was nicht analog ist ist lossy ;p</div>
<div class="line">12:18 <ionas_> und alles was analog ist geht schnell kaputt ,p</div>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
And I start to wonder. My Atom feed is perfectly valid, and I just
inserted the raw (and valid) XHTML as-is. This should be OK.
To quote the Atom
specification
(emphasis mine):
3) If the value of “type” is “xhtml”, the content of atom:content
MUST be a single XHTML div element [XHTML], and SHOULD be
suitable for handling as XHTML. The XHTML div element itself
MUST NOT be considered part of the content. Atom Processors that
display the content MAY use the markup to aid in displaying it.
The escaped versions of characters such as “&” and “>” represent
those characters, not markup.
Now, apparently, both Bloglines and NetNewsWire somehow pass the XHTML
to a rendering engine, in either case my browser respective HTMLKit.
And those seem to parse it again, thereby creating the tag
<ionas_>. Now, I fixed that by escaping all & in my Atom feeds
with &, so now the nick reads &lt;ionas_&gt;. Which
is more than ugly and really pisses me off.
When I see such stuff, sometimes I think, RSS really did it better
when they just decided to escape the whole stuff and stray their
entities all over. That would be consistent, at least.
The civilization of today surely will go down because escaping doesn’t
work (and don’t even get me started on encodings, oh my…).
NP: Le Tigre—Phanta
Introducing Linko
This is just a small Saturday morning hack, but a rather useful one, I
think.
Often, when you are blogging about something, you want to link to
certain sites about topics that appear often, but you don’t always
want to play around with URLs and stuff, and thus you are likely to
insert no link at all, just because it is too much work.
Not so anymore with Linko, a Ruby1 link inserter I just wrote.
Linko2 makes inserting links as easy as pie! For example, I just
typed:
Not so anymore with *Linko__*, a Ruby_ link inserter I just wrote.
Linko_ makes inserting links as easy as pie!
And that’s all you need to do, provided that you have links for Linko
and Ruby in your Linko mapping already.
Further, Linko2 also makes your life a lot easier if the
commonly-linked page suddenly moves, you just fix the replacement
and rerun Linko on your site.
Linko is currently written as a Ruby1 library following the *Cloth
API, so you just can run it like this (or use a chaining mechanism
like my ClothesLine):
Linko.new("Ruby_ is fun!").to_html
=> "Ruby<a href=\"http://www.ruby-lang.org/\"><sup>1</sup></a> is fun!"
Happy linking! Linko2 is available from my Darcs3 archive at
http://chneukirchen.org/repos/linko
NP: Jimi Hendrix—Gypsy Eyes
Cholerabär, Morgenlatte-TV und Viagra als Stilmittel
Das Schuljahr geht dem Ende zu, noch 2 bis 4 Klassenarbeiten, je nach
Religion und Sprachfertigkeit, dann war’s das. Die letzte Latein-Arbeit
ist auch draussen, mit der 2-3 bin ich dann doch sehr zufrieden.
Nur noch acht Tage bis Schützen! Hoffentlich spielt das Wetter mit;
für’s Laupheimer Kinderfest ist es im Moment viel zu schön. *eg*
Der Cholerabär frisst Apokalyptusblätter.
Morgenlatte-TV
[Idee für eine Pornosendung von sechs bis elf Uhr.]
Apfel und Eva haben Adam gegessen.
Anastasi
Donkey Shot
Ist Viagara auch ein Stilmittel?
Wer wohnt beim Mt. Everest?
— Die Neapolitaner!
NP: Jimi Hendrix—1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)
Wikipedia Discrepancies
I know the following rant really is of no use, and that you better fix
“Open Source” projects on your own instead of complaining, but I lack
the knowledge to do that… maybe someone else wants to do it?
Recently, I had to prepare a presentation about Bayes’ Theorem and
conditional probabilities. Therefore, I looked at these
pages: Bayes-Theorem,
Bayesscher Wahrscheinlichkeitsbegriff,
and Bedingte Wahrscheinlichkeit.
And, believe it or now, they all use different notations! What’s that?
Now, I needed to figure how to write p(A and B). One page says
that’s
,
another uses p(A & B). Same for negation. One page uses ¬A, one A̅
and I’ve seen !A too (but I know that that is wrong). A person
profound in maths I asked says it actually is AC (and
that’s what the english version of the page says). So what?
