A Weird Imagination

Custom Bullshit Sans

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So, you saw Sans Bullshit Sans (which I previously blogged about) and thought that Sans Bullshit Sans font is cool, but its word list doesn't really match up with my field's bullshit?

As mentioned in that previous post, Sans Bullshit Sans is open-source and comes with a detailed blog post explaining how it was made. Which means we can follow those instructions to modify the word list.

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LaTeX table environment in Madoko

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What is Madoko?#

Madoko is an extension of Markdown for scholarly papers. In essence, it is a competitor to LaTeX, which, along with Microsoft Word, is the way the vast majority of such papers are presently authored.

Madoko targets both HTML and LaTeX output in order to be compatible with existing workflows while encouraging the creation of HTML versions of papers which are presently rare as PDF is the default for publishing even though it is sub-optimal for reading on a screen.

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Rarely drawing screen in SDL

The problem#

Working on the same screensaver as yesterday, we want to minimize CPU usage. Since the screensaver is a clock showing hours and minutes, there's no need to do anything except once a minute to change the time display. Optimally, the process would only be scheduled once a minute, exactly when the minute changed, to draw the screen.

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SDL screensaver hangs on exit

The problem#

I was modifying a screensaver written using SDL and noticed that sometimes there were many instances of it left running, even after unlocking the screen. Another bug was causing the screensaver to use 100% CPU, resulting in it using up all of my processing power just for a simple screensaver.

The solution#

Make the program exit immediately when it receives a SIGTERM signal by including the function

void exitImmediately(int sig) {
    abort();
}

and making the SIGTERM signal handler call it:

signal(SIGTERM, exitImmediately);

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Useful vim plugins

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Vim plugins#

The real power of Vim and the other text editor comes not from their complicated key combinations, but their programmability. Vim uses its own language Vim script while Emacs uses a dialect of Lisp called Emacs Lisp. Both have large communities who have authors many plugins.

A great source for Vim plugins is [Vim.org][vim-scipts], which also has a wiki about Vim with additional information on some of the plugins and lots of tips on how to better use Vim.

Plugin managers#

While, Vim does have basic support for plugins via .vba files, also known as vimball archives, it's easier to use a plugin manager. I recommend Vundle, which is easy to install and use.

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Listing files into a file

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The problem#

$ ls > file

doesn't do what you expect:

$ touch foo
$ touch bar
$ ls > filelist
$ cat filelist
bar
filelist
foo

You probably didn't expect, or want, filelist to be listed in filelist.

The solution#

$ filelist=$(ls); echo "$filelist" >filelist

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Pi in shell

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Calculating π the hard way#

In honor of Pi Day, I was going to try to write a script that computed π in shell, but given the lack of floating point support, I decided it would be too messy. If you want to see hard to follow code to generate π, I highly recommend the IOCCC entry westley.c from 1998, the majority of which is an ASCII art circle which calculates its own area and radius in order to estimate π. The hint file suggests looking at the output of

$ cc -E westley.c

The 2012 entry, endoh2 is also a pretty amazing π calculator.

Getting π#

Instead, I will just generate π the shell way: using another program.

$ python -c 'import math; print(math.pi)'
3.14159265359

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Better fonts through ligatures

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Typographic ligatures#

Typographic ligatures are a feature of a font where multiple characters are combined as one to improve readability. For example, if you look closely at the ffi and fl in the following, you'll notice they look slightly different with ligatures (normal):

office, float

and without ligatures:1

of‌f‌i‌c‌e, f‌l‌o‌a‌t

You can in fact create a font that declares any sequence of characters to be a ligature to be rendered differently. Because the difference is only at the font rendering level, copy and paste still work as expected. This allows us to choose sequences of characters that really act like single characters in a given programming language and render them as such.

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Making :w work everywhere

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The problem#

After using Vim as my primary editor for a while, I find myself trying to use vi-style keyboard shortcuts in other contexts. Usually resulting in :w in middle of whatever I was writing as saving is a natural thing to do when pausing.

There's a few ways to fix this:

  1. Get used to the fact that not everything supports vi-style keyboard shortcuts.
  2. Change the keyboard shortcuts of the programs I do use.
  3. Use Vim for everything.

The first option is suboptimal because vi-style keyboard shortcuts are very useful. Luckily, in many cases there's ways to get them.

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Blend effect slideshow using shell

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The goal#

Given a series of images, present them in a video with a blend effect between the images. The frames between the input frames should gradually transition between the previous and next image. This, and other transition effects, could likely be implemented using a slideshow generator, but it can also be done quite easily using a shell script.

The script#

The final script I wrote is blend.sh. The following commands fetch and run it:

$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dperelman/2b4b86233aa13d13c0ab/raw/91c7988e27288af8aeb25ade11d0cab90355702f/blend.sh
$ chmod +x blend.sh
$ ./blend.sh slideshow.mkv first.png second.jpg third.gif
$ mplayer slideshow.mkv

The input images may be in any format. The extension of slideshow.mkv will be used by FFmpeg to guess the desired video format (H.264 in a Matroska Multimedia Container for .mkv).

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