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Benjamin C. Wiley Sittler
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| is this thing on? |
[Aug. 10th, 2009|08:22 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sleepy | ] |
an apology: i pretty much stopped reading and posting to lj back when i started work on my new job (or maybe the job before that? or even the one before that?), and i still don't read nearly enough. anyhow, i will attempt to follow updates but at this point i probably won't be able to assimilate the backlog.
fortunately ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rebbyribs keeps the new baby twin pics coming :) (thanks!) |
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| translations, please! |
[Jul. 23rd, 2009|08:31 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | iris | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  happy | ] |
iris: “ploot!” “i just plooted.” “you did a ploot!”
(ploot is an onomatopoeic word for passing gas; this was superseded by ’scuse, as “in i just ’scused!”, and more recently by fart)
iris: “soof! hahahaha!” “i did a soof on the couch.”
(soof is an onomatopoeic word for jumping onto something or someone)
iris: “would you like some linten?“ ”have some linten, ok?” “yum! that was good linten!”
(linten is an imaginary delicacy)
iris: “’s ok! ’s ok! ’s ok!”
(said while she’s doing something she suspects we don’t like, or when someone is unhappy with something she’s done)
iris: “can you bounce me up and down with my ribs?”
(she’s asking to be tossed up in the air and caught. “ribs” is where she’d like you to hold her just before she’s airborne, and how she’d like to be caught afterward. in practice, catching an inch or two of air is completely sufficient for her and causes gleeful laughter.)
iris: “what did i say? what did i say?”
(why she says this is unclear, but it might just be an attempt to start a conversation.)
iris: “i ’n know” (sounds a lot like “i know”)
(means ”i don’t know” and is a generic response to all sorts of questions, including many to which she does know the answer. getting a real answer often requires deviously asking whether the answer is something ridiculous so that she will disagree and include the right answer in her disagreeing statement.)
also, she and Z (jilflirt’s son) played really well together for the first time yesterday, and it was lovely to see. |
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| single-track gray codes with evenly spaced heads |
[Jan. 3rd, 2009|10:52 am] |
Gray codes (so-called, despite having been used by Émile Baudot in the original Baudot code and its evolution, the International Telegraph Alphabet No. 1, many decades prior to Gray's patent) are good for many encoding applications because any two adjacent positions differ by exactly one bit, and the encoder wheels are trivial to construct by binary reflection. However, you can do better — by using a specially chosen sensor arrangement one can use a single encoder wheel which is sensed simultaneously at several points and decodes to a Gray code. The particular case where all the heads are evenly radially spaced is is called a single-track Gray code with evenly spaced heads — see Moshe Schwartz and Tuvi Etzion's The Structure of Single-Track Gray Codes for a good discussion and definition of this term.
Anyhow, I became curious about these codes yesterday, and wrote and refined a Python program to find them. ( Here are some of the codes I found )
(Yes, I have written about Gray codes previously.)
edit: updated the program with a further heuristic and added results for 36 and 48 positions; also, the Gray code page at quirkfactory includes a 7-head, 126-position single-track Gray code.
edit: updated with an even better heuristic; results can now be computed even for 126-position single-track Gray codes in reasonable time. |
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| iris speaks |
[Dec. 21st, 2008|06:24 pm] |
rebbyribs to iris: “Are you feeling sleepy?”
iris: “A little bit sleepy, actually.”
i thought this was very cute. clearly my brain has turned to goo! |
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| unidecode_php-0.3.tar.gz |
[Dec. 18th, 2008|11:39 pm] |
I recently wrote a conversion script and PHP wrapper so that the data from the Perl "last-chance transliterator" Text::Unidecode by Sean M. Burke can be used from PHP: unidecode_php-0.3.tar.gz. To use this you'll need to install the Perl Text::Unidecode module and then run the udec2bin.pl script inside the unidecode_php package.
Example PHP usage: <?php
require("unidecode.php");
print htmlspecialchars(unidecode("中文", "utf-8"));
?> produces Zhong Wen
This allows very basic conversion of lots of Unicode to plain ASCII. It works pretty well for some scripts and languages, is somewhat usable for several more, and fails utterly in some. Here are some examples excerpted from the Emacs-MULE HELLO file, along with their ASCII transliterations:
( (long) )
update: version 0.2 adds a couple examples.
update: version 0.3 is better at finding the datafiles when included from another directory. |
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| Yay!, Bee, See. |
[Nov. 22nd, 2008|09:52 pm] |
I wrote some software using DHTML (JavaScript, HTML and CSS.) It's to help learn letters and numbers, and is intended to be used with adult supervision and involvement.