Whom should I trust and what should I believe? And what if we actually
learned it totally different in school (if I could only remember…)?
It probably doesn’t matter—after all, the audience has even less
clue than I do. But it would be nice to do things right, you know?
And it would be nice to have a free and open encyclopedia that doesn’t
dissent itself.
NP: Jimi Hendrix—Come On (Let The Good Times Roll)
Summer has broken
Kurz vorm Sommeranfang hat die große Hitze also auch
Biberach erreicht—ich war heute zum
ersten Mal dieses Jahr am Ummendorfer
Baggersee. Nur noch 10 mal
hingehen bis zum “break-even point”, ab dem sich die Jahreskarte
gelohnt hat. :-) Hoffen wir es bleibt so, besonders wenn in zwei
Wochen ja schon Schützen
ist.
Selbstverständlich wurde die ganze schöne freie Zeit gleich mit
Terminen vollgepflastert… am Donnerstag waren wir nachts mit den
Realschülern im
Stadtgarten
saufen, am Freitag gabs dann in der Dollinger
Realschule
Abschlussgag
(bei uns am
Gymasium
ist eine Doppelstunde Deutsch ausgefallen) und am Abend waren wir bei
Anna
in Reute und haben Video geguckt
(“Kids”, ein gutes Beispiel
warum man Jugendfilme möglichst slangfrei drehen sollte). Gestern
feierte Christian
Welcker
seinen 18. Geburtstag im
Burrenwald, und
die amerikanischen
Austauschschüler sind
heute nacht um zwei auch wieder abgereist. Nun kehrt wieder Ruhe in
den (gebeutelten?) Haushalten ein (und der Platz neben dem Computer
wird wieder frei *scnr*). Nein, ich hatte keinen
Austauschschüler.
Und morgen ist—dank mündlichem Abitur—schulfrei, ebenso Dienstag.
Mal gespannt was wir da alles machen werden.
Ist eigentlich toll, dass man selbst zu den belanglosesten, lokal höchst
begrenzten Dingen sinnvoll verlinken kann… was wären bloß wir ohne
das Internet.
NP: Bruce Springsteen—Hatamoros Bank
Salad Bowl, French drivers und das elektrische Daktylon
Auch wenn die Amis da sind, die Quotes kommen weiterhin. Quotes aus
einer Schule, wo Chemieschüler nach Strich und Faden verarscht werden
(jaja, Lysin):
Do you think America is like a salad bowl?
—
Well…, a Mexican salad bowl!
What’s wrong with the French drivers?
—
They’re French.
Lady Die!
Kirche, n.: Institution für Geistesschwache
elektrisches Daktylon
Kameradschaft Aldi-Süd
NP: Pearl Jam & Neil Young—What Happened Yesterday
A file manager for discriminating hackers
Being a “poweruser” spending a lot of his time developing software, I
heavily use the command-line, like most others do too. You could say
that I spend at least a third of my time in front of some shell (and
my Emacs runs in an external window, mind).
Therefore, I strive for efficiency on the command-line, but recently I
found out how I would get the biggest slowdown when working with the
shell: I’d just need to sit down at a computer that doesn’t have the
GNU Midnight Commander installed.
As you may know, the Midnight Commander—or mc for short—is a
Unix clone of the Norton Commander, but last time I saw it, Norton
Commander was quite different to Midnight Commander. Still, they
share the basic concept, the two-panel fileview.
In my opinion, a two-panel file manager is the most effective way to
interactively work with files—move around in directories, select,
copy and move files. I know that there are lots of people that use
single-panel file, or even the horrible (despite all the good reasons
there may be for it) spatial view, where each directory gets it’s own
window. I don’t know about you, but to get my stuff done quickly, I
far prefer using the keyboard over the mouse, and that is (almost)
impossible when you have thousands of windows open, and need to “drag”
files from here to there.
While those surely are easy to pickup and consistent with models
whatever user interface developers came up, they are not the way to
go—for me, at last.
Therefore, I have investigated into my use of mc, and came to the
following conclusions:
I need a shell at my fingertips. mc makes this very easy,
I can simply type my commands into the minibuffer and run them.
Also, by pressing C-o I can quickly switch to a full-screen shell.
