BringGo Review: right idea, worst possible implementation

By on June 29, 2015 - Geekery

I’ve been driving an EV car all week. Fun! Now I don’t tend think much of stock car stereos. Often when I bought a new car, replacing the stock radio was something I did on the way home before the car even got to my house. But I was, frankly, blown away with how good the stereo in the Chevy Spark EV was. HD FM radio? Check. Tightly integrated Sirius radio? Check. Bluetooth audio streaming? Check. Best display for interacting with my iPod I’ve ever seen. How, like, I would keep this!

When Chevy told me that the navigation system in the car worked with an app on my phone, I was very excited. “Someone finally got the right idea!” No more horrible built in Navigation. No more multi-hundred dollar map updates. I was so happy, I had such high hopes. I immediately downloaded the BringGo application and… Read More »

Write books in the HTMLBook standard using Scrivener

By on October 20, 2014 - Geekery

My favorite writing tool is Scrivener. I wrote the Learning MCollective book for O’Reilly Media entirely in Scrivener, exporting to AsciiDoc. I was afraid this wouldn’t work very well, but it ended up working just great. You can get my export settings and processing scripts from https://github.com/jorhett/scrivener-asciidoc.

O’Reilly Media promotes and utilizes a lot of web standards. They have switched over to using HTMLBook for new projects. HTMLBook is an XHTML5-based standard for the authoring and production of both print and digital books.

To support this in my upcoming book, I created a Scrivener compile format which outputs chapter headings in HTMLBook. Then I wrote some scripts to process the output from Scrivener compile to make valid HTMLBook, cut into parts and adjusted for the expectations of O’Reilly Atlas.

I have released my Scrivener compile settings and scripts so that others can use them. They are open source under an Apache license at https://github.com/jorhett/scrivener-htmlbook.

Yahoo no longer accepts Abuse reports. Time to blacklist Yahoo.

By on August 2, 2014 - Geekery, Opinion Tags:

Today I received a spam that the headers clearly showed was generated within Yahoo and went directly from their mail system to mine. So I reported it to their published Abuse address, so that Yahoo would know their user is spamming. I received back the following e-mail:

This is an automated response; please do not reply to this email as replies will not be answered.

To report spam, security, or abuse-related issues involving Yahoo!'s services, please go to http://abuse.yahoo.com.

Thank you,

Yahoo! Customer Care

Fail #1: They are required to accept abuse reports at their published Abuse address.

Fail #2: Going to this address gets redirected to http://help.yahoo.com/abuse/ which has hundreds of different links, but after spending 30 minutes looking through every single one of them not a single one provides a place to report a spam sent by Yahoo.

Result: Yahoo no longer accepts spam reports. I am therefore blocking Yahoo on every mail gateway for which I have control, and listing them in the Pink Providers blacklist effective immediately.

Compile Scrivener books into Asciidoc

By on July 14, 2014 - Geekery, News Tags: ,

My favorite writing tool is Scrivener. I wrote the Learning MCollective book for O’Reilly Media entirely in Scrivener. I was afraid this wouldn’t work very well, but it ended up working just great.

To do this, I created a Scrivener compile format which set up chapter headings correctly with a link target above them as recommended. Then I wrote some scripts to process the output from Scrivener compile to make AsciiDoc in the flavor that O’Reilly wanted.

I have released my Scrivener compile settings and scripts so that others can use them should they want to produce asciidoc from Scrivener. They are open source under an Apache license at https://github.com/jorhett/scrivener-asciidoc.