Roadrunner Twice

I've been dicking around with all kinds of computer shit lately! It is way exciting, you don't even know. Well, you're about to know, I mean. You know.

Item one! I'm learning Perl! High time, I know, especially considering my living situation. Basically, I have a hard time learning a large system without a project, so my tactic was to let an (if we're being honest here) totally trivial and absurd potential project take up enough of my mental space that I would basically be forced to learn it. I am getting very close to wanting to share the result, because it basically works now, but it's got a silly dependency chain, it's hella slow, and there are one or two known bugs. I'm pretty sure I can fix all of these! So you'll see it eventually, and it'll make your life better, because it's the shit. Even if it is trivial and absurd.

Item two! If you have an iPad, stop what you're doing and immediately download Simplenote. After it's all set up and you've made an account, download Notational Velocity (assuming you use a Mac), set it up to sync with Simplenote, and change the storage schema to plain text files. The effect is AMAZING; basically, it's a single pile of notes that's always effortlessly in sync on all relevant devices.

It's basically obvious what to do from there, but I did have one trick I wanted to share, which is that if you want a shortcut to open a note in a different text editor from its representation in NV, you can highlight the note title with cmd-L, grab the text with a OS X Service, and use Applescript to turn that into a real file path and open it. Like this, more or less:

on process(inputText)
    set notefilename to ((path to application support folder from user domain) ¬
as string) & "Notational Data:" & inputText & ".txt"
    tell application "BBEdit"
        open notefilename
        activate
    end tell
end process

To be used with ThisService, natch. I think there'll be a more elegant way to do this in the next version of NV, but this works.

Y'all seen this Google Font API shit? Crazy awesome, right? Anyway, I definitely can't get it to work with Dreamwidth. Anyone have any hints?

(I mean, I didn't expect putting the @import statements in the custom CSS box to work, because @imports have to happen before everything else, and I didn't figure the box would get pride of place like that. But linking to an outside sheet containing the imports didn't work either.

Surfing through the links in the source, it looks like linked stylesheets for DW get piped through cssproxy.dreamwidth.org. This is wise! It also completely defeats me here because it strips out @imports as "suspect CSS," which means I can't take advantage of Google's secret useragent-sniffing sauce. I guess I could skip the elegant API solution and re-implement the entire range of cross-browser hacktacularity from scratch! NOT.

Alternately, I could just handle Webkit and the bleeding edge of Gecko. *shrug.* Anyway, like I said, any thoughts?

Oh, also. I motored to Limbo the other day just for the hell of it, and also for the fruit and coffee beans of it, and lord did it remind me how much I miss being in trivial range of that place.

Limbo, in case you don't know, is a small grocer in deepish Southeast (a short pedal from my old house, in fact) with the most ingenious business plan ever. To wit: "Hey, let's set up literally next door to a Trader Joe's—or no, actually, fuckit, let's set up in the same building as a Trader Joe's—and only traffic in stuff that Trader Joe's sucks at." Brilliant.

("Stuff that Trader Joe's sucks at" largely entails fresh fruits and veggies, bulk herbs and spices, and some locally-made stuff like miso and salsa and roasted coffee beans.)

The genius is twofold. Firstly, that sort of remora-ism nets you a steady flow of people in food-buying mode, an inevitable percentage of whom are gonna eventually get sick of TJ's overpriced saran-wrapped decorative wax veggies and stick their heads in. And secondly, you don't have to waste any resources doing anything you can't excel at. If you can't shelve flour and beans and snack food as well as or better than the Joneses, and if even doing so at the minimally-acceptable level would hurt your ability to do the shit you actually care about? Well, then fuck it! You don't even have to play; just tell people to walk thirty feet thataway once they've got their fruit and turmeric squared away.

And you can't argue with the results, 'cause shit's cheap as hell there and is almost universally delicious. (I heard something once about how the owners do tricky shit with the wholesale produce market in town, such that they can just swoop in and grab small lots of really good stuff for way cheaper than it should be on account of there's not enough of it left for the big guys to touch, or they'll grab a crate of good but slightly wilty broccoli for pennies and sawdust and anyone who rolls in in time can make seventy-five cent stirfry that night.) I'm usually a farmer's market guy, but Limbo is pretty much the next best thing.

And that's my post about the Apple iPad. (No, sorry, just kidding.)

When I tried Chrome on Mac for the first time, it failed hard when I tried to read my Dreamwidth subscriptions, and since messing with that is just an absolute no-go, I gave up. BSing with Kip tonight got me antsy, though, and I started trying to figure out what was up. I think I finally tracked down the straight dope, albeit in a confused and forum-y form: It looks as though using any sort of professional font manager basically makes Chrome go apeshit. (Sometimes.)