The software is very, very, very simple — it just echoes typed letters and numbers in a large, colorful font and shows a somewhat-relevant background image for each one. ( Read more... ) |
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| steps! |
[Jan. 12th, 2008|02:51 pm] |
iris walks! she was moving sideways across the floor on two feet while not holding anything. rebbyribs and i squeed, at which point iris sat down and gave us a very puzzled look. |
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| iris, and darwin tweaks |
[Jan. 12th, 2008|11:43 am] |
i think iris might be starting to talk. the words are few, and the pronunciation odd enough that i'm never really sure, but i think i've been hearing "fish", "kitty", "guido" (one of the cats), and "no" used in more-or-less appropriate situations. rebbyribs is a bit more skeptical, but i'm sure iris will talk clearly and distinctly soon enough.
note: what follows is a discussion of scripts that modify your mac os x kernel. this is potentially very risky, as the kernel is what allows everything else to run. although i have made every attempt to ensure they are safe (and believe they are), i can't guarantee it or be held liable if things go wrong. in particular:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR ANY OTHER CONTRIBUTOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
also, this morning's project was to get the mac os x/darwin console vt100 alternate character set support to work and (closely related) to customize the mac os x/darwin console color palette. the end result is a pair of shell scripts that seem to work, and a lot of scratching my head — why didn't they
ⓐ ship with the VT100 positions filled in their font, or
ⓑ provide a simpler interface for switching the font and color palette at runtime (using, say, escape sequences or a sysctl.) oh and
ⓒ why does their console strip the eighth bit off of all output (despite the font [based on a design by zestyping] supporting the first 256 unicode/ucs code points), and finally
ⓓ why don't the function keys work?
update: it's probably worth explaining a bit more here: ( background information on the mac os x/darwin console hacks )
update: it looks like joey hagedorn made a truetype version of the darwin console font! |
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| firefox extensions i'm using |
[May. 1st, 2007|05:36 pm] |
i often feel chained to the firefox web browser due to reliance on some of the great add-on software available for it. this falls into three broad categories: ( enhanced browsing add-ons, development tools and security- and privacy-related add-ons. ) i also like the macfox theme, even on mac os x where it is not yet supported (some buttons do look wrong there.)
update: i use the Combine Stop/Reload buttons userstyle. i keep the platypus and web developer toolbars hidden during normal browsing, and i switch the web developer toolbar to show icons only, and move all its icons to the bookmarks toolbar. i also disable search suggestions, set all pages to open in tabs, and set the tab bar to always be shown.
update 2: macfox looks best with a rounded urlbar, in my opinion
update 3: on windows i also install ie tab so that microsoft's update service can be used from the comfort of firefox. i also disable or uninstall the various google-provided add-ons because they all seem to make firefox crash or misbehave. google toolbar and google browser sync misbehave by storing browsing details on google's central servers, and google photos screensaver breaks the firefox user interface (symptom: red caret of death.)
update 4: the camino theme for firefox looks nice on all platforms. on windows i also recommend IsAdmin to visually remind you when you are running the browser with administrative privileges (usually a bad thing, except when installing system updates.) this works well in conjunction with a tool like suDown which makes it easy to use administrative privileges only when they are needed.
update 5: the Text Shadow extension adds another missing part from css2, the Session Manager has some nice extras like encrypting your stored session, the Text size toolbar is handy for quickly zooming text, and the Link Widgets make it easy to navigate well-structured sites (of which there are surprisingly many.)
update 6: these days i disable the Firebug extension except while activily debugging, since it exposes some serious flaws in Firefox that lead to crashes on GMail and other sites. i've also been playing with betas of firefox 3 recently, and so in that version i switched from Adblock to Adblock Plus (with the huge ugly toolbar button disabled,) from Text size toolbar to Zoom toolbar, from CookieSafe to CS Lite, from MR Tech Local Install to MR Tech Toolkit, and (where available) use the new theme Proto for Mac OS X
update 7: oh, and anyone using Firefox 2 on a Mac should check out the Pinstripe theme too. it is beautiful.
update 8: It's All Text! makes it easy to use an external editor for text input fields. this is great for composing those long blog posts and webmail messages, and for reading the reams of fine print in some license agreement disasters.
update 9: Flagfox shows you where a page is coming from using a built-in geolocation database. it's not perfect and doesn't seem to cover ipv6 at all, but it does work for many sites.
update 10: the MacOSX theme and older versions of CamiFox work well in firefox 3 on all platforms
update 11: i also recommend DownThemAll! for improved downloading.
update 12: if you use mac os x i also recommend Aronnax’s GrApple themes for Firefox 3, especially Yummy (blue) and Yummy (graphite), and for Firefox 2, especially Eos Pro; i also recommend FireGPG which allows use of GnuPG/PGP encryption with webmail systems (including Gmail)
update 13: i also recommend the PDF Plugin for Mac OS X for Firefox 3, and the ACE Safari Foxdie (blue and graphite) themes for Firefox 2
update 14: Ctrl-Tab makes many tabs really usable, and Taboo remembers them; Secure Login makes it a bit harder to accidentally send your credentials in the wrong form; Update Notifier tells you when add-ons have been updated
update 15: OPML support is nice for migrating bookmarks from one browser to another; Forecastfox is nice for checking the weather at a glance.
