Patrick Roberts

Flying

JavaScript to Automatically Save and Restore Form Contents

Here's a simple piece of code to automatically save and restore a form's fields. It saves to localStorage. At the time this was written, it only saves text and radio inputs.

To use it:

$(rememberForm)

The module: jquery.memform.js

Requires jQuery.

Feel free to link directly to my copy.

Sir Arthur Keith's "Evolution and Ethics" Free on Kindle

Download Evolution And Ethics by Sir Arthur Keith - .mobi format for Kindle

From the foreword:

The name of Sir Arthur Keith deserves to be associated with those of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley in the study of the evolution of man. During the last half century, Keith has been the foremost British student of human phylogeny and of fossil man, and, in the opinion of many, has exhibited the greatest mastery of this subject shown by any anthropologist. In his early career Sir Arthur acquired a sound knowledge of anatomy of the great apes which he subsequently utilized in interpreting the fragmentary remains of fossil man and demonstrating their relationships to each other and to subhuman primates. Sir Arthur has always displayed an insight into the physiological, functional aspects of primate evolution almost unique among morphologists. His boldly original theories have sometimes been condemned as fantastic by more pedestrian students of human origins, but subsequent discoveries have vindicated Keith far oftener than they have confuted him. For example, he was for many years the solitary champion of the theory that anatomically modern man, Homo sapiens, existed early in the Pleistocene period, before apelike Neanderthal man lived in the caves of western Europe. This theory has been substantiated by the recent find of the Swanscombe man.

I became, in some sense, a disciple of Arthur Keith when I was a student of anthropology at Oxford nearly thirty-five years ago and was making my first essay at studying the bones of ancient man. I was working upon a collection housed in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, of which Professor Arthur Keith was then Conservator. Although Dr. Keith had no formal teaching duties, he was always ready to instruct and to guide aspiring young students. He had the faculty of building up the self-confidence of the ignorant neophyte by insinuating his own ideas and apposite excerpts from his own vast knowledge into the problem of his pupil, in such a way that the latter imagined that the solution was his own and not Keith's. Among the several great teachers I have had, none was his superior.

Few eminent anthropologists have engaged in scientific controversy as often as Sir Arthur Keith, and I know no other who has shown such consistent tolerance, fairness, and courtesy in the face of acrimonious criticism. In the present book, Sir Arthur Keith steps out of his usual role as the interpreter of man's anatomical evolution to present his conclusions upon the relation of evolution to ethics and the function of war in evolution. The findings of Sir Arthur will afford little comfort to facile political idealists who refuse to recognize the brutal and predatory course of man's rise from apedom. For those who believe that it is better to be optimistic and wrong than realistic and right, Sir Arthur's cogent essays, presented at the age of eighty years, will be unpalatable and even subversive. For myself, I have so often begun upon a theory of Keith with the opinion that he was wrong and have had to admit in the end that he was right that I may as well come forward at once to the mourners' bench without waiting for a reconviction of personal sin.

Apple Wine in Canada

If you're in Canada and you want to buy real authentic Frankfurt apple wine, you should visit AppleWine.ca: Apple Wine in Canada

Computer Generate Audio Books

I first tried another text-to-speech program, TextAloud, but the result was too poorly phrased to bear. The program didn't even interpret multiple blank lines as a new paragraph. It would just say the words on both sides of the space without any pause between. Stupid.

via www.mindmaking.info

On the blog for my book, I shared a script that uses speech synthesis to automatically record an audio book from a text file, phrasing and pronouncing it well.

Convert OpenOffice.org Writer / HTML to Kindle

 

The ebookmaker.py that I recently posted now also helps you to publish your book on Kindle. The script makes a zip of a specially formatted HTML file of your book, plus resized images, that you can upload to Amazon's DTP. Judging from the preview of my book, the conversion works well.

Luckily Kindle now supports non-US authors.

Convert OpenOffice.org Writer / HTML to ePub

I found no easy way to make a decent-looking ePub, the standard ebook format, from my book (sadly) composed in OpenOffice.org Writer. Seeing an excuse to stop writing passive prose, to write living code, I sketched a script that makes an ePub from the HTML that Writer exports:

ebookmaker.py

Example: python ebookmaker.py mybook.html

This produces mybook-clean.xhtml -- clean simple HTML of your book that you can paste into your blog or wherever -- and a mybook.epub containing resized images.

The script starts with a table of options to personalize. Those options probably don't yet offer enough control to make the script work perfectly with other books, depending on how the formatting differs from mine, but if you know a little Python and regular expressions, you can adjust the rest.

Do you know a better tool? I tried a few other converters, such as Stanza, but the results were hideous.

Let me know if you use this. It wasn't much fun to write. ePub uses XHTML, which is XML, which, if you can imagine, is the kind of formal language that a herd of UN lawyers would design.

Now that I have my ePub version, do you know any popular sites to share it on?

Safely Offer Open WiFi

I got sick of typing and retyping a 26 letter WPA key every time I or a guest brought a new wireless device to the house. There must be a way to offer unsecured WiFi while protecting my home wired network. Network segmentation - or is it segregation? - seems to be the solution. Here's how I did it.

Connect your DSL or Cable modem to the router that will offer open WiFi. Set its local IP to 10.0.0.1. The two routers must be on different subnets. They can't both use 192.168.1.x addresses.

Connect the WAN port of the 2nd router to any LAN port of the 1st. Set its WAN IP address to 10.0.0.2. Obviously, the DHCP server on the 1st router should be set not to use that address. Set the gateway and DNS to 10.0.0.1.

My second router had a few port forwards. To spare duplicating those all in the 1st router, I simply set the 1st router's DMZ to 10.0.0.2, the address of the 2nd router.

If you're a network security expert, let me know of any flaws.

(Graph drawn using yEd.)

Fric & Frac (The Ladybugs) by Christiane Walch

via fricnfracladybugs.blogspot.com

Quantum Spin

Two days ago I visited the Quantum 2 Cosmos exhibit at the Perimeter Institute.

They severely exaggerated the quantum computer display. More of a poorly presented quantum flip-flop.

On the upside, there was a gimbal rig motion simulator.

Book Cover Concept

Too classy?