Schinckel.net

You wouldn’t steal someone’s car, so don’t steal Music/Movies.

I heard an interesting thought on the similarities between piracy of copyright material and theft.

No, I wouldn’t steal some guy’s Ferrari if it were left on the street, but if I were able to make an exact duplicate, without doing any damage to it, then I would. And what’s more, I was never going to buy a Ferrari in the first place. They haven’t lost a sale from me…

At lunch on Sunday, I had to do my usual trick of re-fixing Ray & Joan’s digital set-top box. Not that anyone had stuffed it up or anything, but it must have been reset at some stage, and all of the ’extra’ channels, which are just duplicates of the first, had reappeared. This in itself was a simple, 2 minute job, but it gave me an idea of a possible business venture. Setting up people’s entertainment units & systems, and teaching them how to use them. I often have to do similar tasks at both my parents’, and Jaq’s parents’ houses. Most of the time it’s reconnecting hardware, but sometimes it’s optimising settings. I wonder how much I could charge Joe and Jane Average to do this, and show them exactly how to use their stuff. I could do DVD/TV/STB installations, PC usage, and even digital cameras. Another thing I could do would be CD library -> MP3 conversion, and DVD -> AVI/MPEG conversion (for Xbmc, PVR, etc setups). I’m even thinking of a name: GeekGuys. www.geekguys.com.au - I’ll have to do a search and see what similar services are available.

You too can make science, by participating in the MIT weblog survey. Go on, you know you want to…

There are a couple of instances of scripts out there that automatically apply abbr and acronym tags to pages, but I wanted to be able to do the same in ecto. This is also the first time I wrote a plugin script for ecto, and I wanted to do it in python. Please note that this here script is untested until I get onto my Mac and test the hell out of it. The script works, with the caveat listed in TODO.

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    #! /usr/bin/env python
    
    'A script for ecto that adds abbr and acronym tags to the text'
        
    TODO = '''
    Fix it so that acronyms without a space either side (for example,
    that finish a sentence) work.
        
    Lookup on the internet for a list of acronyms/abbreviations?
    '''
        
    acronyms={'WYSIWYG':'What You See Is What You Get',
              'DOM':'Document Object Model'}
    abbrs={'XHTML':'eXtensible HyperText Markup Language',
           'NSLU2':'[Linksys] Network Storage Link (USB) 2.0'}
        
    # Add more values to your hearts content…
    
    # get input data - depends on implementation.  For ecto:
    import sys
    data = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
        
    # replace only the first instance of each acronym/abbreviation
    for each in acronyms:
        data.replace(' '+each+' ', '<acronym title="'+acronyms[each]+'">'+each+'</acronym>',1)
    for each in abbrs:
        data.replace(' '+each+' ', '<abbr title="'+abbrs[each]+'">'+each+'</abbr>',1)
        
    #return data to ecto
    open(sys.argv[1],'w').write(data)

Note: Comments turned off: too much Spam on this entry.

I know I fixed the Search box in my sidebar, but it’s broken again. I’ll work on fixing it. Do’h! Update: it isn’t broken, just not working how I’d like. It treats all entries as though they are surrounded by double-quotes, for example, searching for Connections Blogsome returns no hits, even though there are posts that have both of these words in them. Whoops! Searching for that will now bring up this post, since those two words now appear in that order. Swapping the order of those words and searching will not find any posts…unless I wrote Blgsme Cnnectins somewhere, with the * replaced by o… Update 2: Now it seems to work. I did put a request in on the forum - I wonder if they fixed it…that was quick!