Andy Chase

Next step: applying finish to the ukulele.

As soon as the second half of my workbench was built and my tools hung, the overwhelmingly manly urge to build something hit me. Given my long-standing interest in luthery, my small budget, and my limited selection of power tools I decided to try putting together a Grizzly H3125 ukulele kit as seen on BoingBoing in December 2004.

Conveniently, the kit was available from Amazon.com for the princely sum of $24.99 plus about $6 shipping. (as of January 24, 2005, the Amazon product page says the kit is not stocked or discontinued – you may have to order it directly from Grizzly.) The order shipped from Grizzly, and arrived as scheduled 4 or 5 days later.

I decided to install RubyGems and the Rails framework on my PowerBook so that I might follow along with ONLamp’s breathless Rolling with Ruby on Rails tutorial, but when I tried to complete the installation of RubyGems with the following statement in the Terminal:

% sudo ruby setup.rb install

It kept bombing out with the error

hook /Users/andy/Desktop/rubygems-0.8.4/./post-install.rb failed:
wrong # of arguments(2 for 1)

You know you’re in trouble when Google comes up with fewer than ten results for the exact error you’re researching.

However, given that OS X has a relatively old version of Ruby preinstalled (1.6.8), I suspected that might be the issue and gave the slightly newer Ruby package for Fink a try instead. (You do have Fink installed, don’t you?) The install went like a charm – just be sure to use the Fink executable, not the native OS X one:

% sudo /sw/bin/ruby setup.rb config
% sudo /sw/bin/ruby setup.rb setup
% sudo /sw/bin/ruby setup.rb install

The anc_header plugin allows you to specify custom HTTP headers within your templates.

Download

anc_header 1.0

Installation

After downloading the plugin file, browse to your Textpattern site’s administrative interface, click the admin tab, then click plugins. Click the Browse button, locate the file on your computer, then click the Install button.

The plugin should now appear in your list of installed plugins. Be sure it is enabled before you try to use it. Look under the Active column of the plugin list. If you see the word No next to the anc_header plugin, click it to change it to Yes.

Documentation

anc_header provides one simple tag:

txp:anc_header

Attributes:
content – the header content (Such as ‘HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found’, or ‘Location: /some/other/page’)
replace – True or false. True indicates that the header should replace a previous header of the same name, and false will add another header of the same type. Default value is true.

License

©2005 by Andy Chase

This plugin is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Until I decide to spend the time hacking together a Folder Action to accomplish the same thing, here’s a one-line solution for quickly resizing a bunch of images.

Prerequisites

• ImageMagick – I think there are a number of OS X ImageMagick binaries floating around out there, but probably the easiest way to get it is to install the Fink imagemagick package. (If you don’t have Fink, you should get it!) This solution makes use of the convert utility, and assumes it is somewhere in your path.

• Terminal – You should have a passing familiarity with the Terminal application, which you’ll find under Applications/Utilities. See this Apple PDF for a gentle introduction.

Resizing the Images

Open up a terminal window, and cd to the directory your images are in; for instance, if they’re in a folder on your desktop called resizethese you would type:

cd ~/Desktop/resizethese

IMPORTANT: Make sure you’re doing this with copies of your original images, as this next step will affect the files permanently; it does not make new, resized copies in another folder somewhere, it operates on the files directly. If you run this on your original, 3 megapixel photos they will be irrevocably downsized. There is no undo in the Terminal!

Say you want to resize these images for use on the web, with a maximum 475 pixels for both width and height. Use the find command with the -exec option to invoke convert on all of the JPEGs in the current directory (If you have a directory full of some other file type, substitute its extension for *.jpg; ImageMagick can handle most common formats:

find . -iname "*.jpg" -exec convert -resize 475x475 {} {} ;

Depending on how many images you’re resizing and how large they are, your computer may chug away for a few seconds. When it returns you to the prompt, your images have been resized. To go straight to the current directory in a Finder window, type:

open .

If you’re a bit squeamish about the whole instantaneous, irrevocable resizing of the images in the current directory thing, you can use the -ok option instead:

find . -iname "*.jpg" -ok convert -resize 475x475 {} {} ;

This will prompt you to respond y or n before executing convert on each image.

Room for improvement

Is this the best way to resize a bunch of images in one fell swoop? People who live, breathe and eat Photoshop/ImageReady probably wouldn’t say so, and people who know AppleScript and Panther’s Image Events are probably snickering at my use of a third-party tool like ImageMagick, but OS X is an interesting beast; I often find that although there may be a native, “out of the box” solution to a problem like this, learning how to do it and understanding the hows and whys (as opposed to just copy/pasting somebody else’s scripts) would often take longer than it would for me to use a tool I already know from Linux. That flexibility is one of the best things about OS X.

