I just posted on the Distributist Review:

When Toilet Paper Is A Major Victory

Why did the R.L. Denim owners begin paying maternity leave, stop beating workers, and, yes, supply soap and toilet paper? Because when an overworked 18-year-old died, the NLC, other groups, and individuals writing letters begin to put pressure, not on the factory, but on the retailer ordering from the factory. (More...)

Previous Posts:

Handmade Toy Alliance

Handmade toys may soon be illegal in the United States.

That's the bad news. The good news is that they would already be illegal, if toymakers and others hadn't gotten together and fought back. Now they need our help. (More...)

Three Acres and a Penguin

Imagine if you could only fill your car with gas from Exxon. Or only get an oil change at the dealership. Or if it was illegal to open the hood of your car unless you worked for the manufacturer. Even if you had no desire to be your own car mechanic, these rules would seem a bit draconian.

So why this paroxysm of intellectual property law for computer software? (More...)

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Ready to order.

Laid out and assistant edited (without such awkward verb modifiers) by yours truly.

(sample pages)

So is this really C. S. Lewis? Is there really just one recording of his voice?

He certainly sounds like an Oxford don. I wish there was a way to way verify this, but anyhow, it's interesting.

If you're going to use Firefox, I've found the following essential.   more »

The Powell family would like to offer our thanks to the royal personages who mysteriously graced our neighborhood the other day. Your gracious generosity will not be forgotten; our only regret is that we apparently can't thank you in person. Yet.

If you think it through, a partial support for abortion is intellectually more frightening than a full stamp of approval. In fact, partial support for abortion should frighten pro-abortion people too.   more »

So I'm helping to start a food co-op here in Lafayette, IN, called City Foods.

Here's our mission statement:

Our mission is to serve the nutritional, social, and economic needs of our members and community by providing a market for local, fair-trade, sustainable, independent, and healthful goods and services in a friendly, cooperative environment.

And here's some other helpful info. Stay tuned for more updates.

Mailing lists

Announcement list

Discussion list

Press

Dinner to aid startup co-op grocery

By Eric Weddle
Sep 19, 2008
Lafayette Journal & Courier

Read the article

It's a small open source world sometimes.

I use DokuWiki for my business site, Wineskin Media, and I recently ran into a snag and went to the IRC channel for help. Andreas Gohr, the author of DokuWiki, not only took time to answer my question, he also decided to feature Wineskin Media as a DokuWiki of the month. Pretty neat.

Syntax highlighting is the joy of text editing. Consider these two screenshots:

(That's the xterm16 colorscheme with transparency turned on, using the mrxvt terminal with transparency on, a tint of #000020, and shading of 85. Background image: "View on Dubrovnik".)

Anyhow, as you can see, even the sparse syntax of Marxdown is far easier to read when the syntax is highlighted in different colors. You can even get things like bold highlighting, even though the underlying file is still clean, plain text. Mere asterisks let Vim know to color a word bold. No hidden codes are required; what you see is what's really in the file, but Vim can add colors. Vim isn't the first or only program out there that does syntax highlighting, of course. Any reputable text editor should do it.

My contributions

There many kinds of plain text in the world. This file uses Markdown syntax, but a PHP file would need PHP syntax, a CSS file would need CSS syntax, and so on. Each kind requires its own "syntax file", so Vim knows how to treat it.

Vim comes with quite a pile of syntax files, and the community has contributed even more at the Vim site under "Scripts". Every so often, however, I come across a kind of file that no one has needed syntax highlighting for yet. Fortunately, it's relatively straightforward to write your own syntax file. Here are the ones I've written, and uploaded.

You can find my Vim contributions here.

NoSQL and tab-separated files.

When you get hooked on plain text, you start trying to do everything with it. Tab-separated files are a simple way to store simple data. But I wanted each column to be a different color.

At the time, I was using a collection of shell scripts called NoSQL to access these tables, so I named the syntax file nosql.vim. I still use NoSQL for some old scripts, but lately I've needed the power of perl (DBI and DBI::AnyData) to access these files. DBI is a neat perl module because the syntax is the same whether you're talking to a MySQL database or a plain text TSV.

Anyhow, with this syntax file, columns appear in different colors. Keeps things sane.

get nosql.vim

DokuWiki

I've just this morning finally put up my syntax file for DokuWiki, the wiki I currently use for Wineskin Media. It's not from scratch, just a modification of a Wikipedia syntax file, but if you happen to use DokuWiki, you may find it useful.

get dokuwiki.vim

Make your own syntax file

It's really not so hard. Just open Vim, and

:h syntax

Actually, a better idea is to copy an existing syntax file and work from there. Just find one that isn't bewilderingly complicated. :)

If you live near Lafayette IN and you're interested in local raw cheese, join us for bulk orders at Meadow Valley Farm.   more »

• What's a den? What is this place?
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