Peterbe.com

Suppose you're sold on the idea of XHTML instead of HTML. Then, the next thing you have to decide is whether to go for XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

The names speak for themselves. Strict is strict/rigid, Transitional is transitional/forgiving. The benefits of Strict over Transitional are similar to those of XHTML over HTML in principle. The question is, is Transitional not good enough? Do you have to go so far as to use Strict?

I've now written a little something that is able to convert a piece of text and make URLs into hyperlinks. Here's an example:

Go to www.abc.com
and foo@bar.com

this becomes:

Go to <a href="http://www.abc.com">www.abc.com</a>
and <a href="mailto:foo@bar.com">foo@bar.com</a>

If you already have Firefox installed you can ignore this.

Firefox is a free web browser that works much better than Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is also free of charge but closed source proprietary software owned by Microsoft corp. Firefox is a Open Source meaning that it's development is a community effort.

Perhaps you don't care one bit about the politics of software creation, but you might actually care about how you browse the web. I personally abandoned Internet Explorer years ago after many many years of using it. Firefox just works better, is faster and the usual software politics.

So, if you're stuck with that lame Internet Explorer, get your arse in gear and install Firefox. It's just a click away Trust me. It's worth it.

Yesterday, Saturday, we had a money raising charity event at the City & Islington Fujian White Crane kung fu club.

The money we raised was for the Claremont Day Centre (aka Claremont Project) which is a day centre here in Islington for old people. Sadly the council has cut their fundings dramatically this year and that's almost where we come in. The thing is that we train kung fu in their building on Monday nights, Wednesday nights and saturday mornings. By having a charity event we could raise money to go towards this charity.

"Urwid is a curses-based UI/widget library for Python. It features fluid interface resizing, multiple text layout options, simple markup for attributes, powerful scrolling list boxes and flexible edit boxes."

I've been looking for something like this for a long time. See the screenshots to get an idea of what a curses-based UI is.

I had the problem today that several files in a directory started with an _ underscore character. (e.g. _red.gif). Instead of manually renaming each file used the power of shell and python to solve it. (and some help from my collegue of course). Fortunately none of the files had an underscore in the middle of the name so I could keep the command quiet simple:

$ find -iname '_*' \
| xargs python -c \
'import sys;print "\n".join(["mv %s %s"%(x, x.replace("_","")) for x in sys.argv[1:]])'\
| sh -s

BBC have a great little website called BBS NEWS | In Pictures. Sometimes they have a theme on something, like today the Bush country theme.

I love these kind of photographic slideshows. No long texts to read and you get to watch the photos one by one. Then I also love this kind of journalism from within the USA. The kind of stuff I see, as a european, is often stuff from the front, i.e. new york, hollywood, washington, so this is greatly appreciated.

Have you, like me, had problems with downloaded .AVI files that you can't fast forward? There's a solution to that. Install mplayer and run it like this:

Z:\Films>mplayer -idx Movie.avi

I'm a sucker for high speed photography even though I've never tried it myself. This site is some sort of showcase for a flashtimer that they sell.

Be sure also to check out the Wildlife Photography section

I never use the Caps Lock button. Never. The only time I "use" it is when I accidently press it and start typing things in UPPERCASE. To disable it in Linux all you have to do is enter this on the command line:

$ xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"