Author Archives: admin

KISS vs DRY

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The best practice or goal emphasized above with respect to templates and views is KISS and DRY. As long as the implementation does not become overly complex and difficult to grok, keep the template code DRY, otherwise KISS principle overrides the need to have template code that does not repeat itself.

–Vertebrae Framework

A nice illustration of conflicting positive principles and resolution.

moreorcs.com

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orc

My newest site: http://moreorcs.com/

The site generates orc-themed emails for you, which you can get emailed at (completely insecurely, it’s just a web address at mailinator to see the content). Please check out mailinator’s site, it’s a really neat project.

Some samples:

  • the last small poop orc (thelastsmallpooporc@moreorcs.com)
  • poop gross green blood thirsty orc
  • 49 cross-eyed slightly intimidating poop dumb orcs
  • the last slightly intimidating orc
  • quite a lot of slightly intimidating small orcs
  • 73 slightly intimidating small pretty orcs
  • smelly orc
  • a few orcs
  • lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of orcs

Money orders

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A postal money order

A postal money order

Allow me to introduce you all to the postal money order. For $1.50, you can get the equivalent of a cashier’s check from the post office. It can only be cashed by whoever you make it out to, and it’s basically accepted as cash by every corporation. You can also just give someone a blank one, although that’s riskier to carry around for the obvious reasons.

I was tired of checks bouncing. I can’t be bothered to make sure my account remains such-and-such, which means it happens sometimes, especially times like now when I’m poor. So I asked my landlord if I could pay by money order–he’d never heard of them before, but seemed okay with it when I explained (he’s a really good guy!).

I went down to the bank and got out $2750, and headed to the post office. I asked for 9 money orders, each for $303. The postal worker really only made a couple funny faces about me being weird, although my friend said she was pretty loud about my walking out with that much cash-equivalent, it went pretty well. And I immediately endorsed all the money orders so now they can lie around the hose safely.

Also, they come with attachable receipts (shown in the picture) in case you lose the check and need a replacement, so that’s nice.

The Bible, translated to the new latin

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Abbot: I will perform the opening prayer in the New Latin. Oh ordlay, ivethgay usway ouryay essingsblay. Amen-ay!

Crowd: AMEN-AY!

–Robin Hood: Men In Tights

In honor of National Novel Writing/Generating Month and Christmas spirit, I translated the King James Bible into the “New Latin” (aka Pig Latin).

1:1 Inway ethay eginningbay Odgay eatedcray ethay eavenhay andway ethay earthway.

1:2 Andway ethay earthway asway ithoutway ormfay, andway oidvay; andway arknessday asway uponway
ethay acefay ofway ethay eepday. Andway ethay Iritspay ofway Odgay ovedmay uponway ethay acefay ofway ethay
atersway.

-Ethay Iblebay

The full bible translation is here. Source code is here.

Archiving twitter

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(Output)

I wanted to archive twitter so that I could

  1. Make sure old content was easily available
  2. Read twitter in a one-per-line format without ever logging into the site

twitter_ebooks is a framework to make twitter bots, but it includes an ‘archive’ component to fetch historical account content which is apparently unique in that it 1) works with current TLS and 2) works the current twitter API. It stores the tweets in a JSON format which presumably matches the API return values. Usage is simple:

while read account
do
    ebooks archive "${account}" "archive/${account}.json"
    jq -r 'reverse | .[] | "\(.created_at|@sh)\t \(.text|@sh)"' "archive/${account}.json" >"archive/${account}.txt"
done <accounts.txt

I ran into a bug with upstream incompatibilities which is easily fixed. Another caveat is that the twitter API only allows access 3200 tweets back in time for an account–all the more reason to set up archiving ASAP. Twitter’s rate-limiting is also extreme (15-180 req/15 min), and I’m worried about a problem where my naive script can’t make it through a list of more than 15 accounts even with no updates.