minor minq manifestations

Blogging has been super light, thanks to the triple whammy of a milestone, a cold, and my grand plan to migrate this blog over to a static site generator.  However I did want to mention that I've been trying to update the minq wiki page so it is more accessible. I'd appreciate any feedback, comments or suggestions to make it clearer.  When you write something yourself you just accept as natural the quirks and habits of thought that go with it, so it's handy to have outside eyes when you're writing documentation.

I've added a couple of minor features as well.  There's a  bunch of operators for counting things -- for example you can get the vertex count of meshes with something like Meshes().get(VertCounts) . On a somewhat related note all streams have a count() function which will return the length of the stream, and a first() method which will pull the head item from a stream -- which is handy if you expect to narrow down to a single item and don't want a single-item iterable.

Last but not least I'd love to hear from the community about good minq hacks -- I'll be happy to add cool ones to the examples file. I'd also appreciate any bugs you find going into the issues page!

Blogger blues

Wherein our author uses blogger to post a blog post blogging about how much he dislikes blogger.

It's late on a Sunday night and I need to get this off my chest.

I really have come to loathe Blogger.  The sluggish, overly complicated, JS heavy theme, the sluggish, too-complex-for-speed-but-too-simple-for-interesting-stuff editor, and the way it stuffs stylesheet info into the RSS feed come to mind. but overall... it's just gotten on my nerves.

So, I'm probably going to transition the blog over to something else.  My current leading candidate for a site generator is Pelican, a Python based static html site generator which seems to be powerful enough for my not-too-complex needs.  Jekyll is another candidate but all things being equal I'd rather stick with a Python-based setup and the final output will be pretty much the same.

I'm a tad nervous about what happens to old links and traffic so I assume that I'll probably transition over gradually with duplicate postings for a while. If any of you have done something similar in the past I'd be curious to hear about how it went.

In the meantime, I'll just add that I've been dealing with the transition in typical TA fashion. I hacked up a script to download all of the existing blog posts as XML, then used the html2text module on the cheese shop to convert the HTML from the posts into markdown text. I'm still going to have to hand-finish every pieces, cleaning up dead links and missing images and so on:  I'm sure it'll be a TA-style spit'n'bailing-wire party for a while yet.

In the meantime I'm all ears if anybody has more suggestions for site generators, or a reason to go with something other than a static site on github.io, please let me know in the comments!

update:  the new site is here