February 5, 2012

Reading Webpages. Like, actually reading!

Filed under: Default — adam @ 9:05 am PST

Forget surfing. Clicking from page to page, skimming paragraphs, forgetting it immediately. Someone spent quality time writing, I want to spend quality time reading. Like the good old days. Reading beautiful print on paper, understanding, thinking about what I’m reading.

Along these lines, I totally heart that “READER” trick iOS 5 Mobile Safari does with some webpages. Anyone know how to teach Chrome or Firefox to do the same?

If you haven’t heard of it, see http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html#gallery-safari-reader.

This is an absolute revolution in actually reading overstyled, ad-riddled online content. I even find myself hitting the READER button for fairly clean content because it always produces a consistent result.

This really shouldn’t be a revolution. We know people can read/concentrate/comprehend better without distraction!

Crosspost: https://plus.google.com/109728769351141658237/posts/TCsVTGf5jeM

Update: Krzysiek Głębowicz mentioned Readability and I found dotEPUB.

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January 31, 2012

Auto-update bind 9 zone database serial numbers

Filed under: Default — Tags: Fun, nerdy, vim — adam @ 3:45 pm PST

This post is helpful for configuring emacs to automatically update the “Serial” in bind zone databases. I wanted to do the same in Vim, but the solutions in the comments of that post didn’t work for me. Here’s a version that does. It’s yours for free under the Affero GPL v3 (or any later version, at your preference):

function s:BindZoneSettings()
    function s:UpdateBindZoneSerial(date, num)
        if (strftime("%Y%m%d") == a:date)
            return a:date . a:num+1
        endif
        return strftime("%Y%m%d") . '01'
    endfunction
 
    function s:ReplaceBindZoneSerialLine()
        :%s/\(2[0-9]\{7}\)\([0-9]\{2}\)\(\s*;\s*Serial\)/\=UpdateBindZoneSerial(submatch(1), submatch(2)) . submatch(3)/g
    endfunction
 
    autocmd BufWritePre /etc/bind/db.* call ReplaceBindZoneSerialLine()
endfunction

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January 5, 2012

Get Back at those Fat Cats!

Filed under: Default — Tags: Fun — adam @ 2:15 pm PST

If you have an iPhone or iPad, check out the game Fat Cats!

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December 31, 2011

Browser Pause

Filed under: Default — adam @ 10:08 pm PST

Here’s an idea for Web browsers. When the browser window loses focus, stop everything. Freeze all threads, animated images, scripts, plugins… everything. This would be most useful as a setting that could be enabled and disabled at will. Sometimes I’d just like the browser to just simmer down while my attention is elsewhere. No need to be AJAXing around and stuff.

Thoughts?

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December 22, 2011

Don’t Get Locked In

Filed under: Default — Tags: freedom — adam @ 3:55 pm PST

Here’s a Public Service Announcement for those of you who wish to buy an iPhone and might want to use it for a different carrier than the one the phone is locked with.

You can’t.*

If you buy an At&t iPhone, Apple says Thou Shalt Only Use Thy iPhone with At&t, and makes it very difficult to use the phone with, say, T-Mobile. You’ll get to use the phone, but At&t and Apple really still own part of it, the part that says how the phone can be used.

Strange, isn’t it? It’s like you bought a roll of duct tape, but it only works on ducts.

Other ideas:

buy an unlocked iPhone instead. iPhones hold their value well, especially unlocked ones. They cost a lot more so the upfront cash required is high, but an unlocked phone gives you the freedom to change carriers anytime for any reason. When you figure out the price of the phone, don’t just look at the initial price, look at the cost of the contract over the life of the contract and check prices on similar used unlocked phones on eBay.
don’t buy an iPhone. By purchasing an iPhone you’re telling Apple that you’re willing to pay the price of your freedom. Apple pushes hard on its customers, saying what they can and can’t do. They sure do make awesome technology, but at the cost of personal freedom.

Learn more about freedom at https://www.eff.org.

* If you are brave, patient, lucky, and desperate, you may be able to bypass the electronic measures in place which lock the phone to At&t.

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October 8, 2011

Does the FSF need better top-down social skills?

Filed under: Default — Tags: floss, Fun, gnu, politics — adam @ 8:36 pm PST

Larry Cafiero and Joe Brockmeier are two big voices for technological freedom. They’re both pretty fired up about RMS’s f-you epitaph of Jobs.

Generally you want the figurehead of a public foundation to be, uh, attractive. Intellectually, maybe even physically. Right? Not only does the cause itself have to make sense, these people need to attract other people to their cause. And they usually “say the right things”, smile, wear a suit, whatever. But I always thought these requirements only applied to other causes (besides Free Software).

Certainly RMS lacking those traits didn’t keep me from FLOSS. I heard about RMS and the proprietary printer a while back, and that’s all it took to get me hooked on FLOSS. I could identify immediately because I write software, and proprietary code is a pain. His cause just makes sense, even if he doesn’t. But I’ve been justifying his abnormal behavior because, well, he started something new! Something important. He knew it was important, and dedicated his life to this thing that many, many folks never even know exists. Something that affects all our lives, every day, more and more. Software must support our Freedom, or we are not free.

So he won me over, but I’m a nerd. I’m used to eccentrics in my field. Truth wins, period. And I still don’t know if it matters if RMS is a polished, smiley, public-friendly dude or not. Would Free Software be farther along today if RMS were kinder, more respectful, or somehow a better “public figure”? Would DRM have never been allowed to exist? Would the government pass laws that software for implanted medical devices be Free?

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October 5, 2011

Link Checker Wishlist

Filed under: Default — Tags: Fun, nerdy, programming, software — adam @ 7:00 am PST

Link checkers spider through your website and make sure that links work. I want an awesome link checker. Ideally, it would espouse as many of these attributes as possible:

easy to learn
easy to configure/customize

example config: don’t hit URLs on other servers

sensible default behaviors

example: respects robots.txt and ‘nofollow’ link attributes

scriptable / embeddable

useful from command line
useful from within CI servers like Jenkins

recurses (parses HTML, follows links)

and smartly avoids checking the same pages twice

fast
thrifty with memory
pluggable

example plugin: run jslint on all JavaScript
example plugin: validate HTML 5
example plugin: validate CSS
example plugin: compute accessibility score
example plugin: JUnit XML output
example plugin: OpenDocument spreadsheet output
example plugin: Excel output
example plugin: CSV output
example plugin: JavaScript engine
example plugin: follow hashbang URLs

beautiful source code
FLOSS

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September 30, 2011

Warren Buffet’s Long Bet

Filed under: Default — Tags: money, Work — adam @ 12:35 pm PST

Please check out my post Warren Buffet’s Long Bet on the BreadVault blog.

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September 19, 2011

offline HTML 5 validation

Filed under: Default — Tags: engineering, Fun, programming, software, vim, Work — adam @ 11:05 am PST

I’m liking Henri Sivonen’s Validator.nu service. I’ve got it running locally, and it works well. I can use it as a web service and validate HTML from within Vim, using quickfix to rapidly resolve errors. My Jenkins CI server uses the same validator via phpunit tests.

Warning: it took me a very long time to get it running locally. Technically easy (just run a build script), but it downloads tons of libraries and files before it can do its job.

Comments (1)

September 6, 2011

New job

Filed under: Default — adam @ 2:37 pm PST

My new job is going well! I can’t wait to post more about it. Sign up if you’d like to hear more as we share more.

Visit http://breadvault.com to sign up.

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