Flashward the Course of the Comics Empire Takes Its Way

So, if you subscribed the Dilbert comic feed, you could not have missed to notice that today’s strip has not been delivered. Just in case you are an avid Dilbert reader (probably because you are an engineer, like myself, or you just have an inclination for geeky and nerdy, and/or enterprise-y humor), at the end of the day you have headed towards the Dilbert comic website, to find a new “beta” featuring a flash-based strip visualizer, and today’s strip, in full color.

The only comics still resisting the Flashy new course amongst the ones I read are the Peanuts and Get Fuzzy. Oh, also Garfield minus Garfield, which, if you have not checked it yet, you should definitely do. It’s not funny (well, to be fair, it wasn’t funny even when Garfield was left in place… I remember having a Garfield agenda/diary during primary or secondary school… and what I did really appreciate was the laziness philosophy underlying the cat, while sketches were, uhm, well, perhaps good for a smile of two) but it is exactly what it says on the tin: a comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life; which, if you are or at least have been a schizophrenic, bipolar, desperate person whining about the emptiness of your life (and of course the life of everyone else you know or just exists on the planet), you immediately recognize as a quite polished mirror of your best (meaning worst) moments.

In fact, other strips are only delivered by their official website: for example, Calvin & Hobbes, and Doonesbury. And of course I am reading those by religiously visiting their site, and wandering through the calendar if I happen to have missed the strips for some previous days.

I’m all for maintaining and respecting the reproducing rights of copyrighted images, as it is for, I believe, all of the comic strips mentioned in this post. (I just have a doubt about the Garfield minus Garfield thing, really.) And, instead of reproducing or directly linking the images, I would very appreciatingly link the web page for a comic strip on a given day. Unfortunately, strip archives have this uttermost tendency to disappear: in particular, monthly archives vanish after the month has passed, breaking any link pointing to the web page (so, again, not directly the strip image) of any strip published online in the previous thirty (sometimes thirty-one, sometimes twenty-eight, or twenty-nine on a four-year basis) days as a consequence.

From a client/user point of view, I think this use of Flash technology solves exactly the wrong problem. First of all, as you may have noticed, the URL of the strip is not obfuscated at all; ah, yes, it’s probably a little more difficult to find, but it’s there, in the HTML source, so it can be extracted anyway and republished everywhere. Second, I don’t think (but, at the end of this month, I hope to be happily proved wrong) that Flash comic strip players have anything to do with the availability of comic archives online.

Update: Dilbert has now an official daily strip feed. Hat tip: Marco Fabbri, via Skype.

Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I?

The shell meme. Via Bill de hÓra. Type the following in a terminal window:

history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head

My results, at work, on Mac OS X:

109  ls
109  cd
46  java
33  logout
27  ssh
24  emacs
18  cvs
15  javac
15  env
13  ./football2html.py

Oh, this is funny! I have used the Python script at the bottom to convert football data from Dave Thomas Kata Four in an HTML table, because I wanted to propose it as an exercise to code in JavaScript for students of a university course I have been tutoring.

And at home, on Ubuntu 7.10:

93  ls
55  cd
28  sudo
22  java
18  exit
17  less
15  emacs
13  mv
12  rm
10  gedit

No surprises here. Maybe I am doing too much Java…?

Happy St. Patrick Day!

A couple of pints of Guinness (as they pour it in Italy, that is, the flavor is not exactly resembling what you get in Ireland or other English-speaking countries), a stupid hat got by chance (”You’re a winner,” yay!), a glass of Montenegro and another one of Sambuca; funny people amongst which you can feel at ease; and a final “Are you on LinkedIn?”, “Yes I am“, quite completely unexpected.

Celebrate

Over at the tuprolog-users mailing list, I’ve just had my first encounter with a JVM bug. Clearly, I’ve not been programming enough to make it happen earlier.

Praising JLine

It seems that the command line interface of tuProlog (also known amongst its few users as prompt or CUI console) reacts in quite an irritant way to some particular keystrokes under *nix based systems (that is, mainly, Mac OS X and Linux). When trying to summon some kind of command history by pressing the Up and Down arrow keys, for example, the CLI reacts by displaying an incomprehensible and annoying sequence of characters: ^[[A. (The sequence would be as annoying as usual even if it was comprehensible in some way.) That very same behaviour is featured by much more famous command line interfaces, such as the one coming with Mozilla Rhino, and therefore the tiny jrunscript wrapper around it shipped with every download of Java 6.

After a quick search on the Interweb, I found that Charles Lowell proposed a solution based on a wonderful Java library called JLine. It wraps any command line based program by intercepting input and processing it to make available a series of nice functionalities that the developers of the wrapped program didn’t bother to implement. In the same fashion of Lowell’s Rhino example, you may now try to run tuProlog using JLine, by a similar line from any *nix terminal:

giulio@macbeth:~$ java -cp /opt/jline-0.9.93/jline-0.9.93.jar:/opt/2p-2.1/lib/2p.jar
jline.ConsoleRunner alice.tuprologx.ide.CUIConsole

and get a top notch command history, probably plus some other goodies I didn’t really took the time to check for.

Indeed it is not perfect. For example, I tried to press ESC to reset the command line but it didn’t work… well, not that it should have, it just was the most intuitive thing I thought of doing to get the useless text I typed on the command line to disappear all at once… and it’s not exactly the point… the point being instead that, after pressing ESC, the CLI get a little messed up, with the cursor moving up, the ?- prompt disappearing, and similar stuff. However, JLine still is the best solution to avoid the missing command history problem.