pickles, originally uploaded by valkyrieh116.

Want to bundle a web page into a single file, without a _files directory, or using the not-supported-everywhere .mht (IE, Opera) or .webarchive (Safari) formats? Use pagecan! I developed pagecan so I can return converted documents on doc.mar.cx as a single file.

pagecan will take an URL of an HTML document, grab all resources referenced by “src”, and bundle the page and encoded resources into a single file, through the use of the data URI scheme. pagecan is written in Ruby and uses the Nokogiri parser (you can install the gem with gem install nokogiri, or the Debian package with sudo apt-get install libnokogiri-ruby).

Usage: pagecan url [file | -]

If ‘-’ or no file is given, output is sent to stdout. pagecan has been tested only with HTTP URLs, but as it uses Ruby open-uri, other URIs and local files may work.

pagecan on github

Sandstorm, originally uploaded by asco.

Namibia looks like the sort of place I’d like to photograph. My mom will be going there for a few weeks next year, so maybe she’ll be able to give me some tips.

Want your weather forecast in one or two unicode characters? Go to weather.mar.cx (for location detection by IP) or add the city name to the end, like http://weather.mar.cx/Paris,_TX or http://weather.mar.cx/Paris,_France.

_DSC2454.JPG, originally uploaded by metrixcreate.

Duncan and I made tshirts with the “phone company” logo on them (no actual phone company has this logo, but it looks a lot like the logo of some random independent phone company in the 1970s.

They were screen printed, but with a plastic stencil instead of a photo-process “stencil”. I bought a book of polypropylene sheets from Dick Blick (“suitable for water color”, the cover says), and got the stencil cut on the laser cutter at Metrix. They can’t cut vinyl or other chlorine-containing compounds, as deadly chlorine gas will be produced (though in quantities that would probably be more damaging to the laser than to humans), but polypropylene works great.

Want to squeeze a text file out of a Word document you found online, or need a CSV from an Excel file? Use doc.mar.cx! For example,

http://doc.mar.cx/http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEECopyrightForm.doc

This will give you an HTML version. If you’d like a different output type, insert that type’s extension in front of the URL. For a plain-text version instead, for example,

http://doc.mar.cx/txt/http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEECopyrightForm.doc.

PDF, HTML, text, CSV, XLS, and DOC output formats are supported on the relevant data types. I’ll soon be adding ImageMagick support to convert from zillions of image formats, and conversions to/from .SHP shapefiles, KML files and other geodata should also be supported soon.

Want to know what input document types are supported? Just try the link. If it works, then that document type is supported. If it doesn’t work, then that document type isn’t supported.

My finger gateway now supports much more of the Internet. It supports some sites specifically, like Facebook (try finger cdc@facebook.com@finger.afiler.com), but it also supports sites that have per-user RSS feeds linked to from the page at sitename.com/username (e.g. finger afiler@flickr.com@finger.afiler.com). It also supports queries on sites that have RSS feeds linked from their main page (e.g. finger afiler.com@finger.afiler.com).

More finger feature suggestions are welcome!

At work, I’ve found myself SSHing into this Windows web server (thanks to Cygwin) often enough that I start to just think of it as another Linux server. And while Cygwin allows you to run Windows commands from a bash prompt, Windows commands don’t come with man pages (just /?). Microsoft has an A-Z List of Windows commands online, but sometimes I’d just prefer to stick to the command prompt. Conveniently, the documentation renders well in a text-based browser. To make these show up as man pages, you just need to have a text-based web browser installed, and have the html files named as the commands in a particular “chapter” of the manual. I picked chapter 9, as that’s not generally assigned.

apt-cyg install wget links # You probably don't have apt-cyg installed,
# so grab that or just use Cygwin's setup.exe instead
# to ensure wget and links are installed
ln -s /usr/bin/links /usr/bin/lynx # Man expects lynx for html pages
mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/html9
cd /usr/local/share/man/html9
wget -O- 'http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772390(WS.10).aspx' |\
grep -Po 'ctl00_MTCS_main_ctl.+href="\K([^"]+)(:.+>)([^>]+)(?=)' index.html |\
sed -r 's/^([^"]+).+>([^>]+)$/\1 \2/' | \
while read url name
do name=`echo ${name// /-} | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`
wget -O "$name.9.html" "$url"
done

That will get you man pages for all the commands in that A-Z list. For man pages on subcommands like “net computer”, type “man net-computer”. If you look at that list you’ll notice “net computer” but no “net use” or any of the other usual commands — of course, many of the net commands are well-documented through “net help”. If you really want to be unixy, you can dump those net help pages out to the manual too. Since they’re not formatted, you’ll want to put them in the cat9 directory instead of the html9 directory, and drop the .html extensions.

mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/cat9
cd /usr/local/share/man/cat9
for cmd in `net 2>&1 | grep '|' | sed 's/^NET//;s/[^A-Z]/ /g' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` ; do net help $cmd > net-$cmd.9 ; done


I don’t know of any comprehensive list of commands besides the A-Z list and the net commands list. But to create individual man pages, you can do something like:

wget -O sqlcmd.9.html 'http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162773(d=printer).aspx'

This will give you a man page for sqlcmd, the command-line client for SQL Server. If you wanted to grab all the man pages for the net subcommands (instead of using the results from “net help”), do

for x in accounts computer continue file group help helpmsg localgroup name pause print sendshare session start statistics stop time use user view ; do wget -O net-$x.9.html "http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_$x.mspx" ; done
wget -O net-config.9.html 'http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_config_server.mspx'

If you’re looking for a little more Ubuntu/Debianism in Windows, try Richard’s apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade for Wndows. Got any more urls for man pages? Please post a comment and share!

A new service from afiler.com! Just finger “<twitteruser>@twitter.com@finger.afiler.com”. More services possibly coming soon.

$ finger fakeapstylebook@twitter.com@finger.afiler.com
[finger.afiler.com]
Login: FakeAPStylebook Name: Fake AP Stylebook
Bio: Style tips for proper writing. contact: fakeapstylebook at gmail dot com. No submissions, please. All material copyright The Bureau Chiefs, LLC.
Location:
Web: http://www.thebureauchiefs.com
Apr 22 16:00: For an international audience, spell the pop star's name as "KeUSDha."
Apr 22 11:30: Do not reference The Oxford English Dictionary. We speak American.
...
Apr 16 07:00: It's "for all intents and purposes." "Intensive Purposes" is the hot new medical drama from CBS.
Apr 15 16:00: Be sure not to confuse "aural" and "oral." The former is very uncomfortable.
Apr 15 14:17: Bureau Chiefs Poll: Who would you choose to perform at your son?@Ys bar mitzvah? http://bit.ly/ds489i


I made a monitor stand out of black gas pipe and fittings, compression tees, and an adapter bracket.

The compression tees (as in pipe fittings, not clothing) were an awesome find. They have rubber gaskets inside that made a surprisingly tight connection once the end caps are screwed down.

The galvanized metal fitting is a bracket made for using metal pipes for things like mounting rails and chin-up bars. The holes are 38mm apart, as opposed to 100mm on the standard VESA mount, so I made an adapter bracket. I made the adapter out of 6mm birch on the laser cutter at Metrix Create:Space though it would be easy enough to make at home — but lasering’s just so easy! I even countersunk screw holes using the laser.

I’m really impressed with the stability of the stand. I had been worried I’d need to add clamps under the compression tees to make sure they wouldn’t slip, but it turns out they’re far more solid than expected.

If I ever go completely insane and decide I need more monitors, I’m thinking I could make an X-Y setup, with two vertical bars, on which horizontal bars could be mounted. Each row could still have its height adjusted, plus this would allow an up/down tilt on each monitor.

Total cost for this was about $70, $8 of which was for the (very optional) laser cutting.

With AT&T saying that “with each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”) and plain-old telephone service (“POTS”) as relics of a by-gone era,” I thought it would be a good time to get a snapshot of the North American telephone network as it exists now. In the early 1970s, phone phreaks like Evan Doorbell and Mark Bernay started recording what they saw as the demise of the electromechanical telephone network. The switches then were crossbars and panels and steps and the like, with early computerized switches like the 1ESS just starting to appear. Now, the 1ESS is nearly gone from the network, and the North American network consists mostly of the Western Electric/AT&T/Lucent/Alcatel 5ESS (the 1ESS’s successor), the Nortel DMS-10 and DMS-100, the GTE Automatic Electric GTD-5 EAX, and the Stromberg-Carlson/Siemens DCO. A few other switches in the network, like the Siemens EWSD and the Ericsson AXE 10 have found more popularity in North America as cellular switches (and as wireline switches in other countries).

The oddball switches are the ones that really interest me, and they’ll be the first ones to disappear from the network. I’ve been told that the TRW Vidar ITS-5 and the Mitel GX5000 switches may be gone from the North American network. To see what might be left, I decided to do some digging, and I’ve come up with a list of the telephone switches (minus remotes) still in use in the North American network. There’s undoubtedly some stale data in this database, and so for rare switches, I think the numbers listed are the upper boundary — the lower boundary may be as low as 0. The list also contains the mystery “Digital Switching System”. There seems to be an awfully large number of them for it to be the North Electric DSS-1, which became the ITT 1210 — maybe it just means “unknown digital switch”?

The picture above of the GTD-5 EAX was shamelessly stolen from the site of a GTD-5 consultant, the only place I could find a picture.

Top 10 Switches

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