macolyte.net

Diurnalize - Silly daily challenges.

Steven Frank: Notes - Who doesn’t love Steven Frank? Guy knows his shit.

iBooks Author - Announced by Apple this week, I think this could be a game changer for digital publication.

I use MarsEdit to post most of the articles (if you want to call them that) I write here. It’s a great application, but I don’t like writing draft posts in it because there’s no way for me to access them when I’m not on my Mac (at least not until Daniel gives us MarsEdit for iOS). I’ve tried to write my drafts in text files stored in Dropbox using vim, TextMate, nvALT and Byword and then mashing together some combination of AppleScripts, shell scripts, and TextExpander snippets to easily get the content into MarsEdit. Every “solution” was hacky and I grew dissatisfied with them all so quickly that I lost track of which one I was using at a given time. But since The Switch to Evernote, I’ve come up with what could be the One True Blogging Workflow for me.

I created a notebook in Evernote called @macolyte_drafts where I keep a note, written in Markdown, for every post I’m currently working on. Once I’ve given up on trying to make the post sensible, I hit ⌘ ⇧ M and the following AppleScript is run (thanks to another one of Daniel’s excellent applications: FastScripts) to turn the note into a new blog post entry in MarsEdit:

(Some bits of the code are from here and here

After the piece is published, the note gets moved to the @macolyte_pub notebook (sadly, Evernote doesn’t support moving a note from one notebook to another via AppleScript so I have to do it manually). And that’s it. My drafts are always with me and getting them published is not in any way hacky.

Awk - A Tutorial and Introduction - Pretty self-explanatory. 

TThor Newsletter - Long list of interesting links, delivered to your email inbox every week.

The Kingdom of Loathing - Ever wanted a pet sabre-toothed lime? Have an urge to celebrate the Festival of Jarlsberg? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then this the online game for you. But even if you didn’t, forget your fancy World of Warcraft graphics. Embrace the simplicity of line drawings. 

A couple of good, detailed posts about BBEdit this week. Not an editor I use on a regular basis, but I’ve tried it a few times here and there. It doesn’t suck.

Macdrifter - Moving Text Editors: Taking BBEdit Seriously:

What I’ve discovered is that BBEdit is an incredibly complicated and simple tool. It’s a plain text editor on the surface, but it’s highly customizable (like Textmate or even Vim). I’ve been documenting some of my experience and this post describes some of what I like about BBEdit 10.

Clark’s Tech Blog - Problems with BBEdit:

Right now, to be honest, I write all my BBEdit scripts in Python using Appscript. It’s far more easy to write and I can leverage all the Python libraries to do things.

Various members of the Read and Trust network spent November writing about their favorite authors. Since I’m not nearly cool enough (and let’s be honest probably never will be cool enough) to belong to a group of such excellent writers, I thought I’d share mine here: Robert Anton Wilson. You’ve probably never heard of him.

I first came across Bob’s work while I was a very impressionable teenager. I must have been taking a break from my obsession with The Lord of the Rings because I was looking through my dad’s book collection for something (countercultural?) to read. On one of the shelves I found a book enticingly titled Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. It was an old paperback; the pages were yellowed. The Illuminati reference is what initially piqued my interest, but it was the epigrams and wonderful illustrations scattered throughout the book that sucked me in. Much like a Lovecraftian scholar vanishing from the Orne Library, the book mysteriously disappeared from my dad’s.

Cosmic Trigger wasn’t the first book that Bob had written. Both the cover and the text made reference to another book: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which he had co-written with Bob Shea. It sounded fascinating. This was in the days before Amazon.com, so it was difficult to track down a copy, but track it down I did. Most people would be put off by an 800+ page non-linear narrative, but I gobbled it up like a five year old reading Thomas the Tank Engine (or whatever it is five year olds enjoy). And that’s where shit got crazy.

You see, it wasn’t just the content of Bob’s books themselves that made me such a fan. Everything he wrote drew from so many sources that I’d find myself traveling down some ridiculously eclectic avenues of investigation. A very small handful of things I’ve been exposed to thanks to Bob:

• Discordianism and The Church of the SubGenius
• Fnords and the 23 enigma
• Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics
• Reality tunnels and Synchronicity
• James Joyce
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• H.P. Lovecraft

Given even this small list, I think most people today would simply dismiss Bob as a crazy burned out relic of the Hippie age who dropped acid with Timothy Leary one too many times. It wouldn’t be a completely unfair observation; he couldn’t help but be a product of his time (who can?). I certainly didn’t agree with some of his more utopian ideas and was never particularly keen on the drug references, but to me he was more the sage mystic who knew a secret none of us did. He made me think about how arbitrary everything really is and how needlessly complex we’ve made this silly little world of ours. He taught me that in most situations there’s more than yes/no, either/or: there’s also a maybe.

Bob was an eternal optimist. He, like Nietzsche, lived most of his life dealing with various kinds of pain. He contracted polio at a young age and suffered from post-polio syndrome for the remainder of his days. His daughter was killed in a robbery at age 15. He lost the love of his life to stroke. Despite all this (and the election of George W. Bush) he still believed in the basic goodness of people.

Bob died on this day, at this hour, in 2007. And it saddens me that he never wrote a book on Finnegans Wake.

Resources:

• Official Site
• rawilsonfans.com
• Maybe Logic

Have you ever wondered what all that stuff in your /usr/bin/ and /usr/sbin/ directories does? 

Probably not, but I have. 

True UNIX geeks will most likely scoff at me for my ignorance, but everybody has to start somewhere, right? The brute force approach to exploring those directories would have been to get a listing of every command and run man on each one individually. But that strikes me as awfully tedious and it seems like something that is just begging to be automated. So in my usual hacky manner I did. 

The NAME section of a man page usually gives a nice, succinct description of what the command does. I found a shell script that would extract sections from a man page. Unfortunately, OS X does weird formatting things when you pipe man’s output to a file, so I had to pipe it through the col command as an intermediate step. I then wrapped everything up into a Python script that would iterate through all of the commands in those two directories, grab the NAME section, and finally output it to file. 

This is far from a perfect solution, and I’m sure I’m missing out on some useful information or better ways of doing it. For example, error handling is managed by piping stderr away and then completely ignoring it. But it’s good enough for my casual browsing needs and it taught me a little bit about sed and some of the other tools available to me on my system.