Monthly Archive for August, 2007

Virgin America Takes Flight

Published
by
J.D.
on August 8, 2007
in Asides and Economics
. 0 Comments

Attention Delta, Southwest, Northwest, American, and Continental Airlines: You are doomed. Virgin America inaugural flight was today. Although they currently only handle a few destinations (NYC, San Francisco, LA, and Las Vegas and Washington DC later this year), they will expand. They have a huge advantage: the most amazing airplane ever invented. Seriously. Go look at that last link, look through all the features, and tell me that you aren’t shivering in fear.

Unless you make some major changes now–changes like expanding the amount of legroom in your planes to allow for a taller (and fatter) populace–Richard Branson is going to eat your lunch.

And no one will mourn your companies’ passing.

If you can’t remember it, did it really happen?

Published
by
J.D.
on August 8, 2007
in Asides
. 0 Comments

Along the same lines as my Twitter as Life Log post, Guy Kawasaki linked to someone who is keeping a one sentence journal. Both of these ideas are based on the same concept: remembering the past without spending too much time writing about it. If you write too much, you’ll never read it again anyways. In fact, I kind of like her idea even better than the Twitter log. Maybe I’ll do both.

Congratulations to the Sandbox Design Competition Winners

Published
by
J.D.
on August 8, 2007
in Personal: Projects
. 0 Comments

I mentioned earlier that I had entered a theme in the Sandbox Design Competition. The winners were announced last night.

The results did not go quite as I thought they would. I would have sworn that Diurnal was going to win the whole thing. The way that it changes appearance throughout the day is a bit of genius. And I’m really partial to the third runner up, Shades of Gray. But the winning themes were all beautiful and well-designed too; it would be hard to pick the best of the 46 excellent themes in the competition.

While I did not win anything, it still think it was worthwhile for me to enter the competition. I discovered e and SftpDrive, found a reasonably bulletproof rounded corners technique, and found a lot of neat bloggers and designers.

Also, I found the Sandbox theme, which I really like. It provides all the framework you’d ever need to hang your CSS on for a Wordpress theme. (It does need a wrapper class around the comments so I don’t have to resort to hackery to get rounded corners on my comments though.) I’m even tempted to put together another theme even without the incentive of a contest.

Anyways, if you like the theme and want to use it on your blog, you can download it and try it out. Like all the other themes in the Sandbox competition, it’s released under the GPL, which means that you can do pretty much whatever you want to with it. If you use this theme, I would love to know about it; please, drop a comment on the download page.

Constructive criticism is very much welcome. Tell me what you think of the theme!

Again, congrats to Arpit Jacob, designer of the winning Sandpress theme. Well done everybody!

Del.icio.us Explained

Published
by
J.D.
on August 7, 2007
in Asides
. 1 Comment

You’ve probably seen the del.icio.us referred to on the internet. This handy video explains what del.icio.us is and why it’s so awesome.

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Run Linux Commands On Your Text in E

Published
by
J.D.
on August 6, 2007
in Lifehacks
. 0 Comments

I just keep finding more and more to love about my new text editor, e. For example, I just discovered that you can run selections of text through any given Linux command (using Cygwin). Here’s an example, using one of the most powerful and basic commands from Linux, grep.

The grep command in linux works like this: You give grep a text file and a search term, and it outputs all of the lines of that text file which contain that term. So if you had list that looked like:

    !!!Dessert List:

    * Apple Pie
    * Cherry Pie
    * Chocolate Cake
    * Chocolate Ice Cream
    * Pecan Pie
    * Pumpkin Pie
    * Vanilla Ice Cream

and you ran grep "Pie" on that list, it would return with:

    * Apple Pie
    * Cherry Pie
    * Pecan Pie
    * Pumpkin Pie

This command can be really, really useful when dealing with large text files. And you can run it in e without having to go to the Cygwin command prompt. Here’s how easy it is:

  1. Make a selection of text
  2. Go to the Text menu and select “Filter Through Command”
    Filter Through Command
  3. Type the command grep "[search term]“ into the Command field and click Execute.
    Grep Command
  4. Enjoy the newly filtered results.
    Grep Results

And it works for a lot of linux commands. I just tried it with ls which lists all of the files in a directory, and it spat out a list of all everything in the Start menu. I’m very impressed.

