January 2012
15 posts
MarkWunsch.com →
I’ve updated my personal website to be a minimal, single serving site.
The site has moved from Jekyll to Nesta CMS. The content is all still very much static, but I love the ability to add Ruby/Rack power when I need to. The easiest way to host a simple Nesta/Sinatra/Rack application is Heroku, which is awesome. But I am, apparently, a glutton for punishment. I took the opportunity to move...
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I am impressed with the huge outpouring from the tech community to fight SOPA/PIPA. A few of my colleagues used their lunch break to march with other New Yorkers in protest. I am really proud of them. But I have to admit, I’m a bit surprised at the internet’s sudden activism. I shouldn’t be: SOPA and PIPA are seriously flawed and put a large number of businesses and vital...
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Has anyone ever mastered regular expressions? →
No, it’s a rather pointless endeavor. Chicks don’t think it’s cool, recruiters aren’t sourcing for it, and every time you write one, you’re wondering if God really does kill a lolcat every time you check a regex into the repository.
found by inky
Where is your god now Tebow? →
At the half, the New England Patriots lead the Denver Broncos 35 to 7.
This morning, I predicted and promised in a tweet:
Preparing a script to collect the “Where’s your god now Tebow?” tweets following a Broncos loss.
I am not disappointed.
As promised, here is a script that runs a query and returns tweets saying something to the affect of “Where is your god now...
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If I were to charge money for access to a hosted Thimble-like Tumblr theme development environment, would you pay?
Sublime Text 2 User Settings and version control
I’ve recently begun dipping my toe in the world of Sublime Text 2, after a couple of years of solid Vim usage (before that, TextMate). One pattern I’ve grown quite accustomed to is keeping all of my dotfiles in a git repository. It is very easy for me to start up a fresh machine with everything I need to be productive.
With Sublime, user preferences are stored in a different manner...
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Kill the Wabbit →
Everything I know about classical music I learned from Bugs Bunny.
Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, etc embedded within me the themes and motifs of some of the great classical works. It wasn’t until I started actually listening to classical music and opera that I realized how much of it I already knew — buried deep.
It gives me a much greater respect for both the music and the...
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Die Fledermaus →
What I’m looking at on Wikipedia, right now.
Die Fledermaus (The Bat) is an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée.
Being a newcomer to Opera, learning about this Opera triggered a memory from 12-year-old me.
For the Tick character, see Die Fledermaus (The Tick).
Continuing on…
The appellation was most likely...
“Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.”
– Fremen proverb
December 2011
9 posts
1 tag
Voyager Golden Record (on Spotify) →
I’ve done my best to create a Spotify playlist of the music contained on the Voyager Golden Record, launched into space. I could not locate some of the more traditional songs and I’ve done my best to select tracks that are similar to the actual recordings. This is the music that represents Earth to the universe. I think it’s a fantastic selection.
There is a YouTube Playlist of...
Boiling an Ocean
I asked WolframAlpha, what is the energy required to boil an ocean volume full of water?
3.39×10^24 kJ (kilojoules)
I then asked WolframAlpha to convert that to kilowatt hours
9.417×10^20 kW h (kilowatt hours)
I then asked WolframAlpha to multiply that by the price of electricity in New York City (in US Dollars)
$1.813×10^20 (US dollars) (August 1, 2011)
...
Griping about New Twitter in more than 140...
Since downloading the New Twitter app for my iPhone and getting the new web experience, I have felt uneasy using Twitter. I love Twitter. It is the ultimate realization of social media’s narcissism engine. But now I find myself fighting the experience, instead of embracing it.
Twitter has a small, limited feature set. Users publish messages. Users follow other users and observe their...
I wrote a short dialogue
Gentleman: (brandishing parking garage ticket) Do you validate?
Front Desk Security Guard: You are doing the right thing.
Louis C.K. answers questions on Reddit →
It sounds silly, but I was emotionally overwhelmed when reading some of his responses. I don’t know much about Louis C.K., except for shared YouTube clips and this time I once saw him standing outside of a comedy club near Washington Square. He comes off as funny, and also earnest, curious, hard-working, and just about every other virtue I find admirable. What an inspiring guy. Fuck him.
A conversation starring @mrgan, @waxpancake,... →
blech:
mwunsch:
There should be URI’s for conversations on Twitter, and you should be able to favorite them.
Read from the bottom-up.
Fixed that for you, and you can even read it the right way up. Thanks, as always, to jwheare, whose side-projects I use more than I care to think about. (Just to restate the obvious: I love Exquisite Tweets. I should write about it properly.)
Wow....
November 2011
4 posts
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Refuctoring →
Refuctoring: the process of taking a well- designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anybody except yourself.
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City Beautiful Movement →
What I’m looking at on Wikipedia, right now.
The City Beautiful Movement was a reform philosophy concerning North American architecture and urban planning that flourished during the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of using beautification and monumental grandeur in cities. The movement, which was originally associated mainly with Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. promoted beauty not...
Mark Wunsch on We Are NY Tech →
I was interviewed.
October 2011
6 posts
WatchHere are my slides from my presentation at Gilt Tech’s Exotic Programming Languages and the Web lightning talks.
I thought it went well.
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Gilt Technologie: Exotic Languages and the Web →
Gilt Tech is hosting an evening of lightning talks dedicated to some “exotic” programming languages.
I’ll be speaking about CoffeeScript. You can sign up here: http://exotic-web-languages.eventbrite.com/
There will be beer, wine, a live band (wha?) and me.
September 2011
3 posts
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“I answered that it would be the one to the other, but because it is difficult to...”
– Niccolò Machiavelli, translated by Google Translate
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Law of the Instrument →
What I’m looking at on Wikipedia, right now.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Alternatively,
Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
August 2011
11 posts
erectlocution asked: Hi there. Does wp2tumblr still work in this WP 3.x era?
Eagleson's Law
Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written by someone else.
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jquery-renewal: A carousel for jQuery
I made a jQuery Carousel.
It’s called jquery-renewal.
About midway through the 45 Best jQuery Carousel Roundup is when the madness sets in. There are a lot of jQuery carousels.
So I made another, but I made sure mine had a Logan’s Run reference.
Why on earth would I make my own jQuery carousel? The goals of this project, from the README:
Good test coverage. Because...
Hello again →
Last year, I linked to a company who’s mission was To make communication easier.
And it looks like Heello has now launched. And it’s a Twitter clone.
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A follow up on "Installing Gems"
Commentators in Hacker News said that sudo gem install was the correct way to install gems as I described in my previous post.
Here is an example of the pain that can cause (https://gist.github.com/1139435):
I sudo install ronn and it is located in /usr/bin. The detailed man pages are not found. I use rvm to switch from system Ruby to Ruby 1.9.2. ronn borks. The error that is thrown is not...
Installing Gems
I have a command line utility written in Ruby, available as a Ruby Gem. I want to install it on my Mac OS X machine and make sure it is available in my $PATH. How should I go about doing this?
I am using RVM, but let’s ignore that for now.
Starting in Lion, with the default RVM Ruby set to system:
mark:~ $ gem install redwood
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
...
http://next.com/ →
Steve Jobs talks about WebObjects.
July 2011
5 posts
“Fear of the file system practically defines novice users; it is usually the last...”
– John Siracusa’s epic OS X 10.7 Lion review on Ars Technica is a treatise on user experience for an operating system.
Reboot
I just watched this trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man.
The Amazing Spider-Man is a curious movie — a “reboot”. The movie studio scratched the idea of doing another sequel in a wildly popular series to reset the narrative and direction of the brand. That’s kind of weird, considering that the first Spider-Man movie came out in 2002, only ten years before the reboot. The...