Katy LaVallee

Memetronic Memerator

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:12:51 -0600

Several months ago, I created a cli tool for generating memes on memegenerator.net. It relied on screen-scraping, and when they changed their HTML, it broke.

I finally took the time to fix it, and I made it even awesomer. You can list the most popular meme characters or search, which makes it even faster to create a meme because you don’t have to go elsewhere to look up the title.

The meme characters are no longer hard-coded, so the script doesn’t have to be updated to add new meme characters. It grabs them right off the website.

But theres more…

Where do we want to post our memes? Our IRC channel of course! Wouldn’t it be nifty-dandy if our chat bot could generate memes? WHY YES IT WOULD!

So I added a hook for our chat bot (a fort of skybot) as well.

Now there is only one problem…

I really suck at making memes.

"Humanity’s first sin was faith, its first virtue doubt."

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:40:22 -0600

““Humanity’s first sin was faith, its first virtue doubt.””

- Unknown

Burn Notice season finale aired last night. I enjoyed watching...

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:14:06 -0600

Burn Notice season finale aired last night. I enjoyed watching it overall, but the dramatic scenes between Michael and Fiona were a litte over the top.

Here Be Spoilers

Parts I enjoyed:

For once, it’s not Michael going away at the end of the season
The look on Agent Pierce’s face when the operation blew up
Jesse playing himself for the op
When Michael is chasing after Fi while talking to Anson on the phone, and lets him know it’s over with a perfect delivery of “I’ll see you in hell”

Parts I did not enjoy:

Almost every scene between Michael and Fi — I think they still could have gotten the life-or-death-or-life-in-prison-or-betraying-your-country-this-is-some-seriously-heavy-shit-going-down drama with a little more subtlety

I give in

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:14:34 -0600

Making my own website is probably never ever ever never ever going to make it to the top of my to-do list. So I’ll start tumblring again because I do want to blog, to practice writing, because I have a strange fear of writing, or rather, an anxiety, so I need a blog, to practice.

Because if I try to write stuff that I know no one will ever see, it comes out like this:

what should i write… what to write… what to write. gotta write about something. surely theres something to write about. my mind is blank, totally blank. i can write about my mind being blank, i suppose. blankety blank blank blinkity blanking blonk blonk blonk. these are the time that try… that’s stupid… don’t type that. i am writing, typing, thinking about… elephants. which have trunks. like cars. oh, i should go grocery shopping. but i’m going to be so tired. but i have to go. but i’m going to be so tired…[etc.]

And that’s even more boring to write than it is to read.

Post-it calendar

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:53:24 -0600

Post-it calendar

Milton and a bag of plastic bags. (I need to learn to take...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:13:00 -0500

Milton and a bag of plastic bags. (I need to learn to take not-blurry iPhone videos, but you get the gist.)

Another cool moment in the city… after opening our 20th...

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:40:53 -0500

Another cool moment in the city… after opening our 20th floor window to see where the music was coming from.

Using git with SVN without git-svn

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:58:00 -0500

U P D A T E — July 24, 2009

Thankfully, I don’t have to use the solution below anymore. It was really confusing to SVN when I switched between branches. I accidentally fixed it while solving another problem…

SVN wasn’t able to check out externals either, which looked like a completely different issue. It turned out it was using my username on my mac instead of the one I had set in the repo URL, and I fixed it by creating a file ~/.ssh/config and including the following:

Host worksvnserver.com
User myusername

A few days later I made another attempt with git-svn and it worked!

The Problem

At my new job we use subversion. It’s relatively new to everyone, so getting people to switch to git isn’t going to happen soon. Enter git-svn for my git-lovin’ self, right? So I try this:

git svn clone -s svn+ssh://myusername@worksvnserver/svn/project

Which gives me this:

Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
Using higher level of URL: svn+ssh://myusername@worksvnserver.com/svn/project => svn+ssh://myusername@worksvnserver.com/svn
ssh: connect to host worksvnserver.com port 22: Connection refused
ssh: connect to host worksvnserver.com port 22: Connection refused
svn-remote.svn.url already set: svn+ssh://myusername@worksvnserver.com/svn
wanted to set to: svn+ssh://myusername@worksvnserver.com/svn/project

I have my public ssh key up on the svn server, so I should make sure it works with plain ol’ svn:

svn co svn+ssh://myusername@worksvnserver.com/svn/project/trunk project

…And that works just fine. Google can’t seem to find anyone else with this problem, and not being much of a server-admin type person myself, I’m left to find a workaround.

The Workaround

My Plan is to do a regular svn checkout and then initialize it as a git repo also. I’m not going to get the branch/tag management that I’d get with git-svn, but I’m hoping I won’t need it much. Aside from that, I’m not sure what the advantage is to using git-svn over the following.

First I set my global svn ignore configuration to ignore .git*, and add .svn to my global git ignore. After which I do something like this:

svn co svn+ssh://myusername@worksvnserver.com/svn/project/trunk project
cd project
git init
*hack hack*
*git stuff*
*all good?*
svn ci

So…

I’m sure there are some good reasons not to do this, so before I get too deep, can anyone tell me why?

