MaisonBisson

Flickr Video Flickr Video

I should have done screencasts like the above long ago. It’s not that they’re great, but they are a wonderful excuse to use the canned lounge music I’ve got. Those videos are now on the front page of the official Scriblio site, and I did five more to demo the installation and configuration. Big thanks go to Collingswood NJ Public Library Director Brett Bonfield who let me use his library like this.

You’d think the top search results on the matter would be newer than 1999, but that’s where you’ll find this NYT article and PubLaw item story, both from precambrian times. Worse, both of those articles suggest that my links to them may not be entirely kosher.

The problem is probably that US courts have not spoken clearly on such a case. A Danish court in 2006 did, but I think that no case in the US has gone far enough to actually set a precedent. Another chance at settling this issue was lost earlier this month when BlockShopper settled, rather than continue a costly defense of such a case. The EFF is confident BlockShopper could have won, but that means little when the legal bills come in.

Related at EFF: Kelly v. Arriba Soft and Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.

Anybody who claims magenta isn’t a color is stupid, lying, or link-baiting. Take it from a color-blind person: all colors are a matter of perception, and claiming Magenta isn’t a color because it doesn’t fit neatly in the linear spectrum of visible electromagnetic radiation is like saying this isn’t music because the vibrations that tickle our ear aren’t the result of a monotone sinusoidal wave.

We have no equivalent of polyphony for light, but just as it took a whole orchestra to make Jaws scary, the colors we perceive are most commonly a mixture of different frequencies of light. Magenta is simply what we see when when we see light from both ends of the spectrum at once.

Here’s a better question: where is brown in the rainbow?

I love BBEdit on my Mac, but I was left scratching my head again today when I was trying to remember how to make its regex engine match a pattern across multiple lines. My hope was to extract a list of initial articles from a page that had HTML like this:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">
      am
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scottish Gaelic
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

<table>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">
      an
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      English,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Irish,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scots,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scottish Gaelic,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Yiddish
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

<table>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">
      an t-
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Irish,
    </td>
    <td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">
      Scottish Gaelic
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Indeed, it has well over 100 tables like that, and I was looking for the contents of the first TD in each. The following regex does it:

(?s)[^<]*<table>[^<]*<tr>[^<]*<td[^>]*>([^<]*)</td>.*?</table>

The most significant part of this is the (?s) at the beginning that tells BBEdit to match the pattern across line breaks. A more ninja-like regex assassin would probably be able to do it better, but this worked.

Sure, Matt says it’s Thank a Plugin Developer Day, but let’s hear it for the developers who just tagged WordPress MU 2.7! Not long ago there were still 300 files to merge, now it’s done and ready for the next version.

“What happens when a group that commands respect meets an audience that doesn’t give it readily?”

Pete Cashmore on The Vatican Launching YouTube Channel.

# mysqlcheck -p -A --auto-repair --optimize
wp_1_options
info     : Found block with too small length at 17732; Skipped
info     : Wrong block with wrong total length starting at 17776
info     : Found block with too small length at 28776; Skipped
warning  : Number of rows changed from 444 to 441
status   : OK

Cleaning up the mess after a hardware failure can suck. This mysqlcheck output is from the wp_options table for this blog. Unfortunately, if the options table is unreadable, all of WordPress panics and fails to load.

I was using the dirty laundry metaphor in a previous post and wanted to extend it a bit by saying something like:

For the generation of children who’s parents have already posted their silliest and most embarrassing baby pictures to Facebook and elsewhere, being caught in your underwear is both expected and forgivable. Being evil, on the other hand…

Except I couldn’t find a link to support my claim. They’re out there, I’m sure, but I had to slog through stuff like this:

• Underwear-Throwing Woman Arrested Near Facebook Offices | Epicenter from Wired.com
• Facebook | Causes | Foundation for the protection of Swedish underwear models
• The Great Fitness Experiment: What Not To Wear: Gym Edition
• WikiAnswers – Why do People wear underwear on their head
• stop wearing underwear
• wear a skirt without underwear
• Going commando – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia