Go Terk Yourself

Kerri and I found this little man while walking through Boston on Saturday:

Adam Bertocci rewrote The Big Lebowski as he imagines it would look if written by Shakespeare. Two Gentlemen of Lebowski:

CHORUS
In wayfarer's worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geoffrey Lebowski called, yet
Not called, excepting by his kin.
That which we call a knave by any other name
Might bowl just as sweet. Lebowski, then,
Did call himself 'the Knave', a name that I,
Your humble chorus, would not self-apply
In homelands mine; but, then, this Knave was one
From whom sense was a burden to extract,
And of the arid vale in which he dwelt,
Also dislike in sensibility;
Mayhap the very search for sense reveals
The reason that it striketh me as most
Int'resting, yea, inspiring me to odes.
(In couplets first, and then a sonnet brave
As prologue to the tale of this the Knave.
Behold him, then, a-tumbling softly down
To pledge his love immortal to the ground.)
We stray now from fair Albion and from France
And see no Queen of bawdy songs and cheers
And in an angel's city take our chance
For stupefying tales to take our ears.
To war on Arab kings acoast we go,
Needing a man of times, though hero not;
Hear me call him not hero; what's in a hero?
Sometimes there's a man, your prologue's thought.
The Knave, though scarcely man of honour'd grace,
Nor hero Olympian, nor yet employ'd,
Was nonetheless for all his time and place,
The man befits the circle he's enjoy'd.
A man of lazy ways, of epic sloth;
But, losing train of thought, I've spake enough!

It only gets better.

When I saw 28 Days Later I thought a lot about how the function of the virus there was very believable (at least for a zombie flick), so this epidemiologist's thoughts about a zombie outbreak is pretty awesome:

The most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.

I haven't listened yet but the Kleptones have a new album out: Uptime/Downtime.

Up until now to post photos from SmugMug I've crafted the link and image markup by hand, which is pretty tedious and prone to error. Today I ginned up an extension to Markdown (RDiscount, really) that allows automatic generation of the markup from the image title and URL. Here's how it works:

The first step is to create a new Hobix entry class (located in BLOG_ROOT/lib/local.rb):

module Hobix
  # Entries that use Markdown for formatting and automatically handle SmugMug
  # photos.
  class SmugMugEntry < Entry
    # Use SmugMug
    def self.text_processor
      SmugMug
    end

    # The YAML type for this entry class.
    def to_yaml_type
      "!goterkyourself.com,2009/SmugMugEntry"
    end

    # Register with the YAML engine.
    YAML::add_domain_type('goterkyourself.com,2009', 'SmugMugEntry') do |type, val|
      self.maker(val)
    end
  end
end

Now, any Hobix entry created with the type goterkyourself.com,2009/SmugMugEntry will use the SmugMug photo processor. All that remains now is to define the SmugMug class, which does the heavy lifting. This class is nested inside Hobix::SmugMugEntry:

# A SmugMug text processor that wraps Markdown with SmugMug specific
# capabilities.
#
# The syntax is:
#
#   $[Image Caption](Image URL)
#
#   i.e.: $[Bob Swimming](http://account.smugmug.com/Some/Category/1234567_abc12#123456789_AaBbC)
#
# Note that, for simplicity's sake, a SmugMug image blob must be on its
# own line
#
class SmugMug < RDiscount
  def to_html
    # Create a temporary string for the replacement so @text doesn't get
    # mangled.
    text = @text

    # Replace
    if text and not text.empty?
      text.gsub!(/^\s*\$\[(.*)\]\((.*)\)\s*$/) do |match|
        begin
          caption = $1
          image_url = $2
          image_id = image_url.split("#")[1]
          image_uri = URI.parse(image_url)

          raise "Missing image ID" if image_id.nil? or image_id.empty?

          "<a href=\"#{image_url}\">" +
            "<img src=\"http://#{image_uri.host}/photos/#{image_id}-640x640.jpg\" "+
                 "alt=\"#{caption}\" " +
                 "title=\"#{caption}\" " +
                 "class=\"photo\"/>" +
          "</a>"
        rescue
          # Just return the match on poorly formatted image blobs.
          $stderr.puts "Bad SmugMug blob: #{match}"
          match
        end
      end
    end

    m = RDiscount.new(text)
    m.to_html
  end
end

Once this is in place $[Amelie in her sheep hat!](http://gty.smugmug.com/Children/Amelie/7135981_oYtj9#705169136_SeMGC) becomes:

Bruce Schneier on the Predator drone unencrypted video snafu:

Sometimes mediocre encryption is better than strong encryption, and sometimes no encryption is better still.

Read through to the end; Schneier makes a good point about how the key management requirements of the NSAs Cold War era encryption schemes are limiting their use in today's military environment.

Alma, a wonderfully terrifying short film from Pixar (available for a limited time only...):

Ramona Falls, "I Say Fever":

Intriguing:

Airlock allows your Mac to lock itself, plain and simple. Using your iPhone or iPod Touch, Bluetooth, and a smidgen of pixie dust, Airlock determines whether you're near your computer.

Sketchy Santas