Why the iPod interface is crap

• You cannot delete songs from the device. So everytime that fucking song starts again, you can do nothing but hope never forgetting to delete it on next sync time.
• When you browse your songs by artist, only those with an album tag will be shown. Delete all album tags but one for all songs of a given artist for enhanced hilarity.
• There is no way to play randomly any set, only the full one. So, if you're in the mood to listen those music from the chillout genre, you better fuck yourself and enjoy them in alphabetical order (again).
• It's too easy to let it playing alone, so next time you pick it from the table, the battery is probably gone.
• There is no way to enhance their storage capacity with external memory cards or so. Yes, this is on purpose. And yes, this is not an interface issue but a design one. My ass.

Fuck you, Apple. Your interface is shit no matter what your fanboys say.

All this is for the touch wheel ones, never used one of these new touch thingies. Yes, I'm an old fart.

Note to Facebook web programmers

When you talk about Entering an URL, you are implying that it's a real URL, that is, a string prefixed by an URL schema (the http+colon+slash+slash funny gibberish). By fixing this in your 'Import blog' option in your Notes application you can save several minutes of time to insignificant morons like me.

Or may be this is just a problem in the spanish translation.

Minimum Profit 5.1.3 released

A new version of the Minimum Profit text editor has been released, including the following features:

• A new Qt4 driver (adapted from the KDE4 driver).
• A new hexadecimal viewer.
• New action 'open_dropped_files', to open files dropped from the underlying system GUI.
• Improved file encoding autodetection by looking at the UTF BOM marks.
• New configuration option keep_eol, to keep the original end of line sequence each document had.
• Fixed some clipboard issues, as replacing the selected block when pasting and some crashes.
• win32 executable has been renamed to mp-5.exe.
• The status line format string can also include the %e token to show the encoding used by the document.
• Fixed win32 input processing in non-latin environments.
• Setting an empty encoding (to fall back to system defaults) always work.

Gruta version 2.2.1 released

Version 2.2.1 of the Gruta CMS, codenamed "Montecatini", has been released. The following changes were made:

• Templates are now stored inside source backends instead of having a special directory of plain files. So, it's no longer necessary to prepend the writable directory to the template path in Gruta::Template::Artemus creation.
• The TT template toolkit has been officially deprecated.
• New global CGI variable set_date, to force a date to be assumed as today, to be used to take a look at how would a page be shown in the given date. Only usable by a logged-in admin user.
• A new script gruta_mksite, to help in the creation of a new site.
• A new command, set_story_date, has been added to bin/gruta.
• The full set of mod_rewrite keywords to be used if static_urls is set has been expanded.

 RewriteRule ^/([0-9]+)\.html$		/?t=INDEX&offset=$1		[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)\.html$	/?t=SEARCH_BY_DATE&from=$1&to=$2 [PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/tag/(.+)\.html$		/?t=SEARCH_BY_TAG&tag=$1	[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/tag/$			/?t=TAGS			[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/top/$			/?t=TOP_TEN			[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/(.+)/$			/?t=TOPIC&topic=$1		[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/(.+)/index\.html$		/?t=TOPIC&topic=$1		[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/(.+)/([0-9]+)\.html$	/?t=TOPIC&topic=$1&offset=$2	[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/(.+)/(.+)\.html$		/?t=STORY&topic=$1&id=$2	[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/rss\.xml$			/?t=RSS				[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/sitemap\.xml$		/?t=SITEMAP			[PT,L]
 RewriteRule ^/style\.css$		/?t=CSS				[PT,L]

New Minimum Profit 5.1.3 preliminary release for testers

I'm in the process of releasing version 5.1.3, that will include significant changes to the way character encodings are autodetected. I would like to know if there are any regressions for locales and encodings I could overlooked.

The downloadable tarball is the following:

http://triptico.com/download/mp-5.1.3-dev.tar.gz

I plan to release a Windows binary version really soon, probably this evening. This is specially important as Windows has its own set of potential problems regarding character encodings.

I've also written a document describing the new behaviour regarding encodings (the document is also included in the tarball):

Minimum Profit character encoding support

If you find any issue, please mail me to angel@triptico.com or subscribe to the Minimum Profit mailing list by writing to mp-subscribe@lists.triptico.com and say it there.

Update: Here it's the MS Windows binary:

http://triptico.com/download/mp-5.1.3-dev.exe

How to enter spanish quotes (« and ») under MS Windows

The crappy way: Alt-174 for « and Alt-175 for ».

The more definitive, but not at all not cumbersome way: download a thing called Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FB7B3DCD-D4C1-4943-9C74... and create your own keyboard layout, probably using a standard one as template. This program will prepare a .msi installer for you. After executing it go to Control Panel and set your layout as the default one.

