Sketchpad - Dan Sketcher’s personal blog

I found this Guide to Electronic Music - it’s so comprehensive it makes my head spin… but now when someone ask me what I think of weird music variants I’ll be able to give them an answer

After the last paste-heavy post, I finally got around to doing something about wordpress’s formatting of code blocks. This site was very helpful:

http://tjulo.blogspot.com/2007/03/wordpress-and-source-code-posts.html

So, edit the file wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/editor_plugin.js.

Comment out the section that replaces pre content:

/* var startPos = -1;
while ((startPos = content.indexOf('
', startPos+1);
var innerPos = content.indexOf('>', startPos+1);
var chunkBefore = content.substring(0, innerPos);
var chunkAfter = content.substring(endPos);

var innards = content.substring(innerPos, endPos);
innards = innards.replace(/\n/g, '
');
content = chunkBefore + innards + chunkAfter;
}*/

Then I had to update my CSS so that pre used the same class as code and then change my posts over to use pre instead of code.

Next step is to fix code too so that I don’t have to think about it.

It does seem to have the side-effect of not automatically handling the escaping of < and > symbols outside those tags though, which for this post where I started with <code> and <pre> instead of code and pre, made things a bit of a mess.

Ever since I arrived in London, I’ve been wondering why the black tea I have made here has a horrible oily film on it.

Like the good noodle I am, I googled it, and it turns out that it’s because the water over here is so hard. When you boil water, it excites the calcium and magnesium salts in the water, which the tannins in the tea bind to as it brews. The oxygen in the air makes larger groups form that can no longer stay in solution and then separate from the water.

Why black tea and not green tea or coffee? It’s still there in green tea, but because there is less tannin in the green tea it’s pretty much invisible. Coffee beans have about half the tannin in them as tea leaves, so once again it’s still there but less visible. I think especially instant coffee would mask this effect because it 1. is soluble so may contain agents to assist this, and 2. is weaker in raw content then espresso. Also, I add milk to coffee so that probably masks it as well.

It has no flavour, and is not harmful, but it’s a bit gross and sticks to the inside of the cup. Thus, I have not made it far into the 100 bags I bought. Now, it seems I have to either boil the crap out of the water so that the salts become lime scale in the kettle, or filter the water first.

I’ll buy a filter.

A while ago, in a moment of inspiration/impulse purchase, I bought the domain “ozrailer.com” thinking it’d be great to put stuff there about Rails dev from, well, Oz. As of today, that idea is postponed and integrated with this site, “dansketcher.com” mainly because I started to doubt whether it was actually all that clever. It could be a bit wanky. So, Dreamhost mirror configuration, here we are!