Tuesday, September 20th, 2005
I love TurboTap’s slogan: Science Pouring Perfect Beer. It’s a Chicago-based beer tap startup. How awesome is that?
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
Steve is quite the photographer, getting some great-looking night pictures of us all last night. So here’s Alan & Amanda, Laura & Kris, then Dawn & Steve.
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
More on Markdown & SmartyPants
Some more tidbits on John Gruber’s tools …
To run as an OS X Service,
Install HumaneText.service from here. Then,
- Select any text.
- Press
Shift-Cmd-{to convert “Humane Text” to XHTML. - Press
Shift-Cmd-}to convert XHTML to “Humane Text”.
Note that this runs both Markdown & SmartyPants on your text.
To run integrated (via command—line pipes) with SmartyPants,
Run Markdown first, then post-process the html with SmartyPants to make smart-quotes, dashes, and ellipses look nice. E.g.:
% perl Markdown.pl foo.text | perl SmartyPants.pl > foo.html
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
Arik & Laura Wedding Professional Pictures
A sampling of thier proofs is now available. The couple did such a great job of looking good, it must have made the photographer’s job easy — some great pictures were the result.
Note: to download the photos on your computer, just go to the following website. You can replace the number 16 with any picture number from 1 to 45 to see other photos.
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
Congratulations, Steve & Dawn Hoelzer, on the Upcoming Mammy & Pappyhood
Steve and Dawn are going to be parents! Check out the ultrasound. As you can see in the right hand lower corner of the pictures, the due date is around March 29-30th.
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
My little sister, Jessica, just had her 10th birthday. I’m so proud of her! A bit of Sponge Bob was involved.
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
He was a very friendly and loving cat. He’d greet any stranger with curiosity. We’ll miss him. I put together some pictures to remember him by.
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
I recently decided to brush up on Unicode because I’m preparing to redesign this website and I’d like it to fully use Unicode as it’s text-delivery format.
What is Unicode? It is basically a mapping of a single number that represents each character in every writing system. It even includes some dead languages from the past.
Here are some great places to learn more.
- Unicode website
- Wikipedia entry
- Joel Spolsky’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
- Tim Bray’s Characters vs. Bytes
I was struggling with how to enter Unicode characters on Mac OS X, when I finally found some useful tools that can be enabled by the “Input Menu” tab of the International System Preferences. If you enable “Character Palette” and “Unicode Hex Input”, you’ll get a little flag in your menu bar that lets you choose among two useful input methods:
Character Palette - graphically pick your glyphs (see screenshot)
Unicode Hex Input - type in the hex Unicode code point while holding down the option key
Here’s some examples, for your viewing pleasure.
〆 = ideographic closing mark (U+3006)
☃ = snowman (U+2603)
♥ = heart (U+2665)
⌘ = place of interest sign (U+2318)
☮ = peace sign (U+262E)
∃ = there exists (U+2203)
∢ = spherical angle (U+2222)
’ = apostrophe (decimal 8217)
Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 냻
Friday, September 16th, 2005
Useful Commands for Python Debugging
As explained in the Python Library Reference
documentation,
command-line debugging in python is made possible by the pdb module.
I like using it this way:
python -m pdb myscript.py
Once you’re in the debugger, the following commands were most useful.
h(elp): show me some help
w(here): print the current stack trace (where is the code now?)
u(p)andd(own): navigate up/down within the stack heirarchy
s(tep): run current line of code, stopping within sub-functions
n(ext): run current line of code, stopping at next line in the current function (aka step over)
b(reak): specify a breakpoint
c(ont(inue)): run until you hit a breakpoint
l(ist): show the source code surrounding the current line
p <expression>: print the contents of an object <expression>
q(uit): quit the debugger and your program
Monday, September 12th, 2005
Web Development Trends for 2006
Anil Dash (of Six Apart) on web developer trends.
Friday, September 9th, 2005
Setting bash command history expansion to use the up arrow like MATLAB
This is one of those simple once you know it but annoying to figure out settings. Via google, I found the solution — add the folling lines to “.inputrc” in your home directory:
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
For extra fun, you can make the command line cycle through options instead of printing them all when you press TAB. Try adding the following line (via macosxhints):
TAB: menu-complete
The jury in my head is still out on if I prefer this behavior. I wish they would just hurry up and decide so I can get used to it.
Update: Note that this takes effect in new terminal windows and new logins, not your current command line session.
Update 2: Steve suggested an alternative approach is to add the following lines to “.profile” or “.bashrc”:
# make bash autocomplete with up arrow
bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'
# make tab cycle through commands instead of listing
bind '"\t":menu-complete'
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
MATLAB Update to R14 Service Pack 3
Tommorrow, The Mathworks released an update to MATLAB. It’s funny that I’m reading about it right now, yet it is not released until tomorrow. Some of the improvements of interest to me (and to Steve) include:
- better Mac support for plotting, speed, and the compiler
- large scale modeling which seems to be their buzzword for the integration of Simulink and Stateflow with GUI navigation
- bug fixes in the Image Processing Toolbox, including an improved imagerotate
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
Quasi-Monte Carlo Metropolis algorithm
According to the PNAS Journal (a favorite of Berkely Groks), the quasi-Monte Carlo Metropolis algorithm can get your results much quicker if your MC problem happens to fit their conditions: it has to be “completely uniformly distributed” (CUD). If you have a CUD problem, PNAS can solve it (those of your giggling at this are immature).
Thanks to my friend Sotos for pointing this one out.
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
A very simple and nice tutorial on AJAX (interactive web done right). It may take him 30 seconds but it takes me 10 minutes. I guess I’m slow.