It brings me tremendous satisfaction to know that

1. You’re using a library, plugin, or application that I wrote, and

1. It has proven valuable enough to you that you felt it was worth contributing whatever you have just contributed.

Thanks again,

-Andy

Joel Ray Holveck has written some nice thoughts on the subject on rec.arts.int-fiction.

Like Joel, I have never played any of the old Infocom games to completion. I played Zork I for hours and hours on the Commodore 64, but I never got anywhere. I haven’t even played that many of the more recent, shorter games in the Interactive Fiction Archive.

I have a fairly low tolerance for getting stuck, and most of the games I try lead all to quickly to dead ends where I have overlooked a crucial piece of whatever puzzle is keeping me from the rest of the game. Furthermore, when I am stuck there are almost never any hints forthcoming, and I am usually reduced to the exercise of trying to blindly guess at what it is the author wants me to do:

>PUT CHEWING GUM ON BEDPOST

Apart from losing its flavor overnight, nothing happens.

>PUT CHEWING GUM ON DOORKNOB

You don't need to worry about the doorknob.

>PUT CHEWING GUM ON WINDOW

I only understood you as far as wanting to put the chewing gum.

>EAT CHEWING GUM

But you don't know where it's been!

>THROW CHEWING GUM

(at the floor) You shouldn't litter.

And so forth. It’s actually more frustrating when the author has anticipated all of the foolish things you’re going to try than if every action resulted in a stock You don't need to worry about the [foo] response, because it only confirms the fact that whatever you’re supposed to do is so non-obvious and contrived that the author knows you’re going to be grasping at all of the logical straws.

So, I haven’t actually played a lot of IF, which for a long time has made me feel unqualified to try writing it. I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that I just haven’t played enough good games, or maybe I just don’t have the knack for playing IF, or I’m just missing some damn thing that everybody else in the IF community instinctively groks about playing these games.

Maybe Joel is right, though; maybe other people just don’t write the games I want to play. I’m still getting familiar with the mechanics of the Inform language, but with time there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to write a perfectly good adventure on my own terms.

The other, purely selfish reason I am attracted to writing interactive fiction is that opens a tiny doorway back to the time, before the 7th grade, when I was encouraged by my teachers to be creative and find enjoyment in the process of writing.

All of my writing instruction from junior high onward seemed like a systematic attempt to destroy any possible interest I might have had in the activity. Fiction, which was always the most fun to write, was completely neglected in favor of tedious research papers and nonfiction essays. My tenth grade “Creative Writing” class was anything but. I learned to hate writing anything until I was required to write a journal for my humanities course in 12th grade (proto-blogging on paper, really). The screenwriting courses I took in college were also very enjoyable. I wasn’t much good at it, but the process was absorbing.

Screenwriting, like IF languages such as Inform or TADS, is an interesting way to write; the fun fiction aspect of it gets tempered by the structural requirements of the medium… scene and character descriptions and lines of dialog in screenplays, and program code in IF.

That split between creative and technical breaks up the writing process and forces you to examine your story in managable chunks, which I find tremendously helpful. When putting together an IF story many of the logistics of your plot fall naturally into the realm of programming logic, which goes a long way towards keeping you honest when writing your descriptions and dialog, and considering matters of character (both player and non-player) motivation.

So, why write interactive fiction? I’m still figuring that out, but for me it’s as much about the process as it is about creative compulsion or the desire for critical acclaim. I’m rediscovering that it can be fun and rewarding to make up your own worlds.

I was reading an essay by Richard J Norton called Feral Cities when I came across this bit:

"Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks. A feral city experiences massive levels of disease and creates enough pollution to qualify as an international environmental disaster zone. Most feral cities would suffer from massive urban hypertrophy, covering vast expanses of land. The city's structures range from once-great buildings symbolic of state power to the meanest shantytowns and slums. Yet even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave."

If you substitute 'scientology' for 'disease', you get Los Angeles!

The other night I came across the Gnusto plugin for Mozilla, and promptly installed it in FireFox.

The first (and only) thing I tried was my own entry in the 24 Hours of Inform contest, and I was disappointed when FireFox just prompted me to download the file to disk; no different than before I had installed the plugin.

Just now it occurred to that Gnusto might expect Z-Code files to be served with a particular MIME-Type. The rec.arts.int-fiction archives didn’t provide a clear consensus, but application/x-zmachine z1 z2 z3 z4 z5 z6 z7 z8 seemed a likely candidate, so I added the following to the .htaccess file in my web server root:

AddType application/x-zmachine z1 z2 z3 z4 z5 z6 z7 z8

That did the trick. I put the URL of my .z5 file into FireFox, and after a few seconds Gnusto opened a familiar-looking Z-Machine window. It even supports SAVE and RESTORE – very slick!