Archive for August, 2007

Tweaked SimplyVic Theme

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

For those of you who have Dreamhost web hosting and thought the Simply-Vic Wordpress theme that comes pre-installed was classy but a bit confining, check out the recent modifications I’ve made to the theme on this very site. I’ve enlarged the graphics so that the layout is 1000px wide, enlarged the text significantly, and eliminated the awful “sIFR” text replacement technique that, while making (slightly) prettier text, causes pages to load much more slowly because a new flash applet is launched for each bit of text being replaced.

Feel free to grab any/all of the styles and images from this page, and if you want a copy of the templates you can download an archive: Modified Simply-Vic Wordpress Theme. It’s GPL, so feel free to modify and redistribute. Also, let me know in the comments what you think of my modifications.

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Hacker Alarm Clock

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

I was at the ELCA Central States Synod Candidacy Retreat with my wife last night, and we realized far too late that we lacked a travel alarm clock. Also lacking an internet connection, it was impossible to download an alarm clock program from the Ubuntu apt repositories. Instead, I quickly coded up this Hacker Alarm Clock in perl. It sounds just like the alarm clock we have at home! Who says that you can’t use a Computer Science degree in ministry? If you can think of other approaches, post them in the comments.


#!/usr/bin/perl

my $s = time();
my $e = $s + (3600 * .005);

print "Starting at: $s\n";

while (time() < $e) {
print "Ending at: $e (".($e-time())." secs from now)\n";
sleep 5;
}
print "Press Control-C (or Mute) to turn off alarm.\n";

open( DSP, '>‘, ‘/dev/dsp’ );
while (1) { print DSP (\001 x 150); sleep 1; }

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Testing out Google Maps API

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

Google just released an easy way to embed a Google Map in your own website via a very easy-to-use API. You can read more about it on the Google Maps API site. The best part is that it is completely free for non-commercial use, and it offers many different ways to mark up your maps - all of the tools from the new “My Maps” features can be used!

So, here goes a test to see how it works:


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Greek Out!

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Well, we’re deep in the dank murky corners of the different Greek verb forms in week 3 of summer Greek. One of my classmates commented that he’s about to “Greek Out,” and I liked that phrase so much that I named this Koine Greek verb quiz program after it.

As I understand it, we need to be able to take the other principle parts of various verbs and remember which verb (especially irregular ones) goes with which first principle part. So feel free to Greek Out on this verb recognition quiz.

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