Boring Programming Stuff

By default OS X Terminal doesn’t have colored output enabled for ls. Some people love colors in ls (me), others hate them. I like them, but the default colors aren’t very useful. Directories are blue, meaning they blend in very well with a black terminal background. It’s even worse if you’re using a blue background (such as the default Aqua background) and a translucent terminal. OS X uses a different format for its LSCOLORS environment variable than Linux, so it’s hard to figure out how to change the default colors and googling doesn’t help much. I threw together a JavaScript LSCOLORS generator as an exercise. It probably works on most modern browsers (I’ve tested it in Safari and IE 7) but I make no guarantees. I included a preview of what the colors will look like in a terminal. The colors aren’t perfect, but it’s not bad for toying around. Also, a note about why I have a bold checkbox for background colors: bolding the background causes the color to be lighter (bold brown is yellow in most terminals). This is not reflected in the preview, mostly because I don’t know all the quirks about bold backgrounds.

If I’m particularly interested, I might add Linux LS_COLORS to this also. The options are much more complicated (colors for any file extension, blinking, underlining, and other formatting options) so it would probably take me longer.

Oh yeah, here’s a link to the thing.

Going to Deer Park and blowing things up has been a tradition for the past couple of years. Last year I built a sparkler bomb and set it off after the public fireworks show. The result was incredible. 1300 sparklers finished burning in less that two seconds, but what a two seconds it was. Since I was the one who lit the fuse and ran away, I got to feel the heat of the fire and watch the audience glow white and “Ooooooh” at the display. This year my friend Paul and I built three smaller ones (around 600 sparklers each) and managed to get some video. The first one was set in a piece of steel pipe to try and direct the flames upward. It worked fine but the pipe was way too hot to use after that. The other two were also fun, but the camera couldn’t autofocus well in the dark.
Pictures of preparation are here. I also made videos of the ignition:

Pipe sparkler
Regular sparkler

Both movies are H.264, so you’ll need a modern player to view them.

So I noticed the site Wikipedia Watch keeps public chat-logs of #wikipedia on Freenode, and I couldn’t help myself. I wrote a short perl script that scrambles my xchat logs so that it’s impossible to tell who said what or even when any person was in the channel or not. The time-stamps are still consistent, but everything else is changed. Usernames and content are pseudo-randomly mixed up. Even join/part messages are in the wrong places, making for a completely useless log (at least for the person reading it). Still, a cursory glance of the logs doesn’t raise any red flags. It almost looks like there are 5-10 conversations going on at once and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. So I scrambled a copy of my logs since January and sent them over to Wikipedia Watch, since they don’t have anything from before April. The guy I emailed didn’t take the bait. He found out by monitoring #wikipedia, where I mentioned my plan. He also threw me on his hate list, which is basically as much information he can find by googling someone’s screenname along with some made-up stuff. He even took the copyrighted image from my user page on Wikipedia.

My script probably has quite a few bugs in it, since I only coded it for my own Xchat logs. I haven’t commented the code (or even properly indented it), so don’t email me if you have questions. By next week I’ll probably stumble on this thing and wonder, “What idiot wrote this?” before realizing it’s my own code. Anyway, download it here.

I got tired of wget obeying robots.txt, so I got rid of a lines of code in the source and recompiled. It took me all of 5 minutes, and most of that was waiting for evil wget to compile. So to save others 5 minutes I’ve thrown the new source and binaries up.

My mother always liked the show Deal or No Deal, and I noticed it’s airing again this week. I don’t have a problem with the actual game show program, just NBC’s implementation. First, the show is incredibly drawn out. Also, the show relies on suspense to keep viewers watching through the commercials. The optimal strategy in the game is easy to memorize, just take the average of the monetary values left and take the deal if it is higher. Still, most of the contestants become incredibly emotional and cave in far too easily. Finally, the contestants have friends and relatives show up to help them decide deal or no deal. These people serve no purpose, and at best participate by relaying the deal reward to the contestant. It’s contrived and completely pointless. Artificially prolonging suspense doesn’t make for an interesting show, it just frustrates viewers. There chip, I updated my blog.

Well, this is my new website. I don’t have much here right now, as it’s mostly for myself and a few friends. Anything listed as older stuff will use whatever poorly written HTML from back when I made the page.