JJinuxLand

Internet Explorer's enhanced security configuration just blocked it's own "about:internet" page. No, I'm not making this up, and I didn't Photoshop it ;)

I wrote an article for Linux Journal called The Inverse Extension Design Pattern.

I'm a Vim user, but I try to be pretty open minded. I've used Emacs extensively in the past, and in the interest of being flexible, I decided to revisit the Emacs tutorial. I memorized most of it. I originally switched away from Emacs when I was doing PHP programming, and Vim accomodated me better. Having approached Emacs with an open mind (I really would have liked to try it out for six months), these are the things that dissuaded me:
The syntax highlighting in Emacs cannot compare to that of Vim, especially in multi-mode files such as Cheetah. Here's a screenshot of Vim. Notice that it's able to handle Cheetah, Python, HTML, and JavaScript all in the same file.
I found myself with my pinky permanently glued to the control key when I was editing existing code. Does everyone else ignore the tutorial and use the arrow keys instead of C-[npfb]?
I'm stuck with FreeBSD 4.7 in a certain programming environment, and Emacs there didn't come with Python support at …

I built a Web site using Plone. I read "The Definitive Guide to Plone" in order to do so. Along the way, I kept a log of my impressions, which I'll relay here. Most of them are complaints, usually because I've done better in Aquarium for that particular item. However, I should mention that Plone did indeed fill my needs, for which I am grateful. Some of the comments refer to TAL, some to Zope, and others to Plone itself.
The lack of elif and else in TAL drove me nuts.
In TAL, try to use conditional logic to toggle between a <b> or a <p> tag. The normal way of changing tag attributes won't help you change the tag itself.
The slot mechanism in Metal isn't as flexible as normal OO inheritance.
Why must the Zope object hierarchy match the inheritance/acquisition hierarchy (which is tied to the URL hierarchy)? I like my URL hiearchy to make sense for users, and for each object, I like to be able to say what it inherits from explicitly. I like for s…

As an exercise, I implemented breadth-first tree traversal (instead of the much more common depth-first tree traversal) in Haskell. It took me about 3 hours, mainly because I haven't even finished reading the turorial yet. It really struck me how truly lazy Haskell is! My own language, Squeamish, had lazy evaluation, but in Haskell, you have to somewhat bend over backwards with the imperative stuff to say, "Yeah, really, I'm done defining stuff. Uh, can you actually, uh, do some evaluation or something, and, uh, maybe even print the answer?"{- Implement breadth-first tree traversal.

Name: Shannon -jj Behrens
Date: Tue Dec 13 03:18:34 PST 2005 -}

module Main where

-- The main definition of a tree.
data Tree a = Leaf a | Branch a (Tree a) (Tree a)

-- Depth-first tree traversal.
depthFirst :: Tree a -> [a]
depthFirst (Leaf x) = [x]
depthFirst (Branch x left right) = depthFirst left ++ [x] ++
dep…

I'm using my Sanyo PM-8200 with Sprint as a wireless modem under Fedora Core 4 to send this post. I used the instructions here, with the exception that I skipped the "teathered" business, and the name of the device was "/dev/ttyACM0".

I'm pleased to say that it only took me 20 minutes to figure out how to get this to work, which is about how long it took me on my Mac.

I gave a talk about GCipher, a simple encryption utility, at tonight's BayPIGies meeting. In it, I cover PyGTK, a simple plugin mechanism, and asyncore. I've posted the slides and source code in case you are interested.

Sorry, I couldn't resist posting this.

GNU screen is an essential application, yet its learning curve is insanely steep. Even everyday users barely scratch the surface of what it can do due to lack of knowledge. Neither the defaults (e.g. no caption by default) nor the interface (e.g. tons of special key combinations that hopefully don't conflict with your existing applications) make things any easier. I've been thinking a lot about how to improve it.

Imagine what you could do if you were to use a GUI for some cool new version of screen. Now I know that there's a real benefit to the way screen works in that all you need on the client side is a terminal, and I'm sure many a GUI hater will think I'm missing the point of screen. Let's face it though, I do have a graphical desktop. Furthermore, I'm not talking about getting multiple terminals on the local system. Tabbed terminals solve that trivially. I'm talking about multiple terminals running on a remote system that may or may not be p…

It's interesting that Haskell makes such a big deal about first class functions but does not have first class types. Python does ;)

(Note, I'm not sure it makes a big difference, but I thought it was a humorous observation.)