Also, I’m using SVNMate with TextMate, so I assume there will be some problems with that… but then, I don’t know how it would have worked with git-svn either.

Defaulting MySQL to InnoDB and UTF-8

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:08:28 -0500

Problem

I wanted Django’s syncdb command to create my tables as InnoDB with a default character set of utf8 and collation of utf8_unicode_ci.

Solution

Create a file /etc/my.cnf with the following contents (or add to current my.cnf):

[mysqld]
default_table_type = InnoDB
collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci
character_set_server=utf8

Assuming you’re just starting a new project, delete the database you created for it already.
Stop and restart MySQL.

If there is data you need to preserve in the database, then you’ll have to convert it the long way instead of deleting the database.

TextMate Command: Convert Markdown to HTML with Table of Contents

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:44:17 -0500

Well, I created my first TextMate command. As with most development firsts, it’s really just a mashup of code scavenged elsewhere.

El Problemo…

I like creating technical documentation in plain text. It doesn’t really keep me from thinking about formatting as I intended it to, but it does make it easier to get my thoughts down. I usually end up switching from plain text to Markdown or Textile at some point — not to get it output as HTML, but only so I get TextMate’s handy symbol list to help me navigate the file.

However, when it comes time to share my documentation, I usually have to spend time makin’ it look purty for others. I usually used Textile so I could paste it right into a Basecamp Writeboard. But since I started using Tumblr I decided to take a closer look at Markdown. I do like it better, but that’s not really the point.

The point is I knew nobody was going to want to look at plain Markdown, so it was time for me to explore converting it to HTML. It made nice little ids for all my headings, but some of my headings had the same text, so ids were used twice — which made creating a ToC a little difficult.

Then I remembered the JS-generated ToC on QuirksMode. I pulled that code down — slightly modified to deal with my dueling ids, as well as some other details — and pasted it into my generated HTML ¹.

But I thought… I’m probably going to be doing this sort of thing a lot. Ideally then, I want a command that converts Markdown to HTML, pastes in my JS and CSS, and then what the heck — why not have it save the file and open it in TextMate, instead of opening a new ‘untitled’ file.

As I Wish…

First I duplicated the Markdown > MultiMarkdown > Convert Document to HTML command.
I checked out the files that were called by that command, and created a new file in the same directory as those ². Since I know PHP best and wanted to get this done in a hurry, I used PHP — sorry Ruby and/or Python lovahs. I named my script InsertTOCScripts.php. You can check it out on Pastie.org. It creates an HTML file in the same directory with the same name as your Markdown file, then opens that file in TextMate.
The original convert-to-html command looked like this: InsertFormatHeader.rb|MultiMarkdown.pl|"${TM_SMARTYPANTS:-SmartyPants.pl}". I changed it to this InsertFormatHeader.rb|MultiMarkdown.pl|"${TM_SMARTYPANTS:-SmartyPants.pl}"|InsertTOCScripts.php. I don’t know what the pipes do there, but I just followed the pattern I saw. That usually works out pretty well.

Caveats

I have no clue how you handle errors in TextMate bundle command.
This assumes you have the PHP CLI set up on your machine, and the mate shortcut to load files with TextMate from the command line.
Totally untested on any machine but my own.
I’d call it a work-in-progress, but that could be misleading if I never work on it again.
If something goes wrong, it’s probably about permissions. I mean, that’s what it always comes down to, right?

So I only have to pass one file around, though I’ll probably come up with a solution I like better eventually ↩
/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Markdown.tmbundle/Support/bin ↩

when .gitignore doesn't work

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:49:32 -0500

Because I keep forgetting that .gitignore won’t work on files that are already tracked — remove files from git with git rm --cached [file]

I was just washing some dishes, then I looked up and saw this...

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:41:00 -0500

I was just washing some dishes, then I looked up and saw this oh-so-casual pose. By the way, that’s our new “needs attention” basket. clever kitteh.

Milton likes things that are flat. I find this fascinating.

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:37:46 -0500

Milton likes things that are flat. I find this fascinating.

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the..."

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:47:55 -0500

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

- Abraham Lincoln

Excel SUMIF "not"

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:38:00 -0500

Random Excel tidbit: to assign SUMIF criteria by exclusion use SUMIF([ref],"<>[criteria]",[ref])

not as cool as jon’s custom card, but I do rock, so...

Fri, 29 May 2009 17:01:49 -0500

not as cool as jon’s custom card, but I do rock, so I’ll let it slide.

Why are atheists angry?

Tue, 26 May 2009 11:44:00 -0500

This is a reply to this blog post: http://gkupsidedown.blogspot.com/2009/05/angry-and-aggressive-atheism.html I began a discussion with a commenter named Mary, and decided to continue it here as my comment was too long to post there.

Hi Mary,

You’ve given me a lot to think about, and helped me to clarify my own views about this debate. It seems to me that we (each side, not you and me personally) are looking in a mirror and seeing each other, in that we have the opposite perspective but the same attributes.

