Bottled Text: August 2007

2007/08/29

www.neweurasia.net - Blogging Central Asia » Kiran over Mongolia: Interview with Joseph Spaid

www.neweurasia.net - Blogging Central Asia » Kiran over Mongolia: Interview with Joseph Spaid:

Q: What motivated you to shoot the documentary?

I was moved by the rugged and natural beauty of the eagle hunters and their lifestyle. Berkutchis [...] are just so damn strong and tough. They typically don’t even wear gloves, although it regularly gets below -25ْ F where they hunt. They are true ‘badasses’ by my definition.

2007/08/28

A'bit an hour of Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry just turned 50. BBC did a documentary on him:
http://www.snitchseeker.com/harry-potter-news/j-k-rowling-potter-stars-talk-stephen-fry-49899/

It seems as if everybody is involved with the man, including many of the folks behind Harry Potter.

Would I could write. A pun of Fry and (six degrees of) Bacon is trying hard to form in my head.

2007/08/23

Ted Leung summarizes Erlang

Some simple thoughts...:

Semantically, there is a lot to like about Erlang - the actor based concurrency model, hot code swapping, higher order functions, and (once one gets used to it) pattern matching. The OTP libraries have been refined by many years of production usage in demanding, commercial applications.

2007/08/20

Posting Syntax-Highlighted Code to the Web, Redux

Following up on July's post, I've modified my TextMate 'rawhtml' command so it no longer generates inline <style> sections. (They may work, but AFAIK <style> should appear only in a document's <head>.)

Instead, the command now wraps its output in a div of class SourceCode, and it expects the containing web page to include an appropriate <style> section.

Here's a test to see if this works :) I've added the following CSS to the Bottled Text template HTML:

div.SourceCode {
    font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Monaco", monospace;
    font-size: 12px;
    width: 500px;
    overflow: auto;
    margin: auto;
    white-space: nowrap;
    padding: 4px;
    background-color: #ffffff;
    border: 1px solid #777788;
}
div.SourceCode .comment {
    font-style: italic;
    color: #888;
}
div.SourceCode .keyword {
    font-weight: bold;
}
div.SourceCode .string {
    color: #00F;
}
div.SourceCode .entity {
    text-decoration: underline;
}
div.SourceCode .storage {
    color: #888;
}
div.SourceCode .support {
    color: #0b0;
}
div.SourceCode .constant, div.SourceCode .variable {
    color: #F0F;
}

The "rawhtml" command script now looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
cat <<HTML
<div class="SourceCode">
<div style="white-space: pre; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space;">
HTML

perl -pe 's/<\/[^>]+>/<\/span>/g' \
| perl -pe 's/<([^\/.>]+)[^>]*>/<span class="$1">/g' \
| perl -pe 's/\t/&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;/g'

echo "</div></div>"

To get a realistic preview in MarsEdit, click the "Edit Template" button in the preview window and add a <style> section to the preview template for your blog. Paste in the CSS above and you're good to go.

2007/08/14

Sci Foo 2007 Gossip Liveblog (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

Engrossing summary: Sci Foo 2007 Gossip Liveblog (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought).

Dyson: Climate models are rubbish | The Register

Dyson: Climate models are rubbish | The Register:

"Dyson can expect another round of crucifixion with the predictable chorus that he's not a climate 'scientist'.
His contention, that the models aren't really science when they're programmed to produce the expected results, will no doubt be overlooked. ®"

I love the way Dyson writes. His article is full of thought-provoking observations and assertions, not all of them as directly concerned with global warming as you might expect. For example:

All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in fifty years.

2007/08/06

Death, taxes and beyond

I thought bureaucracy could follow you only as far as the grave. But then there's eastern religion:
China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate - Times Online

Via Ottmar Liebert

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