michael orlitzky

Contact

If you can't see my email address above, you've got javascript disabled. If you're bright enough to do that, you can probably figure out my email address when I say that it's <my_first_name>@<my_last_name>.com.

About Me

Did I ever tell you about the time Michael Orlitzky took me out to go get a drink with him? We go off looking for a bar and we can't find one. Finally Michael Orlitzky takes me to a vacant lot and says, "Here we are." We sat there for a year and a half until sure enough, someone constructs a bar around us. Well, the day they opened we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burned the place to the ground. Michael Orlitzky yelled over the roar of the flames, "Always leave things the way you found 'em!"

Did I ever tell you about the time Michael Orlitzky and I were in a production of The King and I? Anyway, on opening night, Michael Orlitzky chloroforms the entire cast, and slowly eats them in front of the audience for two hours. The production got pretty good reviews.

Articles

  1. Can't Rename Local Windows Users?
  2. Closure under a Binary Operation is Redundant
  3. Error 1740 from Task Scheduler
  4. GoDaddy's Spam Filter is Broken
  5. How to Enable Ctrl-S on the OLPC (Sugar)
  6. On the Reputation of Aaron Burr
  7. Related Concepts in Algebra
  8. SDL Key Codes for the XO Gamepad
  9. Streaming Files to Internet Explorer over HTTPS
  10. Why X-UA-Compatible is Stupid
  11. Windows File Search is Broken

Code

You can browse my darcs repositories. Anonymous read access is available via:

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darcs get http://michael.orlitzky.com/darcs/{$project_name}

I've recently begun using git for version control. Anything I've got in git can be found in my git repositories. Clone a project like so:

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git clone http://michael.orlitzky.com/git/{$project_name}
  1. hfusk

    A Haskell implementation of a Fusker. Right now it doesn't download anything – it just spits out the URLs (or whatever you gave it as input). You can use cURL or xargs/wget to download the URLs if you want. The littlest of documentation is at the top of the source file.

  2. htnef

    htnef is a pure-Haskell parser for the worst format on earth. Microsoft invented TNEF so that they could make winmail.dat shortly before they killed my brother. It uses Data.Binary to parse the file. For now, it just spits the results at you on the command line and saves any attachments to the current working directory. Or segfaults.

  3. hzsff

    Zed Shaw came up with a(nother) stupid, ugly, featureless, feed syndication format called Zed's STFU Feed Format and I love him for it. hzsff is a stupid, ugly, featureless parser for the ZSFF format. It's written in Haskell and uses the Parsec library.

  4. nagios-mode

    nagios-mode is an Emacs mode for Nagios configuration files. I shouldn't get your hopes up, though – it barely works. My Nagios server project has been "on hold" for over a year now, and I haven't had time to work on this script.

    However, it's a lot more useful than nothing if you want a starting point for your own mode, or just some simple syntax highlighting. The last version I used it with was Nagios 2.0.

  5. pictar

    I wrote a Python program? A while ago I ported my pictar application to Python as an exercise – in what I'm unsure. Anyway, here it is.

    Pictar is basically an image viewer. It will show you all of the images in a directory. Symlink the main pictar executable somewhere in your path, say, /usr/local/bin. Then just type 'pictar' when you're in a directory to view the images located in that directory. You can also pass it a relative path to another directory, e.g.

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    pictar images/

    There are a million image viewers around, but what separates pictar is that I like it. I like it because, unlike other image viewers, it uses my favorite image viewer: my web browser. Pictar by default will launch '/usr/bin/firefox' to view the XHTML page which it creates.

    Currently, the only way to change anything is to edit the source. It's only Python though, so get over it.

  6. Mediawiki Third-party Database Authentication Plugin

    When implementing Mediawiki, one often wants to use some other database for authentication. For example, if your site is a forum, you might want to use the username/password from the forum as the Mediawiki login.

    To do this, you need an authentication plugin. The third-party database authentication plugin is about the simplest authentication plugin one could write. You give it some database info and two queries, and it will query that database to determine whether or not authorization should succeed.

    There's some documentation in the repository, but for the most part, you should be able to figure out what to do with it. It's really simple.

  7. whatever-dl

    A standalone script to download videos from a number of websites. Update: I caved and added Youtube support.

    So far as I know, this is the only standalone program capable of downloading the videos from these sites:

    This replaces redtube-dl, howcast-dl, etc. The script requires Ruby, but I removed the wget dependency. Like so:

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    whatever-dl <url>

    I recently fixed the bug requiring you to run the executable from the project root; so now, it should work from anywhere. You can even symlink it and the require methods still won't crap.

Websites

  1. txtor

    Txtor allows you to send free text (SMS) messages over the internet, even if you don't know the recipient's cell provider.

  2. obfuscatr / obfuscateordie

    Obfuscatr encodes email addresses or other "sensitive" information for use in XHTML or Javascript. Obfuscate or Die is just a stupid pun.

What I Want

  1. Amazon Wish List

The following sections look like crap in Internet Explorer, but it's not my fault.

News, Etc.

Resources

  1. I created a stylesheet for printing Good Math Bad Math articles. I apply it via the Web Developer extension in Firefox; but do with it what you will.
  2. I also made a print stylesheet for math-blog.com. What is it with these blog themes?