Achtung Ubuntu 10.4 users: data loss
April 30, 2010 on 1:38 am | In General | 1 Commenti’m just so frigging sick to my stomach at the moment because Ubuntu 10.4 ate my home directory, and i wanted to take a moment to warn other Ubuntu upgraders about a data-loss scenario.
Full details are in the bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/571958
If you’re going to use Ubuntu 10.4, make damned sure your shell scripts do not depend on case-sensitive shell expansion!
(Yes, i have backups, but i’ve got to pull them from 20 different source repos and a 15GB Dropbox, and the whole point of the exercise which revealed the bug was to avoid having to pull down 30GB of data from the net.)
>:-(
A live previewer/editor for Google Code Wiki
April 22, 2010 on 1:54 pm | In General | 1 CommentAnd how for something very different…
A couple of days ago i was looking for JavaScript code which can parse the Google Code wiki syntax reasonably well. i stumbled upon (via a link in a bug report) some code by Fabien Ménager which did most of the work. After coming across a few too many corner cases, i sat down to re-implement the parser using a char-by-char scan, rather than regexes, for most of the work.
It’s now about 20 hours after that work started, i haven’t slept in 26 hours, and Fabien and i now have:
- A reasonable parser (only missing a few markup features): http://code.google.com/p/wikiwym/
- An application to demo it: http://wikiwym.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html
- And another application which allows the user to load arbitrary wiki pages from arbitrary Google Code-hosted projects and preview them in raw and HTML modes. That code can then be pasted back into the Google Code wiki editor when editing is finished: http://fossil.wanderinghorse.net/demos/wikiwym/
Basically, that last app provides an editor environment for people who edit wiki pages of arbitrary Google Code projects. The app cannot save the data back to Google Code for you, but it provides a relatively effective interface for editing wiki markup. If you make a mistake while typing in the editor, for example forgetting to close an inlined markup tag (bold, italics, etc.), the preview mode will prominently mark the error so you know where to fix it (and what to fix).
If you’re looking for a wiki parser implementation in JavaScript, this one might just suit you. If you’re a parser guru and would like to help us improve the parser, then please get in touch!
Happy hacking!
—– stephan beal
CLI-like Web Apps with JavaScript
April 2, 2010 on 8:53 pm | In General | 1 CommentOn April 1st xkcd.com added a new web interface which allows one to view the xkcd comics using a Unix-style command-line interface: http://uni.xkcd.com/
Interested in how it was being done, i followed the source code links, downloaded it, and set it up locally. After spending the whole day hacking on it, and sharing several mails with the author (who goes by the moniker Chromakode), i’m really interested in exploring this idea for web GUIs a bit more…
For those interested in truly geeky things, the source code is here:
http://github.com/chromakode/xkcdfools
i’ve tied that into an experimental JavaScript app framework i’ve been tinkering on the past year:
http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/javascript/jquery/jqapp/console.php
That page demonstrates tying in the CLI interface with JSON-centric RPC. e.g. the “ping” command sends of a JSON-structured RPC request to the server, the server dispatches it to the appropriate event handler, the handler answers and sends us back another JSON object describing the result. Such an interface could be used to write some exceedingly geeky web applications.
In any case… not something of general interest, but in case there are a few other hackers who find the Web/CLI mixture interesting… see the above links.
Happy Hacking!
—– stephan
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