I use (a slightly older version of) Linotype's FontExplorer X; not so much because I'm some big-shot graphic whossit, but because it's actually less confusing than Apple's Font Book for most things. FEX stores added fonts in its own Application Support folder and redirects font requests there in a way I don't entirely understand, and apparently Chrome doesn't understand it either, because whenever it's asked to use a font that exists but isn't stored in /Library/Fonts or ~/Library/Fonts, it'll go all AAAAAAAAA on you. Conversely, if you don't ever visit pages that ask for fonts under external management (or your manager just stores its shit in one of the usual font locations), I think it never complains. Just sucks for me that I went with Candara for my reading page.

Apparently this has to do with the way Chrome sandboxes itself to kingdom come, because messages like this get spat to the console:

1/10/10 Jan 10, 9:39PM sandboxd[27057] Google Chrome He(27058) deny file-read-data /Users/nick/Library/Application Support/FontExplorer X/Font Library/C/Candara/Candara.ttf

Now, I think Chrome's aggressive approach to sandboxing and self-distrust is actually fucking badass, and it's one of the things that's most exciting about the program; between that and separate processes for every tab, they leapfrogged over every existing browser in terms of dealing with the modern web, and everyone else is struggling to catch up. But they've got to fix this shit fast, because barfing mojibake whenever it's used on a machine owned by a graphic designer is maybe not the best way to gain whuffie. (And even though I don't technically need FEX, I'm certainly not going to learn how to use stupid Font Book just to try out a new web browser.)

Man, I have been trying to love Scrivener, and just have not found the trick yet. I like the idea of it, I think. I mean, an IDE for prose! Down with file management! What a great idea! But I've been using the extended NaNoWriMo trial edition, and its theoretical charms continue to outweigh its day-to-day appeal.

For one thing, it's WYSIWYG, which I've been kind of down on ever since I discovered HTML; doing formatting inline tends to bite me on the ass later. (Which is to say, I understand why people used to get all het up about WordPerfect's "reveal codes" thingummy and everyone else's lack thereof.) The export functionality is pretty impressive, but still requires a bunch of cleanup before it's ready to hit the web. Also, it seems like there're too many fidgety places to enter text? Which of these am I supposed to treat like I'll ever read them again, and which are write-only?

Well, anyway: I actually really like the texture on the corkboard. And how easy it is to split and re-arrange files. (Like Fission for prose!) And the way it'll do what can only be called a "build." And that it has some metadata about each snippet. (Not sure whether it needs THAT much, but.) Basically, I think I like the idea of editing with it, but that part isn't quite where I want it to be yet, and I can't stand composing in it.

If anyone here uses it, I'd love to hear what you dig about it.

Micro-brews.

Okay, so generally, historically, a micro-brew is anything smaller than a mega-brew, right?

With the recognition that mega-brew is itself not a particularly real category and generally isn't even thought of as such, being more often referred to as either simply "brew," "corporate bullcrap," "whatever's cheap," or "that pale American piss," depending on audience, I think we can all agree that we know mega-brew when we see it. (It being, like, Bud, Coors, Miller, Busch, PBR, Hamms, and pretty much anything that tastes like them.) But of course that runs into problems right away: Consider Guinness, which I'm pretty sure is available in the entire English-speaking world. Mega? Maybe more like kilo-brew? (The metric jokes are only getting worse, btw, so I recommend bailing now.)

Okay, so you've got mega-brew(American-type) and mega-brew(International-type). Fine. What spawned this post is the set of discrete categories between mega and micro. What are they?

I figure it's time for an RFC:

• Homebrew. Yup.
• Nano-brew. Single-brewpub stuff.
• Micro-brew. Extremely local. Here, I'm thinking of things like Surly, Bridgeport, Flat Earth, Dick's, Dogfish Head, and Fish Tail. There's a decent chance I cannot name any you would recognize, because that's kind of the point.
• Local swill. Stuff that's totally unavailable outside its territory, but which isn't really produced with what might be called an artisan's touch. I'm thinking particularly of Henry Weinhard's, Leinenkugel's, and maybe Summit on a bad day. Generally a cut above mega-brew.
• Milli-brew. Sounds too much like "Miller," so let's just skip it.
• Centi-brew. Produced on a relatively small scale, but quite widely available, even on tap. New Belgium, Deschutes, Sierra Nevada,* and all those smaller international oddities like Chimay and Staropramen.
• Brew. Demilitarized zone; contains no actual brew.
• Hecto-brew. Post-micro-boom "artisanal" subsidiaries of major brewing concerns, as well as certain less-popular international items such as Murphy's and Beamish (both part of the Heineken empire, which is itself of the International flavor of mega-brew) and Smithwick's (part of Guinness).
• Kilo-brew. Reserved for future use.
• Mega-brew. Comes in both American and International types. Available damned near everywhere. American type is your basic watery lager. International type varies a bit more, but still contains a fair number of watery lagers (Heineken, Carlson, Kirin, Ichiban, Tiger, Singha, Harp, etc.). The main requirement is that it's pretty much goddamn everywhere.

