njr 3.0

Yesterday’s Engrish was a sign which actually wasn’t Engrish at all. Unlike all the other posts on the site, however, it’s a sign I’ve seen myself—it’s in Mosman, where I’ve visited relatives many times. Small world as usual.

It was a bit weird of the submitter or site maintainers to obscure the office number (not that such things are hard to find on the Web these days) but not the mobile number on the door below, though.

Anyway, sorry for not much posting recently. I’m still very busy writing a paper, and need to prepare my DLS presentation in the coming week.

7:39 PM | Web
1 Comment

WWDC was fun, if exhausting; everything went wonderfuly smoothly (ignoring the traffic on 101 driving into SF on Friday night) until my flight home, when we were delayed four hours while United maintenance drove two bolts from SFO to SJC. Joy.

For some reason I didn’t get too much out of the WWDC sessions; perhaps I picked the wrong ones to attend. The small amount of time I spent in the labs made me wish I had hung out there more. I got to meet lots of people, both among my friends and the Mac developer crowd, and have some interesting conversations—although, as usual, even with thousands of people surrounding me from time to time I felt completely isolated.

I haven’t finished organizing photos and videos yet, mainly because I’ve been so busy since I returned, Lightroom really likes a faster machine than my iBook, and my iBook died over the weekend in any case. The photos I took at the large and enjoyable #macdev dinner are here, however.

There’s now a date and Web page with the papers for the OOPSLA 2006 Dynamic Languages Symposium in Portland in October, at which I’ll be presenting the work I did on a hardware transactional memory-enabled PyPy. Half the papers are Python-related, which is rather cool.

Finally, a couple of zsh tips. The great thing about a shell with as many features as zsh is that you never stop learning about new features and ways to use them. The annoying thing is that you seem to forget things just as quickly. Until this morning as I came across a mention in the zsh book (which I highly recommend), I’d used this idiom to get all the directories under the current one:

% print ./**(/)
./bin ./eio ./inputs ./outputs ./results ./src

But this excludes the current directory, which I often want (and usually forget) to include. Instead, you can do the following:

% print ./**/  
./ ./bin/ ./eio/ ./inputs/ ./outputs/ ./results/ ./src/

which, in addition to being shorter, has more DWIMitude.

This one is probably a bit better known, but I also discovered yesterday I can get a directory history list by typing ~- followed by the tab key. Reverse the sort order with ~+. Either way, it beats typing popd repeatedly to find the directory you want.

11:20 AM | Administrivia, Computing, macOS
3 Comments

The next ten days are going to be pretty hectic, as I’ll be staying at no less than 6 different places. I’ve been cleaning up, doing laundry and packing all night, and along with my clothing and electronics I’ll be sure to take with me the most important items of all:

More info at Mike McCracken’s blog.

11:59 PM | Administrivia, macOS
1 Comment

Running WordPress 2.0.4 now. The upgrade took longer than expected, but I’ve documented what I need to do for next time, and upgraded a couple of my plugins as well. Hopefully nothing broke.

The ICeCoffEE 1.4.3 release went pretty well—I’ve received two crash reports, and one user claimed it didn’t work for him. One of the crashes is not my fault: Safari crashed during a page load triggered by a Command-click. For the other one, I discovered that I had completely stripped the distributed binaries, which isn’t too useful for debugging:

Thread 0 Crashed:
0   com.apple.CoreFoundation       	0x90853b76 CFBundleCopyLocalizedString + 106
1   net.sabi.ICeCoffEE             	0x002e5358 APEBundleMainLateLoad + 23883
2   net.sabi.ICeCoffEE             	0x002e569b APEBundleMainLateLoad + 24718

I haven’t yet figured out how to map those addresses back to the source code, so I’ll repost 1.4.3 with symbols later this weekend. It’s now less than a week until I leave for WWDC, the pace of my research work continues to quicken and I’ve got a lot left to arrange.

12:03 PM | Administrivia, Computing, macOS, Web
1 Comment

Sorry if anyone tried the scripts I posted yesterday and found them inoperative—they were missing backslashes. I used to always verify this stuff back when I was using more finicky blogging tools, but given WordPress generally does the right thing™ I didn’t worry.

WordPress strips backslashes inside <pre> tags because quotes get escaped. I spent a while searching for the responsible regular expression substitution before finding out PHP had a function to strip backslashes. The line responsible is the second last of wpautop in wp-includes/functions-formatting.php:

$pee = preg_replace('!(</pre><pre .*?=".*?">)(.*?)</pre>!ise', " stripslashes('$1')
                    .  stripslashes(clean_pre('$2'))  . '' ", $pee);

While this eliminates the extra backslashes before quotation marks, it also removes other backslashes. Here’s a fix:

$pee = preg_replace('!(</pre><pre .*?=".*?">)(.*?)!ise', " stripslashes('$1') 
                    .  str_replace('\\\\\"', '\"', clean_pre('$2'))  . '' ", $pee);

2:57 PM | Computing, Web
3 Comments