unwordwrap a file

I hate when I get a text file that I want to load onto my Palm device, and I find it’s already full of newlines. When I use txt2pdbdoc the pre-wrapped lines end up making the display of the file a headache to use. It’s like old emails you used to receive:

Hi, my name is Owen
Williams
and for some reason
my
software is a little narrower
than
yours so everything
looks
like crap.

Well here’s a python script that will remove newlines from any text file. It’s really quick and stupid. (See extended entry)
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New York Trip

Char and I took a weekend trip to New York City last weekend, using the
hip, uber-secret-except-everyone-knows-about-it chinese bus. The idea is, you pay
10 bucks and they take you to New York. Good deal.

I didn’t take many pictures, because I’m lame. I had planned to buy a film camera
at the gigantic B&H Pro photo/video store, but
as two separate people told me later, “they’re all Jews” so it was closed on Saturday.
So I wasn’t able to get a camera.

Our inability to get into B&H was a theme repeated throughout the weekend, as we would try
to find stores and invariably they were closed, in Brooklyn, or otherwise unlocatable.
Eventually we accepted our fate and just went into the stores we could find, but at the
end of the whole thing we felt we were only “moderately successful.”

The part of the trip that went ok was seeing Rent. Like the chinese bus, Rent is
sort of a hip thing to do, although unlike the bus we’re late to the Rent party by about
eight years. The show was pretty good. I don’t see a lot of musicals, so I don’t
have an internal set of standards to go by, but I enjoyed myself. The script is very 90s,
including such memes as: everyone has AIDS! a CYBER-somethingorother! Everyone lives in a loft!
“Living in America at the end of the Millenium!” Somehow we can afford film and processing for
our hip 16mm camera! Something else that probably dampened my enjoyment was that I knew I
would have trouble understanding what was going on, so I was concentrating perhaps a
little too intensely on understanding the lyrics rather than just relaxing. I still
managed to miss a key plot point, but it could have been worse.

Anyway so here is the one good picture I managed to take.

[800×600][1600×1200]
Duck cleaners!

pcmcia network device not working in fedora core 2

symptom: In Fedora Core 2, a pcmcia networking card doesn’t work on boot. This is with kernels 2.6.6 and greater. Oddly, 2.6.5-385 (which came with the distro) works fine. After boot, it is impossible to get the card to start up, and shutting down causes a hang. iwconfig seems to hang. Sometimes completely restarting pcmcia and reloading the yenta_socket module solves the problem.
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Fahrenheit 9/11

We went camping last weekend, and of course I suck so there are no pictures, but
when we got back we saw Fahrenheit 9/11. We tried to see it at 7:30, but forty-five minutes
before showtime it was sold out and there was a huge line for it. We got tickets for the
10:00pm showing, and got in line at 9:00pm. It was worth it — I hate getting crappy seats at
a good movie.

[800×600][1600×1200]
From left to right: me, Jesi, Mike, Char, Adam “W” Katz, and Kate

Extreme Engineering

The show I’ve been working on starts airing next week! I was in charge of Online Editing, which is to say I converted the edited show from low-quality standard definition to pristine HDTV which no one will see anywhere. I get an Assistant Editor credit for this first one, but I’ll get the full credit starting with show three. 🙂

Here’s a little flyer they had me make up for the announcement:

a backtrace with umph

not what you expect to see when debugging an app:

Unhandled Exception: System.DllNotFoundException: sqlite
in <0x00053> (wrapper managed-to-native) Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteConnection:sqlite_open (string,int,string&)
in [0x00031] (at /cvs/mcs/class/Mono.Data.SqliteClient/Mono.Data.SqliteClient/SqliteConnection.cs:157) Mono.Data.SqliteClient.SqliteConnection:Open ()
in [0x00063] (at /home/owen/src/gnome/dashboard/index/sources-manager.cs:101) Dashboard.Index.SourcesManager:.ctor (string)
in [0x00070] (at /home/owen/src/gnome/dashboard/index/index-manager.cs:93) Dashboard.Index.IndexManager:.ctor (string)
in [0x00013] (at /home/owen/src/gnome/dashboard/index/text-indexer.cs:38) FuckNut:Main (string[])