YGingras^.net

There are fashions in the markup world. There was a time when using colons (':') to split fields in /etc/passwd was enough, a time when no one had a problem with using TABs as command delimiter in Makefiles. Then came the era of heavy markup, "more semantic!", they all asked for, and we received XML.

More semantic is a good thing but anyone who wrote documentation using DocBook knows that the heavy syntax gets annoying really fast. No wonder no one documents his programs. Fortunately, some lazy programmers wanted, for some obscure reason, to document their programs; they propelled us into a new era of light weight markup.

There are quite a few really good light weight markups out there, and Gazest supports most of them. For simple formating, my favorite is definitely Markdown. It reads like text emails: the syntax doesn't do much but the essentials are there and the syntax actually helps to read the source instead of obfuscating it. For blog comments, or anything that won't need much semantic, in applications where you can't use for HTML, for security reasons or just because it's a pain to type, Markdown is the way to go.

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Yould 0.3.5 is out. It's the first release under GPLv3. The --list-sets option now works, you can apply a regexp to filter generated words and there is a new --version option.

The new regexp option is useful if you are looking for a word that include a specific sub-string. If you are looking for a name for a new cat website, you would do "yould -n 30 -R cat", if you are looking for adverbs for your new artificial language, you would do "yould -n 30 -R ly$". Have fun.

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It's fun to look at who is linking to your website. Some really creative people recently invented a new game using Yould. They generate random words then concoct a dictionary style entry with definition and sometimes even phonetic alphabet pronunciation guidelines.

Some entries are really funny, especially marmague, and I decided to play the game myself. But I didn't like the web interface. The command line one was much better. So I tweaked the web one to make it better for the game. You can now generate up to 100 words per run and the engine trained on the King James Bible is back online as Old English. It has a nice medieval feel, I really like it.

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Yould 0.3 is out. I improved the command line interface and included trained engines for English, French, German, and more. There is also a web interface to automate domain availability checks, thanks to Register 4 Less.

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It happens all the time. I am about to start a new project and I can't find a good name. I could postpone the decisions until publication. With my completion rate, that would save me a lot of thinking. Still, the name of a project, a programming one at least, is scattered all over the place from the start: you create a tree in your cvs/git/svn, you create a package/namespace/module in your programming environment and you write the project's name in the documentation (at least you intend to). You can change the name later but you save a lot of work if you start with the right one.

There was a time when you could pick a random word from the dictionary and be done with it. Today, it seems, all the real words are taken, even vellication. Here I use a widely accepted definition of "taken": is the .com owned by someone else. There are other root domains (.net, .org, .info) but the squatters bought the most of the dictionary there too. If we don't limit ourself to the dictionary, why should we after all, combinatorics saves the day. There are just to many ways to put letters together. Squatters can buy all the tree letter acronyms but that's as far as they can get.

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