An Experiment in Bloggery

There’s a new site that’s been getting really popular lately called Twitter. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a status message, like IM, but actually usable. Twitter provides XML/JSON feeds, as well as a way to post updates over the web, over IM (using Jabber), or over SMS. You can also receive “tweets” (Twitter updates) that your friends posted with any of these mechanisms. There are also various applications (such as Twitterific), if you want yet another way to send/receive tweets.

By far the most powerful aspect of Twitterific is the SMS support. I have free SMS with my Sidekick data plan, but I’ve never had a reason to use it before. But now I can receive tweets on my phone all day long, and send my own no matter where I am. For example, I sent this tweet while in class.

If you want to keep track of what I’m doing, just take a gander at my profile. And if you sign up for your own account, you can add me as a friend to receive my tweets. If you add me and I recognize your name, I’ll probably add you back too.

After months of absence, Typosphere has returned from the dead!

We migrated off of Planet Argon and onto DreamHost, where we should have more control. We also upgraded to Trac 0.10.3 and turned off anonymous editing (users now have to register to file a ticket). This should (hopefully) prevent the issue that lead to Typosphere dying in the first place.

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Haml is a new markup format for Ruby on Rails apps that just hit 1.0. At first glance it looks pretty odd, but it turns out to be really easy to write in, and it’s shorter and, actually, easier to read than the equivalent eRB.

I think I’m going to convert Typo to use Haml for all its templates. I already did Azure’s layout file and it was pretty simple.

Last night I tried searching MacUpdate for bittorrent or Azureus and got zero results. I thought that to be very strange, and wondered if Joel decided to take an anti-piracy stance (despite the fact that BitTorrent is very useful for distribution of perfectly legal materials). But today when I looked again, I got all the results I expected. Very strange.

My friend from college just sent me a link to The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, which is the greatest thing I have seen in a while. I managed to find the website for the guy(s?) who did the music. Their website can be found at eviltrailmix.com/lemondream/, although they hit their bandwidth limit today, but they should be back tomorrow.

Update: Comments disabled because I’m tired of all the inane comments I’ve been receiving. There’s really no discussion to be had here, so no point in having comments.

Inspired by a script mentioned on ranchero.com, I wrote a ruby script that generates an RSS feed for all the Crash Reporter logs on your machine. Just create a New Special Subscription in NetNewsWire, point it at the script, and you’re all set.

So why has been talking about MouseHole lately. If you’re unaware, MouseHole is a ruby script that acts as a web proxy and filters HTML documents via ruby scripts. Or for a much better look at it, go look at what why wrote.

Anyway, I wanted a way to do JavaScript cross-site AJAX tricks, like what Greasemonkey enables. Unfortunately, because MouseHole is a pre-processor, not a JavaScript extension, it’s not possible. So I spent a few hours and wrote a way for MouseHole scripts to provide content that doesn’t actually exist (as opposed to mutating existing content). This way JavaScript can do an AJAX call within the same domain (so it doesn’t hit the security limitations) but that call is intercepted by your script, so you could pull info from other sites and send it back, or whatever you wish.

I haven’t actually done anything with this new capability yet aside from a rather silly example script which simply adds a button to Google that asks MouseHole for a random number. I’d really like to extend Google Maps, but that will require delving into how it works, and it’s far too late to do that now, as I need to get to bed.

Anyhow, I put together a patch and sent it to the MouseHole Scripters mailing list. If you check out MouseHole from the CVS repository, you can apply my patch and test it. Or you can just wait to see if it gets added to MouseHole.

From the people who brought us Who Owns The Fish? comes a new logic puzzle, School of Government. I just ran across this today, and the answer deadline is tomorrow, so that was cutting it a little close, but with a pen and a pad of paper I think I’ve solved it. And no, I’m not going to give you the solution (like I did last time). Go solve it on your own.

I ran across a link on SvN to an interesting logic puzzle called Whose Fish?. It purports to be a logic puzzle created by Albert Einstein, and claims Einstein said 98% of the population would not be able to solve it. So naturally, I was intrigued.

The only problem was, the logic matrix for the puzzle doesn’t fit on a single piece of paper, and I don’t have Excel installed. So what did I do? I wrote a CGI script in Ruby that generated a logic matrix using a table of checkboxes, and I wrote some accompanying JavaScript to make it easier to use. Go try it!

If you don’t want to solve the puzzle yourself, feel free to check out some of my steps. Just please, don’t submit this as your own answer. If you’re going to submit an answer, do the work yourself. So anyway, here are some of my steps:

1. Step
2. Step
3. Step
4. Step
5. Step
6. Step
7. Step
8. Step
9. Step

And here’s the final solution.

I’ve been reading webomics for ages now, but I’ve never put up links to any. Well, I finally decided to throw my list onto the web, for you all to peruse. You can find it here.

I will attempt to keep this list up-to-date, but I don’t often add or remove webcomics from the list, so don’t expect much change.