You most probably want to set « to AltGr-Z and » to AltGr-X, as any Linux user know and love.

Or take my spanish keyboard layout: keybspao.msi with source keybspao.klc.

Update: If you use Windows Vista, you'll need at least Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4. My keyboard layout source file is still functional, but you need one of this installers instead:

• keybspao_i386.msi
• keybspao_ia64.msi
• keybspao_amd64.msi

«Terra Incognita», a la venta en Amazon.com

Mi libro Terra Incognita (1997) ya se vende en Amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ADC3ZU/sr=8-11/qid=1243405490/ref=olp_produ...

Minimum Profit 5.1.2 released

A new version of the Minimum Profit text editor has been released. It includes the following features:

• The grep action can now be recursive.
• New syntax color for special documentation blocks.
• Fix searching into empty selected blocks (this was bug #1269).
• New action section_list, that shows a list of sections in the current document to jump to. Sections are usually function definitions and special marks in programming languages.
• New action seek_misspelled, to search the next misspelled word. It has been assigned to keycode f5.
• New action ignore_last_misspell, to add the last misspelled word found by seek_misspelled to a whitelist so it won't be found again.
• New action seek_repeated_word, to search for words starting or ending with the same number of letters up to a maximum distance. It's controlled by the new configuration directives mp.config.rw_num_chars and mp.config.rw_max_dist. It has been assigned to keycode f6 (this keycode was previously assigned to join_paragraph, which has no keybinding now).
• The action open_templates_file has been fixed.
• Several GTK interface updates by fellow developer Sebastian Vöcking.
• New command line option -d, to change the working directory.
• Several fixes to the win32 driver; word wrapping, combobox drop-down sizes, underlined text.
• Avoid hanging if the external ispell program is broken.
• The dump() function now dumps its argument as MPSL code.

Semana de monstruos

Igual que hice en enero y febrero con Las Tijeras del Viajero (1996), hoy queda inaugurada la semana monstruosa: desde hoy hasta el sábado publicaré diariamente un minirelato del libro Las Tijeras del Viajero. Monstruos (1997).

Basta con suscribirse al siguiente RSS:

http://triptico.com/?t=RSS;tag=las%20tijeras%20del%20viajero.%20monstruos

Artemus 4.1.2 released

Version 4.1.2 of the Artemus template toolkit has been released. The following changes were made:

• New template function sort.
• New template function reverse.
• Templates can be loaded from external sources by using the new loader_func argument to new().
• The Perl module Artemus is now an alias for the Artemus4 module, as a way to smooth the future transition to version 5. No changes need to be done.

Gruta version 2.2.0 released

Version 2.2.0 of the Gruta CMS, codenamed "Osmannoro", has been released. This release needs Artemus version 4.1.2. The following changes were made:

• Story rendering is cached, resulting in faster page loading.
• An existing story can be copied to another topic from the story edition form.
• The template stories_by_date has changed the order of their output values; now they are topic_id, id and date.
• The RSS template now accepts an optional CGI argument tag, to get feeds on stories by tag.
• Multiple sources are no longer supported; it never really worked well, made the code cumbersome and had no real advantage after all. The cgi caller needs not to be changed, as the sources argument is still supported (only the first one is used, though), but the scalar source is preferred now.
• The file format in the FS source has changed; the .META extension has been changed to .M, and .TAGS to .T. Also, new files appear in the stories directory with the .A and .B extensions, holding the rendered abstract and story body, respectively. The transition is made automatically on the first run, no manual operation is needed.
• New argument hard_top_ten_limit to Gruta::Source::FS, to set the maximum number of stories to be tested when generating the top read stories index (previously hardcoded to 100).
• New argument min_size_for_gzip to Gruta::CGI, to set the minimum size for the output body to be Gzip compressed (previously hardcoded to 10000).
• If a story pointed by a story:// pseudo-url has a publication date in the future, only the title is shown (i.e., it's not clickable).
• The Mbox source is officially deprecated.
• Static URLs are also generated for the CSS, RSS and SITEMAP pages. The following mod_rewrite rule must be added to the ones suggested in the previous version:

 RewriteRule ^/style\.css$     /?t=CSS              [PT]

Nueva edición impresa de «Terra Incognita»

La segunda edición en papel de mi libro Terra Incognita (1997) está lista para comprarla en la tienda Lulu.com.

El texto incluye algunas correcciones de fallos tipográficos y estilo. Pero lo más interesante es la nueva presentación y diseño hecho por Marisa Ortega, gran profesional que además es mi hermana.

Una vez más, se demuestra que el aspecto es fundamental y lo que antes parecía un panfleto sin el menor interés ahora parece un libro de verdad.