I still refuse to acknowledge any graphics design interests or abilities. It simply takes WAY to much time. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy gimp‘ing like anyone else. In fact, I couldn’t find a very-small font that I liked, so I created an 11×11 pixel grid and created an custom alphanumeric phont (phony-font). Like the colorful ‘plaques’ in the sidebar? They use my custom size 6.5 font and some quick custom mini-icons. I got the idea from Eric Raymond’s hacker logo concept. Aside. While I think Eric is a true hacker, I disagree with the hacker logo concept. I firmly believe that a true hacker is called so only by peers. True hacker status cannot be self proclaimed. So I don’t think a logo is necessarily appropriate for people to put on their sites. That being said, I liked the layout for one of his concept logos. Thanks Eric. I think they are a neat and colorful way to highlight interests.

It’s been a fun, late night hacking away at WordPress and PHP. Ah, PHP. Don’t forget the double underscore for the __constructor(). At least OO support in 5 is usable. Though, I wish I could print the Ruby equivalent to Object.inspect. Check out the AccuRev page. I just finished doing some mad custom-field hacks that allow me to drop in a slug of xml that describes a project with each release (and new releases!) and the template dynamically displays all the download/readme/install/etc links. Pretty sweet. It took a couple hours to dig up lower level wordpress APIs, remember php and re-re-relearn CSS… but only 3 minutes to write the content. Funny story… My sister jen and I took the train to visit family for turkey-day. We missed our stop because we were constructing sentences based on my word-a-day subscriptions (eg. anodyne). haha.

Welcome to fepus.net v2.0. Wordpress. Cool features, easy content management console. I’m digging it so far. The first version was a single index file flanked by <pre> tags that sourced in my ~/.plan (A real blog). Now I can focus less on writing a website and more on writing real software. I just ported my old .plan logs to individual blog entires with timestamps rolled back. I’m a dork. But I like the content.

ruby oneliners. Ever come across the sed oneliners page by Eric Pement? This is a really handy list of quick sed commands for common tasks. Two nights ago, I started practicing my Ruby CLI by emulating the commands in sed. Partly to exercise ruby and partly to compare the two tools. Six hours later, I ended up completely mapping them all to ruby. Hopefully someone will find them as useful as I do. I think about half of the tasks are better suited for one tool or the other; ruby replaces some of sed’s extremely terse (but powerful) commands. Though, sed wins with extreme brevity in some cases. In all, I’ll take readability andreproducibility over terseness.