I found this photo to be unexpectedly beautiful. Without any context, it seems to be an art piece, a reaction against consumerism, the curtains pulled back on the Wizard of Oz. It’s none of the above intentionally, and yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized how nicely it encapsulates several themes in tension.
First is the irony that someone, somewhere (presumably on the other side of the world) painstakingly put together this piece of groundbreaking technology, only so that someone, somewhere on this side of the world could take it apart.
Third, it’s amusing how the act of disassembling something powerful (almost magical), in a way emasculates it, knocking it from a pedestal its creator works so hard to preserve.
I’m not embarrassed to say that these are the vi commands that I’ve been getting by on forever. In the order that I learned them. Thus they are probably a fair representation of the bare minimum one needs to know to survive in the wild and woolly world of vi.
i
enter insert mode (for editing)
[Esc]
return to normal mode (for commands)
:w
save
:wq
save and close
:q
close
:q!
close and ignore changes
x
delete one character
dd
delete one row
/[text]
search for [text]
n
find next
Anyway, I just learned three more at work this week.
With the impending completion of the HTML5 spec, I thought I’d summarize the major differences between XHTML and HTML5 that affect me the most in my daily blogging and web development. Figured this might be useful to others.
Void elements (those that cannot contain text or other elements, and thus don’t require an end tag) don’t need to be closed with a nitpicky trailing slash (see: There are only 10 legal XHTML empty tags for more)
<br> is ok!
<img src="image.jpg" alt="image"> is ok!
Unquoted attribute-values are ok (if the value doesn’t contain spaces)
<input type=checkbox> is ok!
Empty attributes (those that don’t require a value) don’t need values
<input type=checkbox checked> is ok!
The acronym element is now obsolete, use abbr instead (which is conveniently 3 characters shorter)
It’s hard for me to believe that in the not so distant past I worked as a web producer for O’Reilly’s now defunct Online Publishing Group. Basically I was a sort of HTML jockey, shuttling articles through their content management system while ensuring that they all had consistent markup.
Since the articles O’Reilly published online dealt predominantly with programming, the vast majority contained code snippets and samples. Thus one of my primary roles was to ensure that the embedded code displayed properly on the web. Our HTML “style guide” dictated that all code be wrapped in <pre><code></code></pre> tags. I remember at the time thinking it a bit redundant—I occasionally embed code on my blog, but for simplicity’s sake, I use <pre> alone.
I discovered today another value to the semantic use of HTML: machine translation. I was looking through my referrer logs, and noticed someone had translated one of my posts with code samples. And sure enough, Google translated everything within the <pre> tags, mangling the code. Gah!
This made me think all the way back to my O’Reilly days, and I wondered what Google would do if I also wrapped the code block in <code> tags. Sure enough, they respected the semantic “intent” of the <code> tag and left it untranslated—BUT they also stripped out the newlines, collapsing multiple lines of code to a single line. So if anyone from the Google Translate team is reading, consider this a bug report.
Before Google TranslateAfter Google Translate
Note: Apparently Google will also avoid translating tags with class="notranslate".
Ran usb-creator to copy the ISO to my 2GB USB memory key (based on these instructions: Installation From USB Stick)
Got the “DBus error” like the instructions anticipated, so ran the following command to format my memory key:
sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1
Then I reran usb-creator
Plugged the memory key into the X100e, booted it up, and installed Ubuntu
Getting wireless to work
Of course, bane of Linux, wireless didn’t work out of the box. This tends to be expected with brand new hardware, and it took me a while to piece together the right steps to get it working.
Basically run exactly these commands (even sudo su):
sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/34090404/rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009_64bit.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvzf rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009_64bit.tar.gz
cd rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1020.2009_64bit
sudo su
make
make install
Then reboot and you have wireless
Note: If you run the Update Manager and it contains a new Linux kernel, you’ll need to rerun make install in ~/rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1020.2009_64bit to reinstall the wireless drivers. So don’t get rid of the rtl8192se… directory. Hopefully this will cease to be a problem in the next release of Ubuntu.
Getting the TrackPoint scroll button to work
Apparently xorg.conf is a thing of the past, which kind of obsoletes my previous TrackPoint “scroll button” instructions. Oh well. This is how you do it now.