Often, I even forget that I am in mc (I only notice that when I open
a second mc in the shell emulation, and C-o will switch between
both commanders…)! Also, the current filename can be copied
to the minibuffer with a simple M-RET.
Two panes are good, one large one is even better. In mc, I can
switch the size of the panel with M-t, it will get half-screen size
or full-width then. I often work with both panels in full-width,
because I see change time and permissions then, all at once. I
then use TAB to switch between both of those panels. Seeing
both at once isn’t necessary very often.
Easy selection is essential. mc makes this very easy, you either
press INS (which is inconvenient on the iBook) or C-t to toggle
marking the current file, and then can conveniently operate on them.
By pressing C-x t, they are all inserted into the minibuffer.
+ will mark all files that match a shell glob.
File searches rock. Typing C-s, I can interactively search
for filenames; this is especially useful for directories with lots
of different files. Just too bad that it only can search for the
beginning, and not for any file matching the search.
Virtual file systems are a joy. Being able to just enter archives or
go to ftp sites by cding to their URL makes lots of things easier
and faster than having to fire up tar in some temporary directory
or remember ftp syntax (and no completion, yuck).
Still, I have some gripes with mc:
Give me a bigger shell. Sometimes, a one-line shell minibuffer is just
too small, but a full-screen shell is too big. Why can’t I just
have a 5 line pty?
Change sorting. Usually, I browse sorted by filename, but then,
I need to find all the big files, or all the old files. mc should
make it easier to change the sorting criteria with key strokes, so far,
I need to F9 into the menu, down, Listing mode, Sort Order, Down until
Size, OK. That’s just far too complicated! Emacs dired gets it a lot
easier, for example, with s I can toggle between file name and date.
Still no size, though.
Does it need to be a TUI? I know there is(was?) a Gnome Midnight Commander,
but it didn’t work as the one for the shell. Especially
when you work with folders of pictures, thumbnails would be just too
useful. A text user interface is nice, but a graphical user interface,
even if it’s just for displaying files, would be a good alternative too.
Just make sure I don’t need a mouse to use it.
With all these points, I’ve decided to design my own file manager;
however, it is unlikely I’ll get around implementing it in near
future, there is just so much else to do, and mc doesn’t suck enough
to make me really need it. :-)
My main idea is a four-panel file manager, on the top there are three
columns of file panes: the first always displays the current
working directory, and the other two can be assigned to any
directory. On the bottom of the screen, there is a resizable
terminal emulation (I think multi-gnome-terminal would be a good
fit, for example), maybe five lines high by default. It is very
important that that shell works good and behaves just like any other
terminal emulator (some keystrokes aside).
Switching from the shell to the file panels must be very easy, the
same is true for switching between the three file panels. Each panel
must be maximizable and minimizable with a single keystroke;
full-window shell, full-window file panel.
The file panels will have different views, say “file list”, “extended
file list” (of most use when maximized), or “thumbnails” (of different
sizes, too). Ideally, the user can program his own views. For
example, you could make a view that internally calls find or
locate, so you have a “virtual” folder that actually is a search
result.
With a single keystroke, the user can swap, rotate and copy the
file-panels; the usage remembers me a bit of the old HP RPN
calculators that only had a very limited stack. The user can copy,
move and delete files from any panel to any other, all with the
keyboard.
On the bottom of the file list, there could be a (hidable) preview
box, that could show more file details like file times, permissions,
even the beginning of text files, or thumbnails. On the top, there
could be a menu to go to often used directories.
When tapping RET on a file, it should use an extremely configurable
mechanism to find out what to do with the file; on C-RET, it could
provide a menu of common tasks for that kind of file. Integration
with external editors (especially Emacs) would be very useful.
All these things also need to be accessible from the shell, possibly
over some kind of IPC.
I know my idea probably sounds weird, but I think I’d be a very
comfortable way of managing files—comfortable for powerusers, not
necessarily newbies. If you’d like to implement it (or a subset of
it), feel free to contact me, I can provide you a bit more information
then.
NP: Aimee Mann—I Can’t Get My Head Around It
Latine blogero
Desitum adolorosus quam expectatum fuit.
Heri nostrum ultimum opus Latinum scripsimus.
Quadragesimum.
Et supremum.
Ergo hodie me Latine blogere constitui.
