{"id":2017,"date":"2011-06-28T09:45:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2017"},"modified":"2011-06-28T09:45:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T15:45:00","slug":"odd-lots-159","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2017","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Strahinja Markovic, the chap who created <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/sigil\/\" target=\"_blank\">the very good Sigil epub editor<\/a> while he was a CS undergrad, now has a master&#8217;s, a good job, and&#8230;a life. (How dare he? ) In <a href=\"http:\/\/sigildev.blogspot.com\/2011\/06\/new-maintainer-needed.html\" target=\"_blank\">a recent blog post<\/a>, he&#8217;s asked for prospective maintainers of the code (which is open source) to introduce themselves and make a case to him as to why they should be trusted to carry on the work. He doesn&#8217;t know me; I&#8217;m just spreading the word, because I use Sigil and I want it to continue to evolve.<\/li>\n<li>We have the same problem with <a href=\"http:\/\/kompozer.net\/\" target=\"_blank\">the Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML editor<\/a>; poor Fabien &#8220;Kaz&#8221; Cazenave <a href=\"http:\/\/kazhack.org\/?post\/2011\/06\/13\/One-Year-At-INRIA\" target=\"_blank\">has a new job and very little time to devote to the product<\/a>. I like Kompozer but it has some rough spots, and I hope someone will take over and keep the wheels turning.<\/li>\n<li>In the meantime, I&#8217;ve installed and am testing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bluegriffon.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">BlueGriffon<\/a>, and so far I like what I see. The editor incorporates the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox 4, so if it looks good in BlueGriffon it&#8217;ll look good in Firefox. It has HTML5 and CSS3 capability, and an interesting business model: The editor is free, and the developer sells various add-ons. That doesn&#8217;t bother me at all; the whole suite of 9 add-ons can currently be had for $35 Euros, or about $50US. If BlueGriffon performs well on my existing Web documents, I&#8217;d pay that like a shot, even if I don&#8217;t use the add-ons.<\/li>\n<li>As brilliant as the original Turbo Pascal was, it wasn&#8217;t alone. From Andrew Stuart comes a link to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supercoders.com.au\/blog\/nickgammongpascal.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">the deep history of Nick Gammon&#8217;s G-Pascal<\/a>, an enviable piece of assembly-coding work that put a potent Pascal compiler for the Commodore 64 in&#8230;16K. If you used G-Pascal back in the 80s, this is a must-see, especially the links at the end, to the sorts of ads and programming newsletters that were the lifeblood of personal programming in the early 80s.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve ever needed an 18&#8243; USB A-B cable, but I did, and after a great deal of looking around, I finally found them at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macsales.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Other World Computing<\/a>. It&#8217;s mostly a Mac shop, but has the short A-B cables for both USB 2 and USB 3. The cable connects the USB hub on my Dell 20&#8243; monitor to the GX620 USFF machine mounted immediately behind it, and keeps cable clutter down behind the monitor.<\/li>\n<li>Little things sometimes matter: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/article\/230736\/what_to_look_forward_to_in_the_toshiba_thrive_android_tablet.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Toshiba Thrive has a full-sized SD card slot<\/a>. Not micro. This means that I can use the SD cards I already have. A mini-USB adapter will also allow me to use my existing thumb drives. Ports and card slots have been the deal-killer so far on tablet after tablet. This one (though it won&#8217;t be in stores until July) still has an edge. (Bill Roper reminded me that I needed to post about this.)<\/li>\n<li>From <em>Smithsonian<\/em> comes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history-archaeology\/The-Beer-Archaeologist.html?c=y&amp;story=fullstory\" target=\"_blank\">a long and detailed article on what amounts to beer archaeology<\/a>. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>For those who asked: Simple Simon&#8217;s formal name (from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2009\" target=\"_blank\">my entry for June 26<\/a>) is Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor, and yes, the acronym was highly deliberate. His robotic factory is the Automated Reprographic Fabrication Facility, and (as you&#8217;ll learn in the novel) the project had always been a dog.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/seriouslulz.com\/archives\/yes-you-can-has-cheesburger\/\" target=\"_blank\">WUTZ 4 DINR<\/a>?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Strahinja Markovic, the chap who created the very good Sigil epub editor while he was a CS undergrad, now has a master&#8217;s, a good job, and&#8230;a life. (How dare he? ) In a recent blog post, he&#8217;s asked for prospective maintainers of the code (which is open source) to introduce themselves and make a case [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[15,43,90,14,20],"class_list":["post-2017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-pascal","tag-software","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}