Summary

This is the first post of two about a light weight way to implement a thesaurus. It is great for what I need, which is the occasional use of a thesaurus for writing text such as this article. Once it is set up, you can forget about it and just use K whenever you want to look up a word.

A nice bonus or synergy is that the website also returns a definition for the word, so it functions as a simple dictionary as well.

The second post will deal with how to use Vim's built in syntax rule sets to provide highlighting and nice colours.

There are two or three simple steps:

1. a vim script that passes the cursor word to an external shell script.
2. a shell script that looks up the word using an online thesaurus, then parses     [continued...]

A quick note to say I haven't been posting much because   a) it is as hot as hell, too hot to use my overheating laptop; and   b) I've been involved in a couple of projects that have been overheating my laptop, and I will post about them soon.

I wanted to try out Tumblr to see how easy it was. Turns out it is pretty easy. Actually, I'm (surprisingly, perhaps) pleased with how seamless the whole thing was.

Even from the limited number of posts so far, the tumblr blog gets more feedback, which always gives an incentive to write more. I think that applies whether you are driven by vanity or not.

I'm not sure whether I'll keep the tumblr blog going or not, nor how I am going to split content between the two.

I usually blog in two distinct categories: general stuff which includes science, and unix and programming stuff. For the time being, I guess I will just post to which blog seems more suitable.

You can check out the tumblr blog here.

I have been a subscriber to How Stuff Works' email newsletter for years, almost since they started in the late '90s. Recently they were bought out by Discovery Channel and, as a result, I have ended up on Discovery Channel's email list.

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I have been a Neal Stephenson fan for a while now, as you can see from my list of books I have read. I read Anathem first in March 2011 and it completely blew me away. Since then, I have been looking for more Stephenson in the local libraries and bookshops.

The Age has reprinted an interview from The New York Times with Stephenson about his role in predicting the future of technology. Quite a good read if you don't know much about him, and it is interesting to read that he dislikes the role of forecaster that others have bestowed on him.

Last night the forecast thunderstorm arrived with rain, lightning and thunder. It is not violent enough to call it a storm, rather it is one of those with periods of rain and the odd lightning flash and rumbling of thunder. A typical late Spring thunderstorm, even though technically we are in early Summer.

That rumbling kept up all night and is still going even now. It is quite reassuring in an odd way, no sharp claps, just continuous background grumbling.

It brings to mind one of Terry Pratchett's marvellous metaphors from Equal Rites, "The storm walked around the hills on legs of lightning, shouting and grumbling." It was one of the first Pratchetts I had read and I remember thinking at the time what a marvellous image it was.

Today, now, is a palindrome date. Just thought I'd note it for posterity.

(Go away pedants, we're having a little fun here.)

More seriously, I should note it also is Remembrance Day, a day where we remember our veterans.

One of the great things about the Internet is how you start off reading something and end up jumping to another interesting article, then another, and so on.

The local newspaper is running a travel series about a guy travelling by train from London to Sydney, which looked really interesting, so I jumped on his blog to read it from start to finish. Well, sort of finish because he is still going and plans to get to Perth in mid-November.

He mentions in one of his posts about Kazan and the amazing Kul Sharif mosque. Here it is:

Simply beautiful. I know nothing more than the wikipedia article, but the images on google are amazing.

Being raised in Western Australia, I guess I was spoiled when it came to snorkelling or diving. Perth has many reefs nearby, some of them accessible from shore and some of them around local islands including Garden Island and Rottnest Island about 12 km off the coast.

I never thought too much about it, they were just there.

The local Perth reefs are limestone, not coral. It turns out that coral reefs near the shore are very rare. Coral is sensitive to fresh water and as a result most reefs are either some distance off shore where they are not affected by freshwater run-off that you get from river outlets or are isolated atolls such as in the Pacific.

Fringing reefs are much rarer because they can only exist where there is no run-off. W.A. is lucky in having a couple of places like that, the most famous of which is Ningaloo Reef, the world's biggest. Another one was discovered in the Kimberley a couple of years ago.

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I received a spam email yesterday that was phishing for some banking details. It contained the usual "your account has been disabled, you need to reactivate it" spiel, along with a link to click. When I hovered the cursor over the link, it displayed the bank's URL. Or did it?

URL displayed when hovering over the link

A cursory glance shows the link's URL pointing to firstdirect.com. There is some other stuff before the firstdirect.com, but I wonder if many people would query it, especially since it appears to contain the quite-common www1 prefix.

If we look closely, however, we can see that the actual domain part of the URL is 95.11064393, which is followed by a directory of www1.firstdirect.com. There is a "/" almost hidden between the two parts. It is quite easy to overlook, which is     [continued...]