Any dog can chase a car

scrapdog — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 15:48:29 GMT

Looking for a novel way to show your creativity and word-play skills? Use, or even better, CREATE!, a portmanteau! People will think you are witty, AND it's not lazy at all!

It's a posolutely (seewhatIdidthere) GREAT way to express that the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts! Look what they did with the Spork®.

At present, I'm racking my brain to find a word that describes a process that is like magic, but not performed manually like a sucker. I bet I could turn to portmanteaus to solve this problem!

There are too many "there are too many monad tutorials" articles

scrapdog — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:18:35 GMT

YES, there are a lot of monad tutorials on the web.

But you know what else there is even more of?
Blog articles pointing out the fact there are too many monad tutorials on the web.

Well, I am going to take it one degree further with this post.
When it becomes trendy, just remember, it started here!

Message to Gino Vannelli

scrapdog — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:11:37 GMT

Some friendly advice:

STOP LIVING INSIDE YOURSELF.

My ears have been busy

scrapdog — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:40:49 GMT

As of 10:18 PM tonight, I crossed milestone #4 in my Music Collection Enjoyment Project®.

Woohoo.

This means that every song in my music collection has been listened to by me, from beginning to end, a minimum of 4 times... since I started keeping track of the play counts in the iTunes application, anyway.

(The collection is about 13000 songs, for a total of about 1300 hours, or 56 full days for one complete listen, give or take)

I crossed milestone #3 back in October of last year. This one took 8 months, while to get from 2-3 took only 5 months. However, I've been buying a lot of music lately and I had to listen to the new stuff several times to get them caught up.

The rules (which I made up) say that once something is in my collection, it is in it for good, and it becomes part of the eternal rotation whether I like it or not.

Of course there are a number of albums I deeply regret purchasing, but rules is rules.

Curse you, Metal Machine Music.

Now, on to milestone #5. It's de facto tradition that I start off with "An Index of Metals".

Lame and pedestrian "return to LJ" post

scrapdog — Wed, 18 May 2011 03:28:03 GMT

You know, after a massive hiatus, posting anything more than that will REALLY make me sore tomorrow.

Wow, that was a workout.

Now to recover.

Writer's Block: The tenth time's the charm

scrapdog — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:40:46 GMT

1. See icon.
2. Well over 25.
3. Of course. I already have. But I will never grow tired of making others watch it with me. Mu ha ha.

HI teh_dirty_robot.

A yank-over-region function for Emacs

scrapdog — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:28:39 GMT

One feature I am surprised hasn't been added to Emacs yet is a yank (paste) operation that replaces the text in the active region.

In order to perform this operation, which is something I do all the time, I need to do a combination of kill-region/yank/yank-pop (or C-w, C-y, M-y). If there is a better way, and I am overlooking something, let me know.

There are three huge disadvantages to doing it this way:

1. It is inefficient.
2. It doesn't work too well with the interprogram clipboard.
3. You can only apply it once. Repeated applications of the operation will need increased presses of M-y to align with the correct item in the kill ring.

So, I decided to write my own function and bind it to C-c C-y.

"yank-over-region" will yank an item from the kill ring, just as if you did a regular yank; however, the yanked text will replace the text in the current region. And immediately after doing a yank-over-region, you can cycle through the kill ring (using M-y) just as if you had done a yank.

The text you are replacing will be added to the kill ring as well; since it calls kill-region to do this, the same behavior for kills can be expected here.

I haven't done a huge amount of testing yet, but so far it seems to work pretty well, and works fine with the clipboard. I'll probably expand it a bit later (such as adding proper documentation and support for arguments, etc.)

To use, just add the following snippet to your .emacs file:

(defun yank-over-region (beg end)
  ; KES 3/10/2010

  (interactive "*r")
  (setq yank-window-start (window-start))
  (push-mark (point))
  (let* ((string (current-kill 0))
	(ring-pos kill-ring-yank-pointer)
	(before)
	(after (cdr ring-pos))
	(cur kill-ring))

    ; prepare the kill ring
    (while (and cur (not (eq cur ring-pos)))    
      (push (car cur) before)
      (setq cur (cdr cur)))
    (setq kill-ring-yank-pointer 
	  (setq kill-ring (append after (nreverse before))))

    (kill-region beg end)
    (insert-for-yank string)

    ; rebuild and normalize kill ring
    (setq kill-ring-yank-pointer 
	  (setq kill-ring (cons (car ring-pos) kill-ring))))
  
  (setq this-command 'yank))

; bind
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c y") 'yank-over-region)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-y") 'yank-over-region)

Save 6 cents!

scrapdog — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:49:02 GMT

White Castle® frozen hamburgers!

~~$3.99~~ $3.93 with your Pick N Save® card!

It took a great deal of internal debate. So many "what ifs". So many times I almost surrendered and walked towards the light.

But I eventually managed to muster the willpower to walk away from that siren-song of a bargain.

I am so proud of myself.

Avatar

scrapdog — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:59:29 GMT

Avatar wasn't that great. No "phenomenal" or "awesome" or "I want to see it again" from me.
It was just OK.

Facebook = why again?

scrapdog — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:17:35 GMT

Have I mentioned that I really really love software to be as convoluted as possible?

