DanKohn.com

My bed time sed regex:

sed 's/\ \+/\ /g' | \       # remove double justify by collapsing spaces
sed 's/^\ /\ \ \ /g' | \    # increase indent back to 3 spaces

I didn’t like the double justification lynx -dump was producing.

Few things are as science-fiction like as spider silk, which is 5 times stronger than steel, spun from the milk of transgenic goats.

I spent far too long today figuring out how to convert text/html to text/plain, whether the top level content type is text/html, multipart/alternative, multipart/related, or multipart/mixed. My specific application was wanting to offer a daily digest email of my blog entries, each one of which is generated in HTML format. Both Yahoo Groups and Mailman can only digest plaintext messages. My solution uses procmail, with munpack breaking apart the message and then Lynx replacing URLs with placeholders “[1]” and adding a references section at the bottom. The existing alternative, demime, loses too much information in the conversion process because it strips away hrefs. By contrast, here’s a sample downconverted message using my procmail script:

My message.
–<
Posted by Dan Kohn to [1]Dan Kohn's Blog at 6/16/2002 7:29:23 PM
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References

1. http://www.dankohn.com/blog/
2. http://pro2.blogger.com/

It’s amazing how much time one can spend on a little .procmailrc. But, through the magic of open source and Google, others can hopefully find this and take advantage of my wasted afternoon.

Building an Inexpensive, Powerful Parallel Machine and Using It for Numerical Simulations (Linux Beowulf clusters).

Ever wanted to read a good newsletter on Embedded Linux?

In a discussion on global warming this evening, it was pointed out that smallpox could reemerge as corpses buried in permafrost thaw out. The virus is believed to be capable of surviving several decades of deep freeze. MSNBC previously raised the possibility.

I previously posted bad geek humor — “This sentence has threee erors.” — but I didn’t say why I liked it. Basically, a dumb joke evokes both the incompleteness theorem and the unknowability of the universe.

Whitehead and Russell (1927) devised a hierarchy of “types” in order to eliminate self-referential statements from Principia Mathematica, which purported to derive all of mathematics from logic. A set of the lowest type contained only objects (not sets), a set of the next higher type could contain only objects or sets of the lower type, and so on. Unfortunately, G