On the other paw
Feb. 19th, 2004 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIt does seem to me that I've done a lot this week. I did get the requirements done as asked for by management after all, doing a blend of gimmed-up components with some scripts and some style sheets and then screen-shooting them into the mock-ups, with different colors and all. So I did my job.
I also pushed the envelope, asking them to think about doing things in shockwave, for example, or java, or something more dynamic. I demonstrated some multi-layer tasks that could be even more cool if I had the right tools. I also showed how I could auto-detect for lots of plug-ins, and why it's not a good idea to automatically include shockwave or java if it's detected (doesn't scale well with CSS, so it isn't ADA compatible). I also told them to contemplate remote calls with modern, object-oriented toolkits, so we could do configuration with native tools rather than HTML.
In the meantime, I wrote a wrapper for the Usenet Binary Harvester, a nifty tool for sucking audio and video out of usenet. It has two flaws: a cryptic command line, and a huge freakin' cache of articles one has seen but not yet downloaded. The wrapper provides the most common commands, automatically wraps 'and' commands, since I use the -I inclusion-only command a lot, meaning "I want only these files", and I sometimes screw up the syntax for "this and that", and compresses and decompresses the caches for individual newsgroups. The caches are very regular and compress really well. I saved something over 216MB, which is ten percent of my hard drive!
I also patched the bittorrent client. Some downloads take a long time and I was tired of trying to figure out what "113 hours" meant, so I hacked in a "if it's more than 24 hours, show it to me in days" line.
I wrote some 6500 words this week, and tomorrow is yet to come. I'm actually happy with this draft; the last two sucked like our president's nose at a line of cocaine. I've read two books: Robert Harris's Pompeii and H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror.
I got the laptop and my handheld talking again, so I downloaded Charlie Stross's A Colder War, hacked the HTML for very-long-line-length, then pushed it through txt2pdbdoc and transferred it to the handheld. Yay, I can read it now. I did the transfer on the bus while I watched the end of that Teen Titans ep I started watching this morning. And I fixed full-screen viewing on the laptop. Tres' cool.
I'm on page 44 of a 70-page textbook for improving one's handwriting, and I've started to notice that it's working. I've dedicated some 20 minutes a day, that's all, in the past two weeks to this project, and it really does make a difference. I even bought one of those $2 calligraphy pens, since the last 10 pages of the text are on calligraphy. I also bought this stunningly beautiful journaling notebook from Kyokuto papers; A-5 size, 5mm spacing, crisp and smooth. Like my Clairefontaine lab notebook, a true fetish item. (Now![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fallenpegasus has to convince me that pens are just as fetishy.)
And I've transferred the first eight cassette tapes of Pimsleur's Learning Japanese onto CD, and made it through the first three. That's a real breakthrough; I've had those tapes for forever, but since I didn't have a tape player in the car or anywhere else to practice dialogue aloud, they've languished on top of my filing cabinet forever. Now I just slap them into the CD player and go.
I gave Omaha a break yesterday by taking Kouryou-chan out to our favorite indoor park, and to a restaurant. Kouryou-chan's been eating like a horse the past three days, which makes up for the last week when she was sick and not hungry at all.
All in all, I can't really complain about how much I've gotten done.
I also pushed the envelope, asking them to think about doing things in shockwave, for example, or java, or something more dynamic. I demonstrated some multi-layer tasks that could be even more cool if I had the right tools. I also showed how I could auto-detect for lots of plug-ins, and why it's not a good idea to automatically include shockwave or java if it's detected (doesn't scale well with CSS, so it isn't ADA compatible). I also told them to contemplate remote calls with modern, object-oriented toolkits, so we could do configuration with native tools rather than HTML.
In the meantime, I wrote a wrapper for the Usenet Binary Harvester, a nifty tool for sucking audio and video out of usenet. It has two flaws: a cryptic command line, and a huge freakin' cache of articles one has seen but not yet downloaded. The wrapper provides the most common commands, automatically wraps 'and' commands, since I use the -I inclusion-only command a lot, meaning "I want only these files", and I sometimes screw up the syntax for "this and that", and compresses and decompresses the caches for individual newsgroups. The caches are very regular and compress really well. I saved something over 216MB, which is ten percent of my hard drive!
I also patched the bittorrent client. Some downloads take a long time and I was tired of trying to figure out what "113 hours" meant, so I hacked in a "if it's more than 24 hours, show it to me in days" line.
I wrote some 6500 words this week, and tomorrow is yet to come. I'm actually happy with this draft; the last two sucked like our president's nose at a line of cocaine. I've read two books: Robert Harris's Pompeii and H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror.
I got the laptop and my handheld talking again, so I downloaded Charlie Stross's A Colder War, hacked the HTML for very-long-line-length, then pushed it through txt2pdbdoc and transferred it to the handheld. Yay, I can read it now. I did the transfer on the bus while I watched the end of that Teen Titans ep I started watching this morning. And I fixed full-screen viewing on the laptop. Tres' cool.
I'm on page 44 of a 70-page textbook for improving one's handwriting, and I've started to notice that it's working. I've dedicated some 20 minutes a day, that's all, in the past two weeks to this project, and it really does make a difference. I even bought one of those $2 calligraphy pens, since the last 10 pages of the text are on calligraphy. I also bought this stunningly beautiful journaling notebook from Kyokuto papers; A-5 size, 5mm spacing, crisp and smooth. Like my Clairefontaine lab notebook, a true fetish item. (Now
fallenpegasus has to convince me that pens are just as fetishy.)And I've transferred the first eight cassette tapes of Pimsleur's Learning Japanese onto CD, and made it through the first three. That's a real breakthrough; I've had those tapes for forever, but since I didn't have a tape player in the car or anywhere else to practice dialogue aloud, they've languished on top of my filing cabinet forever. Now I just slap them into the CD player and go.
I gave Omaha a break yesterday by taking Kouryou-chan out to our favorite indoor park, and to a restaurant. Kouryou-chan's been eating like a horse the past three days, which makes up for the last week when she was sick and not hungry at all.
All in all, I can't really complain about how much I've gotten done.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 06:40 am (UTC)Brrrr...
Re:
Date: 2004-02-20 12:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-20 06:54 am (UTC)Pens...
Date: 2004-02-20 07:59 am (UTC)Of course pens are just as "fetishy". Take a look at the limited editions at http://www.fountainpenhospital.com/ and then take a look at some of their specials. I have something on the order of two dozen fountain pens - from a $10 Rotring Core, to a $125 Visconti Van Gogh (a gift from my wife for my son's birth). They all have their individual quirks and peculiarities. I even made a pen myself - I'll send a link to a pic when I get home... Besides - they complete my "professor's outfit" along with my coat and my pipe >:) (even if I am just an assistant prof)
Joshua Sasmor
sasmor@setonhill.edu
Pens...
Date: 2004-02-20 08:14 am (UTC)What's the name of the textbook?
Re: Pens...
Date: 2004-02-20 10:36 am (UTC)pens as fetish
Date: 2004-02-20 12:54 pm (UTC)