MOTD

I hacked and sawed for months before Dave Barry finally pushed TinyX into my face, and I realized that it was exactly what the LNX-BBC needed. It was a quick day's work to get it mostly set up in a pretty good fashion.

But since we were not about to take twm, I nixed it in favor of hackedbox. The problem: hackedbox is C++, and our libstdc++.so isn't getting installed. This is giving us big headaches, as no matter how many ways we build gcc, it only ever gets bigger yet never succeeds in installing libstdc++!

It's enough to make me pine for the days when it was a separate package, and we may end up having to use a pre-2.95 version of the thing in the end as a hideous patch. GAR.

As my fiancee and I were at our calligrapher's studio the other day, I chanced to mention my interest in bookbinding. We talked for a long time, and she eventually gave me some handouts she'd made for her own bookbinding class. It turns out that calligraphy is often part of a larger discipline of manuscript, and so the creation of the entire book is taught.

This particular technique is for perfect binding without gluing the spine. Regardless of this, it is still important for the grain of the paper to run parallel to the spine.

• Assemble book-block, including one pair of endpapers (same size as book-block)
• Cut two boards: height = height of book-block, width = width of book-block - 1/8". Trim off 3/4" spine piece from each board
• If book is to be covered with paper, cut 2 reinforcing strips: length = height of book-block, width = 1-1.5"
• Make pattern for covering and cut two out of covering material. The angle on the slant around the spine piece should be 45 degrees, and there should be a little bit of a gap between the corners of the spine piece and the left flap's beginning that's a little wider than the thickness of the spine piece.
• Apply paste to the covering and place boards as shown. Apply paste to the reinforcing strip, then rub the strip well into the joint and onto the boards. Tri the corners at foreedge of head and tail. Turn over at head and tail, then at foreedge and spine. Press.
• Cut two more endpapers to fit inside of the boards, allowing 1/8" of book covering to show on all four sides. Paste them up, apply them to covered boards, and press.
• (optional) Make spine strip out of thin chip or heavy paper. Width = thickness of book. Length = length of spine plus 1.5". Trim off two pieces: 3/4" each, from the strip.
• (optional) Make pattern for spine covering and cut it out of covering material. Apply paste and place strip pieces on it as shown on left. Turn over 1/4" at each end and apply paste again. Knock up book-block square at head and spine, clamp it, then wrap spine covering around spine. Press.
• Measure board and mark for sewing holes. The distance between holes is not mandated, but the number of holes must be odd. Allow approximately 3/4" from outside holes to head and tail edges.
• Place boards around book-block and knock up square at head and spine. Clamp it together. With awl, heavy needle, or drill, make holes -- which should be large enough to hold three cords. Flatten edges of holes with your bone folder if necessary.
• Cut cord (6 * book height) and lace up book. Finish off with square knot and poke it into hole, or trim lace ends close to hole and secure with a bit of white glue in hole.

There is a pretty good coverage of how to do the final lacing at http://www.sff.net/people/Brook.West/bind/bindit.html

I just noticed that the clock rolled back to 1am, thanks to daylight savings ending here in California.

I'm curious as to whether or not this entry (roughly 1:05PST) will be placed later than the previous one (1:27PDT).

Okay, so I was bored, so I went ahead and did a green button. I now find it utterly baffling that this little trick isn't more widespread. I see all these stupid little GIFs for the syndication buttons on all these sites I find.

So the CSS for it is just this:

.button {   background: #ff6600;
    color: white;
    border-left:   1px solid #ff9a57;
    border-top:    1px solid #ffc8a4;
    border-right:  1px solid #7d3302;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #3f1a01;
    padding: 0px 0.5em 0px 0.5em;
    font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
    font-weight: bold;
    font-size: small;
    text-decoration: none; }

Then you make your link <a class="button" href="rss.xml">XML</a> and up comes a little orange button. You can even put all thet style nonsense into the style= attribute of the a tag if you want.

So nobody should notice, but I switched from the Perl version of blosxom to the python version. One bonus this gives is the ability to define little filter modules to the text. I had hand-hacked in the blank-lines-separate-paragraphs bit to the Perl version, but I've been able to do still more by simply hacking pyblosxom to use a default filter.

It can cache the files if things get too slow, but I don't imagine that will happen.

The most notable changes are that URLs such as http://www.lnx-bbc.org/ and http://www.lnx-bbc.org/logo.png will be translated (the second one was "http://www.lnx-bbc.org/logo.png", and the URL has to be separated by whitespace -- I may add angle brackets or something to the mix at some point).

Also, you can do emphatic text with the application of asterisks. (that was just "emphatic text" -- again, spaces make the magic happen).

I HAVE NICE STAMPS. Do YOU have nice stamps? I HAVE NICE STAMPS.