Passed on by Jeremy:
You answer the following 12 questions about yourself.
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you attend?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you?
12. Your Flickr name?
Type your answer to each of the above questions into Flickr's search. Using only the images that appear on the first page, choose your favorite and copy and paste each of the URLs into the Mosaic Maker (3 columns, 4 rows).
- Bill Gates and Jay Z, 2. Sweet & Sour Pork, 3. Brendan Benson at the Southgate House, 4. green & blue, 5. Halle Berry, 6. Pepsi Billboard on Hudson River (Manhattan), 7. Kalalau Lookout - Kauai, Hawaii, 8. Hersheys Chocolate Cake 2, 9. DataArt Software Outsourcing Developer (fun), 10. Wife, listen to me!, 11. Energetic, 12. Gamer
Arrrggghhh… I want an Android phone, or an iPod with Wi-Fi, or something where I can rate songs while I drive and then sync ratings at home. Jotting myself is definitely not the most efficient way…
Reminder, rate Brent Dennen Desert Sunrise at five stars. Reminder Ritz. I am in wine(?) sunset seems forgotten. I have five stars Reminder. Ray(?), Iron and wine each coming night at Tarsars(?). Computer reminder, rate tab pure essence this feeling at Five Stars. Computer reminder. Rate(?) Kuresons(?) standing in your shadow at fire(?) for surs(?). Reminder, Ray(?) Pereason(?) is walking data(?) five(?) size(?). Reminder, rate Ray Hare coming again at four starts. Reminder research the [broken audio], computer reminder rate the blues tones, the fountain head at five stars. Computer reminder. Re-quantic(?) lighter than the sky at four stars. Computer reminder, rate quantic sweet calling at 4 thirds. Grand(?) ____ nine(?) lazy nine grazing maze at four stars(?). [unclear speech, please listen] Computer reminder, rate(?) 9(?) laser(?) 9(?) coarser(?) at 4(?) size(?).Read more...
In praise of dogfooding...
Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.
–Paul Graham
Read more...$ fortune ruby
More often than I’d like, I have to open the Pickaxe to look up a core class or module that I can’t quite remember the methods on. I wanted to put some reminders in a place I could review them daily, yet was unobtrusive.
Enter the Phosphor screensaver for X-Windows; it scrolls text from a file or command by the screen. I pulled the classes and modules I wanted from the “ri” utility, made them into a “fortune cookie file” (run “man fortune” for details on fortune), and then piped fortune’s output through the screensaver.
I’ve attached the files I made. Unzip and drop them in /usr/share/games/fortune (or wherever fortune cookie files go on your system) and you’ll be able to type “fortune ruby” at a command prompt. Only core classes are included, but I’ll make a separate one for Rails on request. You can set up Phosphor (or other text-display screensavers like StarWars) from the xscreensaver control panel.
Edit: On systems using gnome-screensaver, save this in your screensaver config folder, probably as /usr/share/applications/screensavers/xscreensaver-phosphor-ruby.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Phosphor - Ruby ri
Comment=(Shortened in 2021 so Google doesn't kill my page rank)
TryExec=phosphor
Exec=phosphor -root -scale 2 -ticks 5 -program 'fortune ruby'
StartupNotify=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Screensaver;
…then select “Phosphor - Ruby ri” in your Screensaver Preferences. This should also scale back the text so you can see the whole ri screen.
Read more...$ fortune eric-raymond
Here’s a separate file with rules of the “Unix philosophy”, extracted from The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond. You can randomly select between these and the Ruby class descriptions with:
$ fortune eric-raymond rubyRead more...