Has anyone else noticed how the GNU ‘less’ command has been getting really smart, perhaps too smart for its own good? When you aim the command at a non-text file, it does its best to interpret the type and display it in a readable manner.

• source code: ‘less’ originally displayed the text unadorned. Now it calls some program to colorize the syntax, which is nice, except when it’s an inordinately large source file on a rather slow computer and the external colorizer program takes forever. Ctrl-C asks the colorizer to quit and allows ‘less’ to process with the regular text.
• HTML: ‘less’ used to show you the raw HTML text. The programs now formats the HTML the best it can.
• directories: ‘less’ used to advise you that the requested target was actually a directory. Now it offers a directory listing.
• ELF: ‘less’ used to inform you that the file appeared binary in nature and asked if you still wanted ‘less’ to try to display it anyway. Now it parses header information, apparently using ‘readelf -a’.
• binary: Like ELF, ‘less’ used to notify you that the data appears binary. Now it shows you a rudimentary hex view. This confused me the most. “Wait, does this file actually contain a text listing of a hex dump?” I then have to open a proper hex editor to verify that this is not the case.

I finally got around to upgrading all the blogs on this site from WordPress 1.5 series to 2.0. It feels slick. Last weekend’s conference encouraged me to look into the hundreds of plugins already written for WordPress. I quickly found a code syntax highlighter:

Hey, it even links to descriptions of standard functions! I didn’t catch that until I wrote this post just now.

Update, July 25, 2020: Time and technology both march along. For years, the code highlighting plugin mentioned above has been broken. Instead, I went through the blog and moved all of the code snippets on this site over to Github’s gist service.

I never cared much for the old theme on this blog, inappropriately named “Simple Green”, but it was one of the few decent themes that had a fluid layout. I don’t think the narrow fixed layout themes fit well for this site. I sometimes need to spread things out. Thankfully, WordPress hosts an amazing themes resource site that enables you to search for certain properties, such as fluid width. I have settled on this Business 1.0 theme and I even delved into the underlying code in order to customize it somewhat. I am truly proud of myself. For the curious, the banner icon comes from here, the same icon set as the MultimediaWiki icon.

So I was in a Sony Style store yesterday when I noticed a Vaio laptop equipped to play Blu-ray discs. Who wants to take the US$3500 plunge to try to learn how to extract data? It seems there is a slightly cheaper option available though– the BWU-100A internal Blu-ray drive, which can read and write just about every CD and DVD format preceding Blu-ray, as well as reading and writing Blu-ray media. US$750

Does anyone care yet? Or will Blu-ray and HD-DVD go the way of DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD?

I attended WordCamp 2006 today. It was free but I think part of the unwritten agreement is that attendant bloggers are required to write something about it.

WordCamp brought together a whole bunch of folks, mostly from the San Francisco Bay area, many of whom are hyper-passionate about blogging (usually with WordPress) and new media and future of communication and social networking. To be honest, a lot of it was a bit high level for my taste. I started this blog as a research journal that I decided to make public just in case someone else thought the same stuff was interesting. But the conference did remind me that I need to take the proverbial plunge and upgrade the various blogs on this site to the WordPress 2.0 series, if for no other reason than I will be able to find better themes for 2.0.

I also need to look more carefully at various plugins offered for the WordPress system. The more avid users were insistent that there is already a plugin for just about everything. This makes me want to hunt for a plugin that can automatically properly HTML-ize and colorize C code as I occasionally need to do. Further, much was made of WordPress Widgets. The end goal of all this is to let bloggers do powerful things without having to learn much, if anything, about hacking the underlying PHP/CSS/XHTML/AJAX/whatever. This is the boat I always find myself in– even though I fancy myself a reasonably technically savvy individual, normally willing to learn new techs, I simply don’t care to learn much about web programming. I just want this stuff to work. That way, I can devote more time to my specialty: figuring out how to make multimedia tech just work for Linux users.

My personal favorite presentation was about using WordPress as a general content management system (CMS). I have been wanting to do just that since WordPress is solid, easy to use, and already has a familiar ring to it. It turns out that it is feasible, though maybe with a little work, to use WP as a CMS on a site where a traditional blog layout is not the most conducive for organizing the information.

I was in the minority as a non-laptop-carrier. An inordinate number of laptop users were on Apple hardware. It’s seductive, that’s for certain. I don’t know if I saw any Linux laptops, unless they were cleverly disguised.