a blog by Brie Gordon

I've got a good chunk of free time coming up (now until Monday)! Rather than waste it, I'm going to finish all the little (and big) projects I've been wanting to do for a while. A lot of these are super lame, like finishing scripts I've abandoned and doing math for fun. Some of the stuff is cool but I can't think of any examples at the moment. I'm trying to avoid biting off more than I can chew but here's a list of most of what I want to get done:

 

• Finish writing my Python-based laundry robot 
• Complete the next 12 Project Euler problems to get to level 2
• Put some content up for every domain name I own (There are a lot so most may be one page sites.)
• Learn Perl in 2.5 hours
• Read an issue of Columbia's Journal of International Affairs
• Finish and publish weather forecast script 
• Finish and publish stargazing forecast script
•  Finish reading Carl Sagan's "Cosmos"
• Write my second Android app (lol!)
• Find a floppy and floppy burner (or whatever they were called) so I can get my Dell PE2400 up and running PicoBSD
• Learn to tune my own freaking guitar
• Locate all five visible planets
• Finish and relase my mashup

Like I said, super lame, lol. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a personal hero of mine. He is quite well-known for his role in the demotion of Pluto from planethood (although it wasn't really official until the International Astronomical Union finally decided to define 'planet'). Dr. Tyson's public influence has moved beyond discussions of Pluto to becoming one of the most important and prominent science communicators around. 

There are several ways to get your fix, including a recent episode of the CBS hit sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory' (video here).

Dr. Tyson tweets regularly at @neiltyson and hosts the program at Star Talk Radio. He also serves as the host of the PBS series NOVA ScienceNOW. The show is very accessible (but usually not quite to the point of being 'dumbed down').

He's all over YouTube but here are a few to help you get an idea:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the world ending (or not) in 2012:

Neil deGrasse Tyson's Authors@Google talk:

 

He's about as excited to be at Google as the Googlers are to have him. It's long but compelling and the Q&A at the end is insightful.

On Conan (pre-controversy):

 

Books:

In addition to a number of professional publications, Dr. Tyson has written ten books. The two I've read, The Pluto Files and The Sky Is Not The Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist, are informative, inspiring and surprisingly funny. I'd recommend them both to anyone interested in learning about Tyson's life, general science or what it's like to be the Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive (according to People Magaine).

As some of you know, I began an experiment to do 2,010 new things in the year 2010. The experiment was a complete and total failure for a number of reasons, including that that many things comes out to between 5 and 6 things every day.

I had fun trying for the six weeks or so that I kept up with it. I have been reworking the experiment in the hopes that I will succeed in 2011. That's when I found this thread on Reddit and the accompanying subreddit.

The idea there is to do one new thing every day. This is much more realistic and I am going to stick to it this year! I have not decided on a domain name yet so for now, I will throw everything up at ashleylov.es.

Like millions of people, I love The Beatles! I finally got around to putting together my 'Best of The Beatles' playlist to share, for posterity and because I haven't posted on my Posterous in forever, although it gets more hits than almost any other website I run (Imagine that!). If you haven't ever listened to The Beatles (What planet are you from?) or are looking for another collection of your favorite songs, you've found as good a place as any to stop looking. My playlist is as follows (in no particular order):

1. Come Together
2. Here Comes the Sun
3. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
4. Eight Days A Week
5. Can't Buy Me Love
6. Help!
7. You're Going To Lose That Girl
8. Yesterday
9. Strawberry Fields Forever
10. I Want To Hold Your  Hand
11. Hey Jude
12. Let It Be
13. Love Me Do
14. Yellow Submarine
15. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
16. All You Need Is Love
17. Eleanor Rigby

I may have missed one or two and for that I am deeply sorry. :-P

If you haven't yet, I'd recommend checking out the concept behind Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It gave a great song new meaning for me. (Have you heard Jimi Hendrix' cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?)

Using Wikipedia’s pseudocode description of the Collatz Conjecture, I whipped something up in Python. Try it!


n = int(input("What number would you like to explore? "))
while n > 1:
     print(n)
     if n % 2 != 0:
         n = 3*n + 1
     else:
         n = n/2
print(n)

 

--

Brie

Python is a very cool programming language that I've started learning. It's extremely powerful and I've already done some neat stuff with it. I wrote an interactive sales tax calculator for PA residents. (I'm working on a version that will let you tell me what state you are in and output the information appropriately.

# This is actually the cost of the item and the tax. This would be a ridiculous tax rate.
tax = 1.07
price = raw_input("How much is your item before tax? ")
totalcost = float(price) * float(tax)
finalanswer = round(totalcost, 2)
print finalanswer

Here's a screenshot of how it works:

Bet you thought I'd never write that and mean it! So, I got the following straight from the horse's mouth, also referred to as Internet Explorer Platform Preview Guide for Developers[1] in certain circles.

Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has become one of the most requested features for implementation in Internet Explorer, and is a powerful way to add attention-grabbing visuals to a website with minimal markup and low bandwidth overhead.

With the Internet Explorer Platform Preview, Microsoft is proud to introduce support for much of the basic SVG feature set, with support for even more expected in future platform pre-releases.

As you may know, I'm a fan of SVG, having spent a lot of time in college writing SVG widgets[2] to recreate form elements in SVG using JavaScript, instructed by the wonderful Dr. David Dailey [3], also known as the man behind "An SVG Primer for Today's Browsers" [4][5] (in cooperation with the W3C, of course).

If you are unfamiliar with what exactly SVG does or you're just new, see this article which will list 9 of a number of reasons why SVG is important for the web. [6]

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff468705.aspx
[2] http://techylady.com/svg/widgets.php
[3] http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/
[4] http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html
[5] http://www.sru.edu/pages/15247.asp
[6] http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/01/08/9-reasons-why-svgs-are-important-for-the-web/

"I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea."

I have been subjected to far too many of these commercials. How, exactly, did you tell Microsoft about how Windows 7 was your idea?

What is so ironic about these commercials is that the virtue they extol is a large part of what I (and so many others) love about open source software. It really is *our* idea. Using Launchpad, development mailing lists, Ubuntu Brainstorm and other tools, my ideas (or code or translations or documentation or artwork) can be submitted to the community responsible for a project and considered in an open, clear process for approval.

Try expressing in a clear, open manner your thoughts about Microsoft. Ask to watch the progress of your idea. Request that you be kept in the discussion loop of the key developers. You'll be laughed out of town.

Why should you take my word for it? Because I'm awesome. No, you shouldn't just take my word for it. Below I've included a bunch of links to ways *YOU* can contribute -- even without coding.

We're awesome and open source software is our idea!

Ways You Can Make Ubuntu Your Idea:
Ubuntu Brainstorm
Launchpad
Community Documentation

Ways You Can Make Linux Your Idea:
The Linux Documentation Project
Mailing Lists

Ways You Can Make FreeBSD Your Idea:
Mailing Lists
Submit a Problem Report
The FreeBSD List of projects and ideas for volunteers

Even more goodness:
A huge list of How to Contribute to Open Source without Coding
Microsoft uses the same channels to contribute to the Linux kernel

Until next time,

Brie

Posterous is amazingly simple and fun to theme. (Last time, I talked about setting a custom favicon.) That's a nice touch but it's a detail that some will not notice. A custom background, on the other hand, is very noticeable and speaks volumes about you and your blog. Grab an image (may I suggest something from COLOURlovers?) and follow along:

1. Log into your Posterous account.
2. Go to Settings > Theme and customize my site
3. Click Advanced
This is where you can put the custom CSS. Note that how it ends up looking will vary based on what kind of customization you have done already. I am using the Ginza bigpic theme. This is what I did, modify as appropriate.
4. Scroll down to the body section that starts out like this:

5. Right before the closing '}' place some lines like this (remove the spaces):

6. Click 'Save, I'm done!'
Caution: Some patterns are very bold and may be too distracting for your blog or make the text hard to read.

Bonus:
I've attached several patterns from COLOURlovers.com that I think are really pretty. The links for them are below:

[1] http://imgur.com/VTGTy
[2] http://imgur.com/qdIcN
[3] http://imgur.com/1NR2V
[4] http://imgur.com/P9Rog
[5] http://imgur.com/cOpj9

the one I'm using:
[6] http://imgur.com/wJLLa

P.S. I <3 Posterous. The theming docs are complete and well-written if you're interested in doing more with your Posterous blog.

While using the 'Explore' part of Posterous.com, I noticed that a lot of people, myself included, were using the default Posterous favicon. I assumed that we weren't given a choice until I saw Tweetdeck's Posterous favicon. Did they get an exemption? No. They made use of Posterous' option to perform advanced customization.

Here's what you need to do to set your own favicon:
1. Log into posterous.com
2. Scroll down and click 'Theme My Site'
3. Click 'Advanced'
4. Click 'Expand'
5. Remove this line:
    <link rel="icon" href="/images/favicon.png" type="image/x-png"/>

6. Place a line like this where the one you removed was:
    <link href="http://www.unixsysadmin.org/favicon.ico" rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />

7. Click 'Save, I'm done!'
8. Click 'OK'

You'll be returned to your blog. Note the favicon! :+)!