I think where we are today is to be expected considering basic human nature and the various personality types represented on both sides. There are people who want to challenge ideas and be challenged. There are people who prefer to avoid conflict and focus on common values. There are people who are afraid of the slippery slope and what would happen if the other side went too far. There are people who just want to get on with their life and not think too much about it. There are people who feel compelled to evangelize. There are people who feel persecuted. And there are people who don’t want to debate, but do want to open a dialogue and understand. I appreciate and have been all of these people at some point — I’m still most of these.

I also think the anger is a natural side effect, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s bad if it doesn’t lead to discussions like the one we’re having here, but clearly it has. I don’t think we can progress to a point where we are shaping the world together based on our common values until we have worked out our differences, and if we try to do that without getting angry, then some things will always remain under the surface and never get addressed. I think we should all be allowed to be wrong if it leads to greater understanding.

That said, I’m not sure jerks like Dawkins will ever be tolerant. I’ve gone through my phase of calling believers idiots, and while I still get frustrated because it seems ridiculous to me, I have realized the real issue is that believers find Meaning in it, whereas I don’t, and I can’t belittle that. I think at his age he should realize that as well. Though, if I had never read Dawkins, perhaps I wouldn’t have realized how ridiculous it is to call believers idiots, so maybe it’s all part of the process.

Now, on to some of the specifics you addressed (paraphrased in caps)…

MOST CHRISTIANS ARE NOT DISCRIMINATORY AND HATEFUL TOWARDS ATHEISTS

I agree, most Christians I’ve met in person are great about the whole thing. Most of the people in my life to whom I’ve “come out” have been wholly accepting, and occasionally willing to engage in dialogue. Other atheists have different stories, and it may have been their own attitude that led to people treating them harshly, but I don’t want to make that assumption without knowing the details. My fiancé and I can’t tell his family, because they are also racist and disowned a family member for being gay, so it’s not worth the risk. It may seem silly, but it saddens me mostly because in order for us to be friends on Facebook, I’d have to remove all references to atheism on my profile lest his siblings find it. I’m very much into social networking — it’s important to me — so this is frustrating.

I also know many atheists who simply made it clear that they did not wish to engage in discussions about religion (as most Christians assume every new person they meet is Christian and will engage them as if they are) because they don’t believe in God, only to be the recipient of hard evangelism at work, by family, by friends, at home — in all the “safe” places — which turned them angry.

The fact remains that we do have to be careful who knows we’re atheists. I’ve only told people after I’ve gotten to know them, so they would already know I’m a decent person. Also, I would like to be a teacher or hold public office, but I’m not sure it would be worth the struggle, as I am an open atheist and any quick google search of any form of my name will show it.

However, most of the hate (on both sides) is online, and when it’s online, it seems like it’s the whole world. On account of this discussion with you, I have resolved to try to remember the real people I know when I encounter hateful remarks online, and remember that if the people online knew real atheists they probably wouldn’t feel that way either.

Another issue is political representation, but that’s a lengthy topic of it’s own.

ATHEISTS ARE JUST AS — IF NOT MORE — ANGRY AND HATEFUL

I think this is true. But I think it’s to be expected given the situation, and I believe it’s forgivable. However, I think atheists need to stop being angry first in order to affect change.

WHY TALK TO EACH OTHER ABOUT IT AT ALL WHEN BOTH SIDES HAVE ALREADY MADE UP THEIR MINDS? WHY ARE ATHEISTS EVANGELICAL?

I think we’re all emotionally attached to our ideas, and although we often get angry, I think we also all want to understand the other’s point of view. Most of the discussions probably start with questions intended to further understanding, which leads to discussions of logic, which leads to fallacious arguments, which engages negative emotional reactions, which leads to insults, which leads to leading with insults when writing about — or conversing with new people — on the topic.

I also think it comes down to the personality types I mentioned earlier. Personally, I wouldn’t like the world very much if we didn’t talk about it all. I find Meaning in discussing the things that are important to people. The people who don’t find meaning in the discussion often ask these questions, and I guess the only thing I can say is “Thank you for asking. I simply enjoy the discussion.”

Also, one thing I’ve noticed, though atheists don’t treat atheism like a religion, we do treat reason like a religion. It’s what guides us and where we find meaning and purpose. So when we debate about the logic behind theistic belief, it is a religious debate on both sides, and has all the baggage associated with that.

WHY CAN’T ATHEISTS JUST BE QUIET

You didn’t say this, I know, but that was what I heard when I read it the first time. I don’t think it’s what you meant, but I think it’s worth addressing, because I often have the same question myself. Why the heck should we feel the need to commune about our lack of belief? I honestly don’t know the answer. I have some guesses, but I think they are mostly reiterations of what I’ve written elsewhere in this comment thread. I continue to struggle with this question.

In conclusion I want to thank you for enhancing my determination to make the dialogue between theists and atheists more open and understanding. Coincidentally, my local atheist group is becoming more organized and has created a mission statement including that very idea. Also, I have been holding a domain to create an atheist blog for myself, but instead I’ve decided to create a website where we can come together to have discussions like this one. I am optimistic about the future of this debate.

—

My co-worker recently “came out” to his family, and he started a blog about the dialogue he’s having with his dad. I thought you might be interested: http://www.emailfromaskeptic.com/2009/04/email-from-skeptic.html