blog.shrub

Here’s a feature suggestion: I’d like the ability to pause and resume a post on Craigslist.

Here’s the scenario:

• I post an ad in free stuff
• I get 10 responses immediately
• I want to stop getting responses until I can deal with the ones I’ve already received
• If I delete the ad, I can’t repost it for two days (it gets flagged as spamming)

It would be nice if I could pause the ad, either until I resumed it, or for a fixed period of time (1, 12 or 24 hours).

I emailed Craig a few months ago. Perhaps if he gets more requests, they’ll implement this.

I was searching the web for JavaScript date validation code. All I found were lots of really bad ideas. Some were quite complicated. John Gang was on the right track. I didn’t see Chris Hogben’s article initially, but he used the right algorithm.

Still, nobody offered the complete solution. Given a date string YYYY-MM-DD, is the date valid?

The smart way to do this is to (a) parse the date string with a regular expression, (b) construct a date object and (c) compare what you got out of the date object to what you put in. To make this really convenient, we’ll use JavaScript’s proptotype functionality to extend the String class, making this available to any string:

Here’s the method in action:

On weekday afternoons, the Toronto Star publishes an eight-page PDF edition, “Star PM.” I download this for one reason: the free crossword puzzle.

But sometimes I forget to download this, and since there’s no archive, I lose the opportunity to do that day’s crossword. So I wrote a script to automatically fetch today’s Star PM and save it to my hard drive. Then, I went one better. Using the CoreGraphics Python module, I remove pages 1-7 of the PDF, so I store only the crossword puzzle. Then, it prints the PDF to my default printer.


## Toronto Star crossword puzzle fetcher
##
## Paul Schreiber <misc at paulschreiber dot com>
## http://paulschreiber.com/
## 1.0 -- 26 December 2006
##
## Licensed under a CreativeCommons-Attribution License:
## http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
##
## Usage: starpm.py <directory to store crossword puzzles>


Sean Bonner rips into MySpace, calling out its poor usability (far, far too many clicks to do anything). Sean was inspired by Evan Williams’ analysis of how MySpace gets so many page views. Evan was in turn building on Mike Davidson’s analysis. Mike’s characterization of MySpace as an “Unnecessary Click Factory” is spot-on.

Oh, and Mike also shows you how to make a profile that looks anything but shit-ass. Well done!

Here’s a text box that grows as you type to hold just the right amount of text:

<textarea name="foo" rows="1" cols="20" onkeypress="resizeme(this);"></textarea>

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
// <![CDATA[
function resizeme(t) {
	var characterCount = t.value.length;

	// assuming proportional font
	var columnCount = Math.floor(t.cols * 1.25);
	var height = t.rows;
	var newHeight = 1 + Math.floor(characterCount/columnCount);

	if (newHeight != height) {
		t.rows = newHeight;
	}
}
// ]]>
</script>

Here it is in action:

In Python, to read a URL, I do the following:

import urllib
data = urllib.urlopen('http://foo.com/').read()

PHP links against cURL, which lets you accomplish the same thing … in five lines of code.

If this is something you plan to do more than, say, once, you’ll want an easier way of doing this. Here’s the function I use:

function readUrl($url) {
	$curlHandle = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$data = curl_exec($curlHandle);

	if (!$data) {
		print curl_errno($curlHandle) . "  " . curl_error($curlHandle);
		curl_close($curlHandle);
		return false;
	}

	curl_close($curlHandle);

	return $data;
}

(keywords: curl php wrapper example)

the execs at the telcos (perhaps the same people whose secretaries print their emails — who knows) have this great idea to make money off the internet: meter everything.

their argument is that google is getting a “free ride” on their network. well, no, they aren’t. they are paying for bandwidth at their end, and you, the end user, are paying on your end as well.

that’s like at&t saying they should get 5% of the profits of every telemarketing call. sigh.

for a great overview of this, listen to Burnie Burns’s SXSW keynote and read Brad Templeton’s essay. (Scot Hacker has notes from Burnie’s talk.)

It would be nice if Google Finance allowed you to use easy-to-type URLs, i.e.
http://finance.google.com/goog

Which could redirect you here:
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=goog

Perhaps something like:
RedirectMatch /([a-z]{4}) http://finance.google.com/finance?q=$1

fun flickr toys that let you make calendars, billboards, fortune cookies and more out of your photos.

fantastically beautiful high speed photos of water, sparks and motion. and lightning.

Remix: this movie + WordPress’ PressIt bookmarklet = Apple Store bookmarklet

javascript:if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari') >=0){
Q=getSelection();
}else{
Q=document.selection?document.selection.createRange().text:document.getSelection();}
void(window.open('http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore' +
'?productLearnMore='+encodeURIComponent(Q)));

(I’d make it draggable, but WordPress auto-curly-quoting is being too clever.)

Update: the movie is from Jon Rentzsch.