The policy here at the UnBlog is that I only write up things I've created -- not just things I've seen. Last month, however, most all my creative output went into work, with very little time and energy left for side projects. I've got a few nearing completion, but nothing worth writing about yet.

I did manage to get a few small projects done -- some of which involved a little ingenuity:

Last weekend I was camping and the person buying the food bought frozen pizzas. I couldn't think of any good way to cook them until I saw we had some aluminum foil. We defrosted the pizzas and cut them into slices. Slices were places face-to-face, wrapped in two layers of tin foil, and then tossed into the coals of our fire. After ten minutes or so they were fished out, and they'd turned into perfectly palatable pizza-pocket-alikes. It's not good camping food, but its better than raw frozen pizza.

When getting or giving directions I always prefer a map to written directions. Maps are great because they don't become useless if you make a wrong turn. With a good map you can always find where on it you are and can always build a new route to your destination.

Unfortunately, one can't always produce a map on the spot -- especially a good map. In those cases you have to fall back on written directions. I've given and received plenty of directions, some good, but mostly bad. I'm thinking a list of guidelines to use when vetting directions could help.

When editing source files checked out from CVS I sometimes want to prevent them from going back in to source control without further edits. Until now I've just used // FIXME comments and have tried to remember to grep for FIXMEs before committing the files back.

Problem is others use FIXME comments, and sometimes I forget to grep. So I've tweaked our CVSROOT files to prevent custom FIXME tags from going in to source control.

For years I've been using garble to pull track and way point data off of my Garmin eTrex GPS. Unfortunately it produces data in a completely non-standard format. In the past I've written a little custom software to turn the garble data into maps.

Now I'm using http://gpsvisualizer.com to produce much nicer maps, but it takes data in the superior GPX format. The GPSBabel software will pull way point data off of Garmin GPSs and puts them into GPX, but it doesn't handle tracks.

I was just digging through some old files, and I came across my first web pages. They were hand written HTML done in late 1995. Among the worst of them design-wise was my 'Adopt a Vegetarian' page. It was a joke started in October 1995 wherein non-vegetarians would "adopt" vegetarians and agree to eat twice as much meat, so as to balance the vegetarian out.

The Adopt a Vegetarian website was up before most of the world had even heard of the web, and certainly before folks learned not to take anything on-line too seriously. The volume of vitriolic hate mail I got was amazing. I wish I'd have saved them. The site existed during the period when the mainstream press was writing a lot of "gee whiz, look at this crazy website" articles. I ended up getting written about in a few different publications including Der Spiegel (wikipedia), which I've got clipped and stored somewhere.

Approval voting is an alternate voting system that has many benefits as compared to Instant Run-Off Voting. For years I've been running the on-line officer elections for the local campus chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery. Last year I talked them into switching to approval voting (even though it probably violates their charter), and it worked really well. Their elections have kicked off again, and once again I'm hosting them and using my voting script.

I wrote an article that got posted on the O'Reilly Network. It sounds a little more huckster-ish than I'd like, but the tech does get explained pretty well. There's a link to the new beta 2 release of SwarmStream Public Edition at the bottom of the article.

When writing I frequently find myself searching backward, either visually or using a reverse-find, to see if I've previously used the word that I've just used. Some words, say furthermore for example, just can't show up more than once per paragraph or two without looking overused.

I was thinking that if my editor/word-processor had a feature wherein all instances of the word I just typed were briefly highlighted it would allow me to notice awkward repeats without having to actively watch for them. Nothing terribly intrusive, mind you, but just a quick flicker of highlight while I type.

When you click on a link in your browser to go to a new web page your browser sends along a Referrer: header, which tells the owner of the site that's been linked to the URL of the site where the link was found. It's a nice little feature that helps website creators know who is linking to them. Referrer headers are easily faked or disabled, but in general most people don't bother, because there's generally no harm in telling a website owner who told you about their site.