New Selenemacs packages are here:

• selenemacs.js
• selenemacs.el

I fixed some of the more obvious and glaring bugs.

For now the Selenemacs main page will be Here. If/when there is more interest, I'll put up a proper SVN repository and a page on bunnywiki.

In my previous entry, I described how one could set up selenium to runs tests from emacs, via the Moz REPL. The most painful part of all of that is setting up the REPL to run. After every firefox startup, you have to manually go to tools menu, and manually select 'MozLab' and then 'Start REPL'. YUCK.

It would be nice if you could somehow automatically run javascript on Firefox startup.

Enter UserChrome.js. With a little more polish, some documentation, and something more then a MozillaZine forum posting for a website; this little extension is poised to become the new GreaseMonkey. It will be the GreaseMonkey for the hard core.

Once you have installed the extension, you can now run Javascript on the creation of every new Mozilla window (even sub windows like prefs, downloads, etc.) or just the main window. From this point, it is almost painless to start the REPL:

// Anonymous function application to 
(function(){
	var repl = Components.classes["@hyperstruct.net/mozlab/mozrepl;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIMozRepl);
	if (repl && (!repl.isActive()))
	{
		repl.start(4242);
	}
})();

This gives you a good example of how to interact with other Firefox plugins/addons through Javascript.

Twitter upon first glance, is daft. If you were to click on that link right now you would see what appears to be disjoint messages from everyone answering the question "what are you doing right now?". If you are like me, that is probably the most inane thing EVAR, and you'll close that tab and be done with it. My god! It's worse then blogging! That being said, visiting the twitter main page is hardly a reasonable introduction to twitter at all.

In fact, I would say the best way to get introduced to twitter is to ignore the front page and join. Assuming you are one of my friends, add me and then you'll start seeing what it is all about. What everyone is doing is so absolutely unimportant to my own life that I just don't care. However, what my friend are doing can have some really serious impact to inspire, motivate and connect. Here are a few examples:

• mux twitters constantly about the time he spends in the studio, consequently I am sticking to my at-least an hour a week personal promise of studio time (but I've really spent 3 or 4) This is really quite a feat given how little time I have been in the studio before then.
• I've twittered about a track that I am listening to obsessively, which prompted Stormchild to go download and listen, and we've both been tarding over it ever sense.
• It's become a J-Pop support group between people who's identity will be protected.
• General questions can be posted via twitters, and answered in a matter of hours

Essentially Twitter is like broadcast IM. There have been plenty of times that I have wanted to broadcast something to my friends, but didn't feel it is worthwhile to actually bug someone with a message; in this cause I would just twitter it up.

but not only that, it tends to tighten ones social circle. I feel that I am getting tighter with my twitter friends, by virtue of this alternate communication channel.

The important thing about twitter isn't "What are you doing?" but rather, "What do you think is important about what you are doing?" I don't twitter that I am on the bus. I twitter about what I think is important, like The Key to a good morning routine or when discovering/creating A new turn of phrase. I think that is something special, these glimpses into what people feel is important enough in their daily lives.

All this being said, I am very glad that I got into the Status Message thing through twitter (and with the cool twitter group that I have) instead of through Facebook.

On top of it all, Twitter is RESTful. REST is cool.

Reading character-based Asian languages is really cool in that you look at the characters and your brain responds by directly understanding the idea behind the characters. There is no need to know the pronunciation of the character. Now, even though you may not know how to pronounce every Western word you read either, there is a profound difference: it is rare to look at a word and instantly know what it means, but not be able to say it. It is far more common to be able to pronounce a word, but have no idea what it means, right?

From Japanese for the Western Brain.

To drive the example home a little more, in a previous entry I showed you the Kanji for sun, moon, bright, tree, east, and forest. If you can remember those characters, you can read those Japanese (or even Chinese) words. But that won't help you at all if you ever want to say that word outloud.

The very thought me taking that final step of being an Otaku Gaijin fills me with a certain amount of pride and dread (pread? dride?). Nothing says "Hard Core Geek" like learning Japanese.

What has made me take the plunge is a rather long rant, involving a whiteboard, lots of beers, and Jason Stormchild. He was showing me some Kanji, and how some kanji have an etymological basis. To the right, you can see the kanji for 'sun' and 'moon'. When you put those two characters together, you get the kanji for 'bright'. Similarly, the kanji for 'forest', is 3 trees done up together. Finally, there is the kanji for 'east', which is a combination of the kanji for sun and the kanji for tree, so it is like the sun rising in the east, peeking out through the trees.

It was this explanation (which, was way more poetically put by Jason) plus the repeated assertions that I would be one of the people to get a lot out of learning kanji that made me take the plunge. Learning a new verbal language has the same kind of potential as learning a new programming language, except, I rather suspect, that instead of changing the way you think about programming, it changes the way you think about thinking.

I found this group of icons at the bottom of my Firefox status bar, and it pretty much sums up my thoughts. I've been using GreaseMonkey to help out the team here at work. Small, simple little scripts, that seem to have a huge effect. It's fun to write these little scripts, and it's fun to take on a more "Research and Development" capacity. Maybe one day they will pay me to do that full time. That would be awesome.

There is a great book called Cambodia: A book for people who find television too slow. Well, I had an idea, what if there was a podcast of sorts for people who find YouTube too slow? You would call it "Angkor Wat" Of course.

What would you feature on it? How about I whet your appetite with a few links:

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: part one and part two.
Clay Shirky, Making Digital Durable - Seminars About Long Term Thinking (video broken about 22 mins into it, but it fixes itself.)
Scheme as an introductory language

Ideally I—and perhaps we, if we can make it a community endeavor—can come up with at least one video per day, tagged with 'angkorwat' on del.icio.us, and suddenly we start to build our own personal distributed television station about really cool shit.