update 16: HTML Ruby works where XHTML Ruby Support does not; users of Firefox 2 on Mac OS X (are there any still?) might like Growl Notifications
update 17: in Firefox 3 i recommend a recent beta of Ubiquity for a more keyboard-friendly user interface; if you're trying to learn or read Japanese: Perapera-kun (additional dictionaries); for Mandarin Chinese: Chinese Perapera-kun; for Cantonese: experimental CantoFish
update 18: if you ever use Tor, i recommend Torbutton
update 19: i also recommend the secure wiki userscript for redirecting/rewriting to use an SSL-encrypted connection to wikimedia.org for wikipedia, wiktionary, etc.
update 20: for full-screen/small-screen use i recommend the Full Screen Status Bar extension, the Miint theme, and the Tiny Menu extension. It would also be nice to have more control over the bizarre auto-doubling of UI elements on high-DPI displays (192 dpi and above means images suddenly double in each dimension here on Ubuntu,) but I have yet to find a good resolution-independent browser set-up.
update 21: GrApple Yummy Graphite is gone, but GrApple Luscious is pretty nice on a Mac. There's also an updated Foxdie theme with a built-in sub-theme switcher.
update 22: the official version of Locationbar² now seems to include zestyping's fixes, so i recommend it.
(perhaps it's time for a new post, eh?) |
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| γ and ν |
[Dec. 24th, 2006|11:04 am] |
thanks to fontforge and potrace, two fonts i drew many years ago are now available in vector form. the fonts are licensed under the gpl and i retain the copyright.
Update: They are now dual-licensed under ofl and gpl (with an embedding exclusion: embedding these fonts in a document does not force that document to be gpl'ed)
 - Gamma is a fixed-width small-caps font seen previously in beta versions of VS Bomber (ttf · svg · sfd)
 - GammaVariable is a variable-width version of Gamma (ttf · svg · sfd)
 - NuFraktur is a fixed-width Fraktur-style font i've mentioned previously. (ttf · svg · sfd)
 - NuFrakturVariable is a variable-width version of NuFraktur (ttf · svg · sfd)
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| Iris |
[Nov. 29th, 2006|09:19 am] |
Iris was born yesterday around 7:30pm. She's a healthy baby girl — a medium sized (8lb7oz and 21in or so at birth) brunette — and loves to eat and sleep. rebbyribs and Iris are both doing well, and resting a lot. We hope to go home in a day or so! rebbyribs went into labor yesterday morning on her own and labored all the way to delivery (about 17 hours) without episiotomy or any sort of anaesthetic. She's happy now but quite tired, and I'm sure you'll see her less abbreviated version eventually… ;-)
We're at Alta Bates in Berkeley, room 4300. |
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| fun with python's ctypes and unicodedata |
[Aug. 20th, 2006|11:37 pm] |
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ucnhash is a python wrapper i wrote for the unicode names database in the python distribution. why write such a thing? well, unicodedata.name(x) only works for x <= u'\uffff' on narrow python builds (mac os x and win32 are built this way by default.) ucnhash.getname(x) works for all named characters in the database, and the corresponding ucnhash.getcode(x) can be used to write your own version of the \N{...} decoder in the 'unicode-escape' codec. both work equally well on narrow and wide python builds using the ctypes module to call into the ucnhash_CAPI exported by the unicodedata module. |
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| ♀ |
[Jul. 27th, 2006|05:21 pm] |
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rebbyribs and i just got back from her mid-pregnancy ultrasound, and it looks like we're expecting a baby girl in early december. squeeeee! |
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| play |
[Jul. 10th, 2006|09:33 pm] |
after reading the wikipedia entry for gw-basic this weekend i was reminded of the play statement, which supports a mini-language for non-chording music. i remembered that a had a couple old tunes lying around that smws and i put together many years ago (he read the sheet music and played them on a trumpet, i encoded the notes he spoke and tweaked them for play.) this weekend i wrote a python play decoder that outputs either canonicalized play codes or cd-style audio which can be converted to a wave file using sox like so (this is the short example from the wikipedia page):
./play.py -e "edcdeee2dfedc4" | sox -t raw -w -s -c 2 -r 44100 - -t wav short.wav
here are the tunes:
- short
edcdeee2dfedc4 - cowboy
mb
ml
o3
t150
e8 g4 e8 g4 a4 e4 c2. p64 e8 g4 e8 g4 a4 d1 p64 e8 g4 e8 g4 a4 g4 f2 p64
c8 d8 e4 e4 p4 d4 c2. p4 e8 g4 e8 g4 a4 e4 c2. e8 d4 e8 g4 a4 d1 e8 g4 e8
d4 a4 g4 f2 c8 d8 e4 e4 p4 d4 c2. p4 - start
mb
mn
o4
t165
p8 c4. o3 g4 p4 f4. b2 f8 e8 c8 p4 g8 a8 g8 a8 o4 c3 c3 c3 p4
e8 f8 e8 f8 b3 b3 b3 b8 a8 a8 d4 e4. d4 c4 c4 c4
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