That is why I am so impressed with Facebook. After a full minute of digging through the user interface, I still have not found a way to post something besides an insipid one-line "status" message.

Maybe I have to go set some settings or set some filters or install an application I don't know about yet. Or read some manual. Or be a college student. I really don't know what the trick is.

----------------
Now playing: John Adams - Harmonielehre
http://foxytunes.com/artist/john+adams/track/harmonielehre

Mac development

scrapdog — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:42:27 GMT

I would like to do Macintosh development, but as far as I know there are no free cross compilers available, and there is no way to host a Mac in a virtual machine.

So I suppose the only way to compile things for a Mac is on a Mac.

I need to find a cheap low end Mac that has just enough horsepower to occasionally run a compiler to build an executable, and nothing more, other than testing the executables that are built.

Anyone know of any good dumpsters to dig through to find such a thing?

Nintendo DS?

scrapdog — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:24:12 GMT

View Poll: Nintendo DS

Typing test

scrapdog — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:46:17 GMT

75 words

Speed test

Stay outta Florence County... it's a MAN'S counteh

scrapdog — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:04:27 GMT

I recently realized there are a total of 8 of Wisconsin's 72 counties I have never been in:

Polk
Burnett
Iron
Sawyer
Marinette
Florence
Oconto
Rusk

That means I've missed out on meeting 56 people, tipping over 112 cows, and peeing on 75,000,002 trees.

OK, that's enough posting for now.

scrapdog — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:12:07 GMT

View Poll: The many faces of fun!

scrapdog — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:50:16 GMT

Happy birthday, hungariangabbie!

Midnight Meat Train

scrapdog — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:52:29 GMT

The most terrifying ride you'll ever take™.

The Caring Continuum discredited by Google

scrapdog — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:23:02 GMT

The phrase "could care less" yields 4,170,000 hits on Google.

The phrase "couldn't care less" yields 218,000.

And I'll bet that 75% of the hits in the latter are instances of lecturing on how the phrase in the former is incorrect.

It's snowing

scrapdog — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:39:21 GMT

I'm liking this winter so far.

I love living in the north.

Phoney McRingRing

scrapdog — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:03:59 GMT

I'm only asking because I'm curious:

View Poll: Phone usage

Music stats

scrapdog — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:10:45 GMT

I've been playing around with Perl tonight. First time I touched it in 4 1/2 years. I forgot how much fun it was. However, it'd be a lie if I said it was like riding a bike.

I decided to write a script that calculated some stats on my CD collection; namely how it is distributed throughout the spectrum of time. 1/3 of my motivation was curiosity, 1/3 pure geekiness, 1/3 to exercise my dormant Perl skillz.

With further ado, the stats:

1967	0:41:56
1968	0:56:53
1969	8:33:27
1970	7:43:03
1971	8:37:42
1972	9:45:40
1973	15:06:04
1974	12:07:46
1975	13:07:36
1976	10:10:31
1977	18:05:18
1978	9:53:06
1979	11:05:52
1980	7:24:02
1981	8:18:41
1982	5:32:27
1983	8:53:55
1984	8:29:10
1985	2:37:14
1986	5:20:39
1987	4:12:26
1988	4:01:55
1989	3:56:15
1990	4:39:26
1991	13:23:53
1992	9:17:02
1993	12:10:30
1994	17:52:43
1995	15:01:58
1996	16:02:40
1997	20:13:11
1998	8:57:02
1999	9:59:32
2000	11:23:05
2001	8:56:39
2002	4:21:39
2003	4:13:20
2004	2:21:44
2005	4:38:13
2007	3:06:24

This is a tally of durations, not track count. Each track increments the value of its year by its duration in seconds. In other words, longer songs add more weight.

Of course, this includes only the CDs I have ripped to mp3, which currently is about 2/3 of my collection. The year is fetched from ID3 tag. Tracks that are within compilations (e.g. greatest hits) are assigned the year of the compilation.

According to this report, I have music from every year from 1967-2005 and 2007. No 2006. Interesting. I just realized that. I don't recall buying a single CD in 2006, actually.

I've got 8-bit fever

scrapdog — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:35:08 GMT

I've really been jonesin' to write a new game for the C-64, NES, or SNES for a couple of weeks now but have been too lazy to think of any ideas. Like an RPG, or something of that nature. Would be willing to collaborate with some who is seriously interested.

Someone light a fire under my ass.

Alanis the prophet

scrapdog — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:38:36 GMT

The other day I actually found myself in a situation where there were 10000 spoons when all I needed was a knife.

I had to use a plastic spoon to cut a leftover hamburger in half. True story.

The irony was so thick that I could cut it with a knife.

If only I had one.

Nil Recurring

scrapdog — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:56:27 GMT

The Nil Recurring EP from Porcupine Tree (featuring Robert Fripp) is now available. $8.70 cheap!

It is a great supplement to Fear of a Blank Planet... with a tiny bit of editing I was able to cram both onto one CD.

All four tracks are good.

Our universe ain't that big

scrapdog — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:44:56 GMT

There are only 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 electrons in the universe, give or take 1 or 2.

That's 1/1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000th of a googol.