The builders have started working on my porch, and it seems it is more rotten than first thought. The power connection is interesting too.

I said this repeatedly at the Quiz Master at the pub tonight –> We should have only got 3 points in the sports round, but for some unknown reason they gave us 5, propelling us into a tie-break for second place –> Guess of the number of Instant Kiwi players, which we won. My team mates were not very keen to point out the mistake, and honestly I was happy to win too. After all it’s been a while since we made a placing at pub-quiz.

Attended NZLUG where Glen gave a talk and lab on PXE booting. The different menu programs were new to me.

I’ve registered for the linux.conf.au conference being held 18-23 January in Wellington. This is also a test of my feed to Planet LCA2010.

I think it is excellent that as part of the terms and conditions Australians are required to note that “New Zealand is a country in its own right”.

So, who else is going? It’ll be great, I’m sure.

I’m also going to the Kiwi Py Con on in Christchurch, this weekend coming. I’ll write more about it soon.

The RenoufTxt Algorithm: Tim came up with the idea of using an automatic txt compression on fixed length fields, where the input being entered is just a little bit too long for the field size. It’d be better to increase the size of the field, but maybe there might be some situation where that is not possible. This was back when I had more free time, so I coded it up. It was a good excuse to write some Javascript (I should say ECMAscript) code anyway. Javascript is a very interesting language, the way objects are just dictionaries with member functions just values being stored by function name. Python is similar, but has a few more restrictions.

Here’s an example of an input field with RenoufTxt enabled on it.

Updated: It seems later versions of Firefox wisely block bits of Javascript sitting inside blog posts. You’ll have to go to this page to see the script in action.

And, here is the source code: renouftxt.js.

My implementation tries four different methods [toNumber, abbrev, innerAbbrev, removeVowels] to compress each word and tries to choose the words and methods which give the most compression for the best readability. That’s probably way over-engineered, but this was “just for fun”. A simpler implementation might just remove vowels.