Category: Programming

Alive and coding

Yeah, I’m still around… haven’t posted in so long (again) that not posting has become sort of a habit.

Just dropping by to post a link somebody somewhere might find useful.

If you’re using a tool like Media Companion to gather metadata for a library of DVDs you’ve ripped to disk for eventual use on a uPnP/DLNA streaming media server you’ve rigged up in your basement (and c’mon, how many of us aren’t doing that?) and want a way to do bulk renaming of files & folders in your collection based on data from the XBMC-style /NFO files, I’ve crufted together a VBScript over the last couple of nights that might be of use to you. It worked for me, at least.

nfonamer

(Is ‘crufted’ even a real word?)

The hazards of multitasking

Sunday afternoon I was writing some code on a work machine while logged into Lord of the Rings Online looking to get a group together to run some team-oriented in-game quests, and this usually involves just kind of hanging out for a while and pasting an occasional message into a “looking for group” type channel until something turns up.

I use a great little utility called Synergy to share a single keyboard and mouse across multiple machines; I can change which machine I’m interacting with by dragging the mouse pointer offscreen to make it jump to the other side. It also allows the cut-and-paste of text between boxes. This is a very convenient arrangement, but I’ve found an inherent danger: mis-pasting. When I compiled and ran the application I was working on, I was surprised to see the following:

Dangers of Multitasking

Introducing SkeptiQuote

I’ve noticed lately after looking at a lot of blog and content management packages that random Bible quote plugins are widely available, but I couldn’t find anything equivalent for skeptical sorts like me – so I made my own.

It’s called SkepiQuote, and it’s currently available as a simple WordPress widget, though versions for other packages are planned. It picks randomly from a selection of quotes stolen borrowed with permission from The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.

From the readme file (typos and all… grrr):

SkeptiQuote WordPress Plugin
@2008 by Don Lloyd
Version 1.0

Updates and variations will be found at http://www.drl2.com/blog/?cat=8

Tested on WordPress 2.5 and 2.6.3

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I’ve been tinkering with various blog and CMS packages lately and noticed that almost every one of them has an available plugin that displays random quotes from the Bible and/or other holy books. Unfortunately there was nothing for those of us of a more skeptical bent, so I decided to create one to exercise some long-atrophied PHP muscles (I’ve been stuck in the .NET world since PHP 3 was new) and to get a little familiar with the world of plugin creation.

The included quote file is built from a collection gathered from the Bible, the Quran, and the Book of Mormon by Steve Wells of The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/) and highlight some of the… let’s call them unsavory aspects of those tomes.

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INSTALLATION: Just put the SkeptiQuote directory into your WordPress plugins folder, then activate the plugin and place the widget via the WP management console just as you would any other widget. Check the WordPress site for widget install instructions if you’re unfamiliar with the process.

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This software comes with no warranty, guarantee, assurance, promise, or suggestion of stability, functionality, or magical powers. It comes only with the statement that it’s worked for me so far.

Feel free to use and abuse SkeptiQuote any way you want. Setting it up as a generic random quote engine is easy – just follow the instructions in quotes.php to add your own text.

I do have a couple of requests of anyone who uses this:

– If you keep the supplied quotes, please keep the links to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ intact – Steve undoubtedly put a lot more work into collecting those quotes than I did in stealing them (with premission) from javascript files on his site.

– If your site is related to skepticism, atheism, etc., a link to my blog (http://www.drl2.com/blog) would be a nice gesture… I don’t have nearly enough people showing up to batter my fragile ego by disagreeing with me!

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TO(possibly sometime eventually if the mood strikes)DO list:

– Implement some more advanced formatting capabilities such as optional category/source name display (quotes.php is built with separate sources already in anticipation of this)
– It strikes me as rather inefficient to load in a huge list of quotes every time the code is run; would be better to pick a number then randomly access the quotes file to find the corresponding line. Need to think about how to do this without compromising easy end-user quote editability.
– Add an optional refresh or “next quote” type button and Ajax-ify the refresh.

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Versions of SkeptiQuote for other CMS., etc. packages are planned. Check http://www.drl2.com/blog/?cat=8 for the latest.

Download SkeptiQuote here in whichever file format you prefer:

SkeptiQuote Widget .tar.gz file

SkeptiQuote Widget ZIP file

Look up in the top right corner of this page to see the widget in action!