Since almost everything in linux is a text file, Linux users have developed a lot of simple but powerful tools that let you manipulate text in all kinds of useful ways. And now, with e, there’s an easy way to use those tools in the Windows (without resorting to the command line).

Religious History Timeline

Published
by
J.D.
on August 6, 2007
in Asides, Culture and Religion
. 1 Comment

Someone went to the trouble of putting thousands of years of religious history on a timeline. It’s really cool; it goes from A.D. 1 through present day, covering the reign of Pontius Pilate and the ministry of Christ through the publishing of The Da Vinci Code and the discovery of the Gospel of Judas. Click on any event to get a little more detail. The top two bands are Jewish history, while the bottom two are Christian history. It’s really interesting to poke through.

Fantastic New Text Editor: E

Published
by
J.D.
on August 5, 2007
in Software Reviews
. 1 Comment

For quite some time I have envied Mac users because of a single program: TextMate. TextMate is known as The Best Text Editor in the World. It’s easy to use but also filled with useful features, like the project pane and an powerful plugin structure. (These plugins are called “Bundles.”) Until recently, there was nothing at all like it on the Windows platform.

Now there is.

E is essentially TextMate for windows. It has the project pane, and it even supports many of TextMate’s bundles. To give you an idea of the kinds of things these bundles can do, I’m writing this post inside e right now. When I’m done, I can hit the Post to Blog keyboard shortcut, and it will connect to my blog and publish this thing. (It might even convert the Markdown into HTML for me in one step; if it doesn’t, there’s another keyboard shortcut to do that.)

There are all kinds of bundles. Some provide easy keyboard shortcuts for many major programming languages, HTML, CSS, Textile, Markdown, and other formats. So, for example, if you’re editing a CSS file and you type “font” and hit tab, it will pop up a menu of seven different presets that you can choose.

CSS Font Menu

Other things bundles can do: Automatically validate your CSS/HTML, do math, compare two different text files, run python scripts in the Cygwin terminal, sort a list of items while removing the blank lines, or run a todo list. Frankly, this sort of plugin structure is what keeps me coming back to Firefox, and I expect it’s what will keep me using e for a long, long time.

The only caveat is that e is still in Beta. It’s rapidly being developed, with new versions coming out every few days, but it can be a touch buggy. Hopefully that will stabilize over time, but even with the bugs, I think it’s totally worth the $35 asking price. The price will go up once the product comes out of beta, so I’d go ahead and pick it up now.

Killer Robots

Published
by
J.D.
on August 4, 2007
in Politics: Terrorism & the Military
. 1 Comment

SWORDSMetafilter links to a story about the first armed robots in Iraq. They are referred to as “SWORDS,” or “Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System.” According to Thomas Killion, Chief Scientist of the U.S. Army, in an interview with CNET’s News.com, over the next few years, these robots will become more and more autonomous.

A lot of the systems today are tele-operated. That means a soldier has to spend all of his time essentially controlling a system, in terms of things like PackBot and so on. We want to get away from burdening soldiers in that way, and the work that we’re doing largely in support of the FCS program is demonstrating semiautonomous vehicles where they can do a lot of planning and execution on their own and they really only have to essentially call home to a soldier that’s controlling it when it needs additional guidance or is posed with a situation it doesn’t know what to do or it is at a point in the mission where it really needs further direction so it knows exactly what to do next.

I cannot begin to tell you how bad of an idea I think this is. We’re going to give robots guns and the autonomy to kill people.

Who’s responsible when one of these SWORDS kills some innocent Iraqi schoolchildren? What happens when one of our enemies figures out how to feed the SWORDS false instructions?

As a commenter in the Metafilter thread asks, Doesn’t anyone in the military ever consider unintended consequences?

Physics and Metaphysics

Published
by
J.D.
on August 4, 2007
in Asides, Just For Fun and Religion
. 0 Comments

Quote of the Day:

grosslack: Hell is a place of everlasting damnation and fire.
locokamil: Your belief system is thermodynamically unsound.

Recategorized

Published
by
J.D.
on August 2, 2007
in Asides and Site Announcements
. 0 Comments

I’ve gone through all of my blog posts on JDHarper.com and reorganized them into something resembling useful categories.

I am not going through the Blog Jones archives and doing the same. ::shudder::