Model Reality

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The status message project

Filed under:

— regs @ 1:30 pm

I’ve decided that Facebook makes a great stage for little acts of performance art (I’m sure twitter does, too). I’ve starting writing funny but nonsensical status messages. Here are the first three:

Ari is screening lesbian porn with which to indoctrinate Nicole while doing lines of blow off a stripper named ‘Chastity’ and sending good American jobs overseas.
February 28, 2008, 4:50pm

Ari is reverse engineering Pakistani launch codes while watching Macy’s fitting room footage.
February 29, 2008, 2:51 PM

Ari is getting jiggy with your mom while conspiring to bribe a member of congress.
March 2, 2008, 11:21am

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The Zen of Python

Filed under:

— regs @ 2:20 pm

I found this little note at the end of the python tutorial today:

Zen of Python
Listing of Python design principles and philosophies that are helpful in understanding and using the language. The listing can be found by typing “import this” at the interactive prompt.

Naturally, I was curious. This is what it said:

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct 30 2007, 13:45:26)
[GCC 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-33)] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

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AppleScript Snippet: Set spaces shortcut key to ctrl-option

Filed under:

— regs @ 3:08 am

So yes it happened. I switched over to using Apple hardware and OS X on my primary laptop. I’ve been very happy with my iPhone. When my girlfriend decided to buy a new TV, I thought it would be nice to have a media computer of some sort to drive the 1080p display. My good friend Brian was selling a 1st-generation Intel Mac Mini (A Core Solo), so I thought, “What the hell, why not?”

Turns out Leopard is pretty cool. OS X has come a long way since I poked at versions 10.1 and 10.2 while trying to maintain the machines in the SourceForge.net compile farm. After poking around under the hood and getting acquainted with launchd while trying to get openvpn to start on startup, I realized that it really is serious Unix, that Apple has done some really neat stuff, and that it really does have a prettier face than I’ve ever seen on a Unix box.

At that point, I started seriously thinking about buying a Mac. I knew that MacWorld was coming and rumors were flying about a new ultra-light laptop, so I took a wait-and-see-attitude. After seeing that I would only want the Air in a $3000 configuration, I went and bought the MacBook that I’ve wanted since it was released: the black one.

In short: I love it and I’ve been using it enough to start to get annoyed by it. For example, by default, the Spaces preferences allow you to choose a single modifier key for moving around spaces. On Linux, I use Ctrl-Alt-Arrow to move desktops, since nothing else really uses that; it allows application bindings to shine through and continue to work.

So I started fighting with AppleScript to see if I could get it to do what I wanted. It took some frustration (most new languages do), and I will pronounce AppleScript supremely weird if not totally readable. In the end, this was what I wanted:


tell application "System Events"
	tell expose preferences
		tell spaces preferences
			tell arrow key modifiers
				set properties to {key modifiers:{control, option}}
				get properties
			end tell
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

I hope this is useful to someone. Enjoy.

Comments (1)

Sunday in Manhattan

Filed under:

— regs @ 7:41 am

A nice crisp fall day on the island.

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Drunk shanna

Filed under:

— regs @ 9:48 pm

–
Ari Gordon-Schlosberg

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xkcd live

Filed under:

— regs @ 6:10 pm

–
Ari Gordon-Schlosberg

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Clogged artery plaza

Filed under:

— regs @ 4:56 pm

–
Ari Gordon-Schlosberg

Comments (1)

Poor UI

Filed under:

— regs @ 8:08 pm

–
Ari Gordon-Schlosberg

Comments (1)

Software Release: battery_status.py

Filed under:

— regs @ 5:49 pm

Annoyed that Fedora 7 doesn’t have the same CLI tools to get battery status, I coded up a little python script last night to do just that. It was a pretty straight-forward project that took me about an hour, but I was pretty happy with the end result. It reads the proper files out of the /proc/acpi/battery hierarchy, does some calculations on that data and the gives you what you really want.

You start with this:

thesis|18:46|~% cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present:                 yes
design capacity:         65520 mWh
last full capacity:      69150 mWh
battery technology:      rechargeable
design voltage:          14400 mV
design capacity warning: 3457 mWh
design capacity low:     200 mWh
capacity granularity 1:  1 mWh
capacity granularity 2:  1 mWh
model number:            42T5229
serial number:           35751
battery type:            LION
OEM info:                SANYO
thesis|18:46|~% cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          charging
present rate:            8595 mW
remaining capacity:      66620 mWh
present voltage:         16690 mV

And you get this:

Battery 0: 96.46% (0:17 until charged)

In the spirit of sharing and trying new things, I thought I would register it as Google Code project and give it away under a BSD License. It was about a ten minutes process, start to finish and now the world can have it:

http://code.google.com/p/batterystatus/

Hurray for non-scarce economics!

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Dinner in Palo Alto

Filed under:

— regs @ 6:58 pm

Dinner with Todd (a former coworker) in downtown PA. This followed my
first visit to the dev floor at Facebook.

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Model Reality

March 3, 2008

The status message project

February 8, 2008

The Zen of Python

January 30, 2008

AppleScript Snippet: Set spaces shortcut key to ctrl-option

October 28, 2007

Sunday in Manhattan

October 12, 2007

Drunk shanna

xkcd live

September 30, 2007

Clogged artery plaza

September 11, 2007

Poor UI

August 21, 2007

Software Release: battery_status.py

August 7, 2007

Dinner in Palo Alto