_____
* Funny story about the size of the American beer world. You know how Sierra Nevada used to have twist-off tops, but they were really bitchily hard to open, and then they switched to pry-offs? One day, Summit's twist-off caps suddenly became really hard to open. Like, across the board, without exception.

Turned out that Sierra Nevada had bought a new bottling line, and immediately sold their old one to Summit.

I'm testing out one of those new Mac builds of Chromium (via), and it is actually kind of awesome! Feels sleek.

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Lately I haven't been posting as often as I otherwise might have, because it turns out that I'm actually kind of reliant on having a native-app LJ client. And they all suck right now.

Xjournal used to be awesome, but it doesn't work with Dreamwidth and is stagnant these days anyway. iJournal always kinda sucked, and now it hasn't been touched for three years. MarsEdit technically works, but its DW and LJ support is... lacking. asLJ is too new to trust, Deepest Sender kind of defeats the purpose of using a client in the first place, and nothing supports the DW crossposter. So I have to post via a web form, which shouldn't slow me down as much as it does, but it does, so.

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I AM MOVING HOUSE. Gonna go live with Schwern in inner Northeast! It'll be rad. I have not even started packing yet. Expect me to become increasingly bugfuck insane until the 6th or so.

The place I'm moving into is a 2nd-floor apartment in a brick building that kind of reminds me of my digs in Minneapolis. Not anything close to identical, but familiar enough to immediately feel like home.

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That is a rather large spider in the bathroom, isn't it? I have granted her Not My Problem status, on the condition that she gets off the counter within the next half hour.

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Writing continues to be difficult. DON' WANNA TALK 'BOUT IT.

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It's one of those nights where The Replacements are once again everything I could ever want from pop music.

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So yeah, this is my new job. I likes it lots. Folks is cool. Things:

• The yarn world is far larger and stranger than I imagined.
• Indigo is awesome. No, seriously, it's the weirdest shit. Reacts on oxygen contact! Changes color as you watch!
• We get free coffee. My caffeine tolerance has shot through the roof.
• The shop runs on this app called POS·IM, which apparently has a 20-year lineage and is One Hairy-Ass Beast. It's got a majorly schizoid personality. On the one hand, it's been polished for 20 years to suit the needs of small-to-midsize retail outfits, and in general, the developers have thought of everything you will need to do with the thing. On the other hand, the interface seems to be held together with baling wire and fun-tak, the search capabilities are about the least sophisticated I've ever seen, and none of the features seem able to decide whether they're made for database-savvy power users or the technically-disinclined. The manual is written in at least two, probably more like three different voices, which switch off without discernible pattern and use distinctly different sets of vocabulary. It perversely re-invents every available wheel. It makes it frustratingly fidgety and tedious to make any large-scale changes to the inventory, and frighteningly easy to wreck vast havoc.
  • I am absolutely confident in my ability to bend it to my will. JUST YOU WAIT.
• No, I don't know how to knit yet. Gimme another week or two.

Might as well share this. You know how sometimes you have a good song in a crappy file for a long time and it ends up in a bunch of your playlists? And then you finally get a good version of the file and it's a huge pain in the ass to get it in all the right places? I fixed that for you.

iTunes Body-Snatcher
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AppleScript for iTunes to automate the copying of playlist info to a new track. GPL. Mac-only.

Time elapsed between seeing the heads-up on Daring Fireball and slapping down my $30 upgrade fee: very freaking little. There was a time not too long ago when I couldn't believe a text editor could be worth $125 plus upgrade costs—well, it was actually $200 or so at the time, but whatever—but now I'm pretty much happy to pay Bare Bones whatever they ask. BBEdit is one of the very few programs that works the way my brain does.

Anyway, I've read the release notes and am in the process of poking at the thing. I'm still trying to decide whether I like the changes to the find dialog(s), but will raise an immediate Hell Yes for the new Projects feature, the Scratchpad, the ability to edit in disk browsers, and sub-line diffing.

WANT. More info here. Alas, there are apparently only about 80 left.

EDIT: Actually, let's have a good old-fashioned dump post.

Regexen: Are they great or what? If you had to pick just one majorly geeky computer skill to learn, regexen might be your best call—paired with a good text editor (or a great one), they will rapidly become your best friend. Yes, the learning curve is a bit steep at first, but it's worth it.

EDIT: No Country For Old Men is gorgeous. Still deciding whether I can keep watching it. (I don't do so hot with thrillers.)

EDIT: Late last month, early in the morning:


EDIT: Pursuant to my brief mention of the über-sweet drawings from Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham—it turns out the artist died the day after I re-read them. Curse and goddamn—but a big thank-you to PNH for bringing more of her work to my attention. Go, see.