I serve as tech support to my parents, Frank and Lyndol, and a handful of others. I was at Lyn's tonight to find out why he no longer had an Internet connection. I told him when I arrived, "This will take a minute or an hour." Either it was going to be something that I'd spot in a moment or I'd be fighting with it for a while.

I im­me­di­ate­ly noticed that the network hub was un­plugged—and dared to hope that it might be just that simple. It wasn't, of course: the hub had been unplugged during Lyn's own fruitless trou­bleshoot­ing. I quickly pinpointed that the DSL modem was not …continue.

I blogged before that I had used Exact Audio Copy to rip most of my CD collection to the lossless FLAC format. I haven't ripped any more CDs since then, as the old Windows laptop that I was using had severe problems.

We went to the Columbia City Beatwalk on Friday night. I liked the Correo Aereo duo so much that I bought their CD.

It was time to figure out how to rip a CD to FLAC on the Mac. I found some hints that it was possible to run Exact Audio Copy in a virtual machine or under Wine, but neither choice appealed to me.

One guide rec­om­mend­ed …continue.

In the late 90s when I worked on the classic Active Server Pages dev team, I tried to convince one of the Program Managers that we should make regular updates to browscap.ini, the file that described browser ca­pa­bil­i­ties. He wanted no part of it.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn via Hanselmin­utes that Microsoft has stepped up to its re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and is now shipping the Mobile Device Browser File on CodePlex. Over 400 mobile devices are defined, with 67 distinct ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

The Hanselmin­utes podcast is an in­ter­est­ing discussion of the Mobile Web and designing a different experience for mobile browsers. There's more to it than the small screen. You want to think …continue.

One app that I really want for my iPhone is iKeePass, an port of the KeePass password safe. I've mentioned it before. I'm up to about 400 entries now. It's completely in­dis­pens­able to me for keeping track of not just passwords, but identities, and which websites I've registered on.

Apple is holding up approval of iKeePass, apparently in­def­i­nite­ly. It seems to be some com­bi­na­tion of not wanting to approve strong encryption for export and hangups about open source. Or something. Whatever it is, it's damned annoying.

KeePassX works on Mac and Linux and means that I can move my password database back and forth to Windows without problem. Only my iPhone is without some form …continue.

New post to the Cozi Tech Blog: Iframes: thinking outside the box.

Using an iframe to host some content turned out to be a big pain, so I came up with a different approach.

About three weeks ago, I answered a question on Stack­Over­flow about generating the most readable color of text on a colored background.

I suggested flipping the top bit of each component, (r ^ 0x80, g ^ 0x80, b ^ 0x80). This has the same effect as adding 128 if the component is less than 128, and sub­tract­ing 128 otherwise.

Another way to think about it is to imagine the 256x256x256 color cube. Inside that cube, erect another cube half as wide. One corner is at your original color and the diagonally opposite corner is the one computed above.

The questioner liked my answer the best, but I decided to experiment further. I wrote …continue.

On a Stack­Over­flow question about favorite Vim plugins, I learned about Ack, a re­place­ment for grep that's smarter about searching source trees.

Ack is written in Perl. The built-in :vimgrep is rather slow. It seems to have some Vim-specific overhead, such as creating swap files and executing BufRead autocmds. Ack is noticeably faster, though somewhat slower than GNU grep.

Which would you rather type to search a tree, ignoring the .svn and .git subtrees?

$ ack -i -l foobar
$ grep --exclude='*.svn*' --exclude='*.git*' -i -l -r foobar .

The ack takes 6 seconds to search 4500 files, while the grep completes in 2. This does not count the time that I spent trying …continue.

I use or par­tic­i­pate in a handful of wikis hosted at PBwiki. A year ago, I wrote a PBwiki syntax high­light­ing plugin for Vim, modeled after the ones that I put together for the FlexWiki and SocialText wikis. Es­sen­tial­ly, paste the wikitext into Vim, get syntax high­light­ing, edit the text, then paste it back into the multiline textbox. I find the WYSIWYG editors annoying.

PBwiki is forcing all wikis to switch over to v2.0 by March 9th. The good news is that the upgrade is painless and reliable. They offer new features, such as an improved editor, better access control, and a new look.

The bad news is that for cranks like …continue.

So how do I go from the Project Gutenberg etext to LaTeX?

Here's the Gutenberg text for the pictured fragment:

(BLOOM'S WEATHER. A SUNBURST APPEARS IN THE NORTHWEST.)

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted emperor-
president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant
ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!

ALL: God save Leopold the First!

BLOOM: (IN DALMATIC AND PURPLE MANTLE, TO THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR,
WITH DIGNITY) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.

WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (IN PURPLE STOCK AND SHOVEL HAT) Will you
to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your 

I have a long-standing fas­ci­na­tion with typography. In the late '80s and early '90s, I became quite adept with TeX and LaTeX, the well-known scientific type­set­ting system. When I was at ICPC, I think I read the TeXbook cover to cov­er—twice. I became the TeX ad­min­is­tra­tor for the CS department while I was at Brown.

And then I moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft and entered the world of Windows, and I left TeX behind for more than 15 years.

I wrote the other day that I prepared the Bloomsday scripts in XML for several years, using XSLT to generate HTML. I used to send the HTML to the …continue.