Flying Meat makes a great, and simple, image editor called Acorn. Acorn has a plug-in architecture that allows one to develop in python. I had begun work on a Flickr export plugin but got side tracked because I didn’t know Objective-C (you can write obj-c interface code in python) or Interface Builder all that well. Now that I’ve learned them I was going to go back into it and see about finishing up with a dialog box.
Happily, the gang at Coding Robots just beat me to it with Flicker Export Plugin for Acorn. I won’t complain because they’ve done a great job and with the source available I can learn more from it. Interestingly enough, except for the dialog I hadn’t yet done my implementation is very similar to theirs.
This morning I was listening to NPR and the weekly StoryCorps segment came on. I’ve been fascinated and delighted by StoryCorps. It’s a project well worth the time people are putting into it.
Today was Marry Ellen Noone talking about her great-grandmother. There was a disclaimer on the radio that this segment was hard to listen to. That disclaimer applies here as well.
That a person could have so much hatred, distain, and disrespect for a human as what happened to Mrs. Noone’s great-grandmother makes me sad and angry at the same time. I realize the event was almost 100 years ago, but that our country and the world ever got the point that degradation of humans was acceptable I sometimes wonder how we ever got where we are without destroying ourselves.
At any rate, StoryCorps is fascinating. If you’ve got some time browse through it and listen to stories. If you have a story I encourage you try and share it with StoryCorps.
The future is born from the mind of visionaries. Arthur C. Clark is one of them. He first conceived of communications satellites in 1945. Ninety years is a good long run. Farewell ambassador from future times.
When I woke up this morning I thought it was raining enough for me not to ride. I looked again and it was fine at my house so I went out any way. I was at the stop sign at Sacramento and Harmon on my way to Rockridge. I was waiting for traffic on the far lanes to pass when a pickup came up behind me, decided not to stop at the stop sign, went around me, and clipped me with his extended mirror.
It hit me on the left shoulder and I went over to the right. I was fine but furious so I just turned around an went back home (about half a mile). Because I fell over I didn’t get the guys plate. I’m glad it wasn’t more serious. I hope that’s the closest I ever get to a car hit while on a bike.
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.
Well, thanks to a pointer I found out that my git-chdiff script is a bit overblown. You see, a person can just use the built in functionality of git, namely setting the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable to point to something that can take the seven command line argumentsgit will pass on to whatever you’ve set as your external command. It’s beautiful in its simplicity:
Just stick that in a script file, make it executable, set the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable to point at it and away you go. I’ve also documented it in the Changes.appwiki. I feel so silly for not finding this before, but the exercise in a scripted solution was good for me.
For a long time I’ve been making southern style cooked greens. I learned how to make these when I was in school back in Nacogdoches, Texas1 from a friend’s mom. I never wrote down a recipe and I just kind of keep making it with little changes here or there. This is the recipe as I’m currently cooking it.2
2-3 large bunches of chard (red or yellow chard are my favorite) or kale or any big leafy green.
around 1/4 lb. of ham hock, smoked ham, or smoked pork neck pieces (optional)
hot sauce (Frank’s Red Hot, other than Tabasco if you can)
salt
pepper
cayenne powder (optional)
In a large pot place the pork in large chunks and about 4 cups of water. To the water add between 2-4 tbsp. of hot sauce (add more if you like, to taste, don’t go nuts at first). Add about 4 tsp. salt (maybe start with half that and bring it up to taste) and 2 tsp. of pepper. Add about 1/2 to 1 tsp. of cayenne powder if you like. Start to heat on medium heat while you do the rest of the work.
Wash and clean the greens. Cut the tips of the stems off. Take 3-5 leaves and stack them up. Start at one edge of the leaf stack and roll the leaves lengthwise into a tight bundle. Cut the leaf bundle across every half inch or so. This will form little circular bundles of leaves (when unfurled the pieces will have leaf, stem, leaf).
Put all the cut leaves into the pot. Add more water to fill the pot to just below the level of the leaves (make sure not to fill the pot up too far, the leaves will cook down).
Turn up the heat to medium-high and bring the pot to a boil, then turn it down to medium-low and keep it at a simmer for at least an hour. Let them cook for two hours if you can.
Strain from the pot and serve with or without the ham if you put it in.
I got a MacBook recently and since I have a pretty big messenger bag so I can lug stuff when I ride my bike to and from work I figured a sleeve would be a good idea to protect it. I asked at work and got a recommendation for the WaterField SleeveCase. I am so happy with it I can’t recommend it enough.
I got the case with a flap to keep things out of the sleeve when in my bag. This case looks good, is super durable, and will be a great addition to my MacBook for the time I’m using it. If you’re in the market for a laptop sleeve I recommend you check out WaterField Designs.
Last night I was messing around at home and trying to use the contributed script for diffing a project with Git1 but it just wasn’t working the way I wanted. I generally like to work by being in the code tree and diffing a file against what was the last checkin (Or alternately a tagged checkin). The script that was there would do a comparison of the whole tree. I do find that valuable and I’ll keep it around for when I need that, but for my day to day work I want to just quickly view what changed from what I have on disk and what is in the repository at some point.
With that in mind I went and wrote up a quick python script that basically does what I want. I’m sure there is room for improvement and I might not have gotten everything right, but that’s why I put it up on the wiki. You can access the code directly from me if you like.
