Mac OS X’s System Preferences has a “Universal Access” option. I few weeks ago I turned on “zoom” because I thought it would be phat to hit option-close-bracket to zoom in to stuff. Well, it is cool, but according to top(1) it takes up a bunch of CPU cycles just to have Universal Access watch your keystrokes. So, I turned it off. Maybe my battery will last longer now.
August 28, 2005
Core Wars
Have you ever heard of Core Wars? I’d found it a few years ago but had a hard time finding it again. Basically, you write some pseudo-assembly code, and your code dukes it out with other code. Koth.org has more information, and a core wars “hill” where your bots can fight. Apparently Core Wars was introduced in Scientific American in 1988, and the last language revision was in 1994.
Church website
I’m my church‘s webmaster and have been doing a fair amount of work on the site lately. We’re hosted by Zettai, which is a really awesome web host. They specialize in Plone and Zope hosting.
I installed PloneCollectorNG, an issue-tracking system, to keep track of maintenance. We just put the sermons on-line. People with accounts can read the newsletters since 1999, in PDF format. The newsletters are making the Data.fs backups of Zope very large: around 70 mb.
August 25, 2005
Python Challenge
I have been playing the Python Challenge. I got to level 16 but I cheated a little bit on levels 8, 9, and 10. You have to do a lot of image manipulations to go on to the next levels.
del.icio.us
I started using del.icio.us. Lauren showed me how to use it. Now I want a program to let me comment my Safari bookmarks and then export them to del.icio.us.
August 12, 2005
Querying WFU Library DVDs
With the help of mechanize for Python, I have written a short module that queries the Wake Forest Library for a title’s call number and status. Pair this with the Netflix queue retriever and you’ve really got something.