Me errores fieri possunt, veniam date, Latine antiquite non verterimus.
Etiam constitui me prosa non carmen scripere, tum Ovidus Naso futurus
ego non sum.
Quadraginta opes labor difficilus erant, etiamsi in anni supremi non iam
studeramus. Sed sic omnes facemus.
Quisquis hic legere possuit, is gratulo, nisi leges, non interest.
Gratias Bavarium Carlum Lindauerumque Josephum suo libero ago, et
Davidem corrigendum.
NP: Neil Young—Look Out For My Love
Phytoplankton, Quadratliter und die Schleiereule
Für einen guten Start in die warscheinlich stressigste Woche dieses
Jahr (Arbeiten in Geschichte, Biologie, Latein und Deutsch, Noten in
Sport, Biologieexkursion und Biotechnolgie-Praktikum…), unsere Quotes:
Würdet ihr euere Ernährung auf Phytoplankton unstellen [dann]…
— Im Notfall schon!
Broadcast, n.: toleranter Gipsverband
Checkkarte
Die Schleiereule wurde doch von der RAF umgebracht, oder?
[Lehrer schreibt mit Kreide an die Wand:] Euer Wort in Gottes Ohren.
Schütte unser Herz über dich aus.
Und wenn ich ‘ne 7 schreib, das geht mir am Arsch vorbei!
— Hast du überhaupt einen?
Kaiser Karl V. war ein Drucker, er herrschte.
Quadratliter
[das müsste doch eine 4-Dimensionale Größe sein, oder?
Ist der Kubikliter dann 5-Dimensional?]
NP: Bright Eyes—Gold Mine Gutted
Package, a future replacement for setup.rb and mkmf.rb
(This blog post will go to ruby-talk as soon as Gmail fixes its SMTP.)
Hello,
During a discussion on IRC, I started to wonder if Ruby’s install
scripts are state of the art, what could be done better and how.
Ruby’s mkmf.rb and Aoki’s setup.rb probably have their roots in the
oldest pieces of Ruby source still in use. While setup.rb had some
changes in the latter time, mkmf.rb more or less stayed the same.
I have looked into how other languages install source and compile
extensions, and the library I liked best so far is Python’s distutils.
I’m not very familiar with Python, but I like the general approach and
the essence of API. Basically, you create a file, setup.py, like
this:
from distutils.core import setup
setup (name = "Distutils",
version = "0.1.1",
description = "Python Module Distribution Utilities",
author = "Greg Ward",
author_email = "gward@python.net",
url = "http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/",
packages = ['distutils', 'distutils.command'])
In Ruby, this would maybe look like that:
require 'package'
setup {
name "Distutils"
version "0.1.1"
description "Python Module Distribution Utilities"
author "Greg Ward"
author_email "gward@python.net"
url "http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/"
packages ['distutils', 'distutils/command']
}
Given this file, we can simply run:
python setup.py install
and the files will get installed where they belong to. distutils can
also handle different prefixes, installing into home directories, and
complex cases like putting scripts to /usr/bin, but libraries to
/opt/local and whatever.
Python’s distutils also handles compiling extensions:
name = 'DateTime.mxDateTime.mxDateTime'
src = 'mxDateTime/mxDateTime.c'
setup (
...
ext_modules =
[(name,
{ 'sources': [src]
'include_dirs': ['mxDateTime'] }
)]
)
Here, something like this would be possible in Ruby (I’m not yet sure
about exact semantics of the Python version):
setup {
# ...
extension("DateTime/mxDateTime/mxDateTime") {
sources "mxDateTime/mxDateTime.c"
include_dirs "mxDateTime"
}
}
Of course, more complex build descriptions can be represented too:
extension("foolib") {
sources "foo.c", "bar.c"
if have_library("foo", "fooble")
define "HAVE_FOO_H"
cflags << `foo-config --cflags`
ldflags << `foo-config --libs`
else
fail "foolib is needed"
end
}
Whether this will generate a Makefile (like mkmf.rb), a Rakefile
or compile directly (like distutils) is still an open question.
To allow for an easy conversion of setup.rb usage, Package will
provide convenience methods that will make it behave like setup.rb
with respect to the directory structure.
Package doesn’t try to conquer the world, however, it aims to be just
a tool that would be useful if it was standard and everyone could
build on due to it’s policy-neutrality
What advantages will Package have over setup.rb and mkmf.rb, as
they are now?
- simple, clean and consistent working
- unified library to handle both extensions and libraries
- lightweight approach (if included in the standard library)
- easy adaption
- more flexible directory layout: especially small projects
profit from this, as setup.rb’s directory layout is quite
bulky by default and not very customizable
- easier packaging by third-party packagers due to simple
but flexible and standardized invocation
What do we need to get a wide adoption of Package?
- inclusion in the standard library so it doesn’t need to be
shipped with every package (as setup.rb unfortunately is).
- backing from the community to make use of Package.
- acceptance from packaging projects like RPA, RubyGems and
distributions like Debian, FreeBSD and PLD.
Coding of Package has not started yet (the name is also not set into
stone yet, so if you have better ideas, please tell me) because it
would be pointless without a strong feedback from the community. I
expect to get a first version done rather quickly, possibly borrowing
code from setup.rb and mkmf.rb, but Package will not depend on these
both. If anyone is interested in helping development, please mail me;
helpful hands are always of use. Also, there will be need for testers
on all and even the most weird platforms.
But now, I’ll ask you: Are you satisfied with the way installing Ruby
extensions and libraries works? Do you think there is a place for
Package? Do you have further improvements or can provide alternative
ideas?
NP: Neil Young—My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)
Abi-Gag im WG
Heute war also endlich auch Abi-Gag bei uns im Wieland-Gymnasium und
man muss sagen, das haben sie wirklich geschickt eingefädelt. In der
ersten Stunde war nämlich Unterricht (und alle mussten noch schnell
Englisch abschreiben, grummel), dann kam eine Durchsage (bei weitem
nicht die letzte für heute), man solle sich doch in den Pausenhof
begeben, dort gäbe es ein Schulfoto.
Da standen wir dann also eine Stunde, während die Fotografen an ihren
Apparaten fummelten, stets im Versuch, ein Foto zu machen auf dem
niemand durch die langsam, aber stetig aufgehende Sonne geblendet
wird. Ich weiss nicht, wie lange es gedauert hätte, hätten sie nicht
gegenüber die kompletten Kulissen aufgebaut.
Ab der 2. Stunde war dann also Abi-Gag, wiederum mit einer Band, die
nur marginal besser war als die des PG (trotzdem!), aber es gab auch
Musik aus der Anlage. Besonderes Feature war eine Schaumkanone—ich
war ja erst skeptisch—aber nachdem man selber erst mal voll mit
Schaum ist, macht man halt doch gern ekstatisch bei dieser Schaumorgie
mit.
Das Thema war Comics, alle Abiturienten liefen als Comicfiguren herum
und man hatte im Allgemeinen recht viel Spass.
So gegen 10.00 meint natürlich unser Rektor, er müsse jetzt den
Abi-Gag abblasen, es sei wieder normaler Unterricht. Diese extrem
lächerliche, unnötig Zorn auf sich ziehende und stupide Aktion führt
er jedes Jahr durch. So weit wie dieses Jahr ging es bisher aber
nicht. Kurz nach zehn fanden wir uns tatsächlich im Klassenzimmer
wieder und hatten Latein… für ungefähr 5 Minuten, als erneut eine
Durchsage kam, die Lehrer sollen doch bitte die Anwesenheit der
Schüler kontrollieren (einige waren natürlich schon gegangen). Dann
inszenierten (mehr oder weniger) der Stufensprecher und der Rektor
einen Streit, mit dem Ergebnis dass man jetzt ja doch weiter Abi-Gag
machen könnte.
Dazu kam es dann auch, wir gingen wieder in den Pausenhof und die Band
spielte “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Es hätte kein besseres Lied für
diesen Augenblick gegeben (erinnert sich jemand an den Videoclip?).
Und die Unterbrechung war trotz meiner Befürchtungen nicht lethal für
die Stimmung, stattdessen ging alles viel exzessiver weiter.
Alles in allem ein rundum gelungener Abi-Gag mit kurzer,
schockierender Zäsur, die jedoch die Stimmung nicht trübte uns aber
hoffentlich zum Denken angeregt hat. Ich habe keine Lust, das so
etwas noch einmal passiert.
NP: Aimee Mann—She Really Wants You
