Patrick Micka

Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-grumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
‘Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain’t been there before.
-Shel Silverstein

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I’ve already made a wordle text cloud of Obama’s portion of last Friday’s debate. As promised, here’s McCains:

If you’re interested in having a look at the text used you can find it here.

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I’ve written about wordle before, and I am still completely blown away by how useful it is at conveying information without completely removing the context. I feel that this sort of word count analysis has been especially useful in the current political setting. The New York Times used this method recently to compare the Democrats and Republicans during their conventions this year.

Below is a wordle I created using Obama’s portions of transcript of the first presidential debate. Before simply copying and pasting the transcript into the wordle creator I parsed the text myself in order to remove words and phrases that would simply clutter and overshadow the key issues mentioned during the debate - from over 4000 words to about 1500. You can find the text file here.

I’ll post McCain’s portion of the debate soon.
UPDATE: I’ve posted it here.

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Adobe AIR, the runtime environment I’ve written about before, has moved out of Alpha and into Beta. Expect apps to run more consistently with Windows and Mac.

Be sure to uninstall any previous releases of Adobe AIR before moving forward. This can be done in a number of ways depending on how it was initially installed.

Enter these commands to get the newest version (currently 1.1):

cd ~/Desktop

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Give the .bin file execution rights:

sudo chmod +x adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Run the bin file to install/upgrade AIR:

sudo ./adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

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Instead of keeping your browser pointed towards the Facebook web page, Pidgin users should take advantage of an open-source plugin which enables Facebook chat via the XMPP/Jabber protocol. Users can then chat with friends, view the online status of their friends, and set their status through the third party chat program.

To install the plugin follow these steps:

cd ~/Desktop

Download the .deb and .zip to your Desktop (one line):

wget http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/pidgin-facebookchat-1.37.deb http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/facebook_icons.zip

Extract the .deb file containing the plugin:

dpkg -x pidgin-facebookchat-1.37.deb ~/Desktop

You should notice a folder named usr on your desktop now. It contains a few .so files, however, you only need one for the plugin to function. Depending on what your system is running determines which of the three you need:

32-bit Linux users enter the following command to install the plugin:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/usr/lib/purple-2/libfacebook.so /usr/lib/purple-2/libfacebook.so

64-bit Linux users:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/usr/lib64/purple-2/libfacebook64.so /usr/lib64/purple-2/libfacebook64.so

Now, before starting Pidgin, you’ll need to install a few icons. Enter the following two commands to place the icons in the correct location:

cd /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols

sudo unzip ~/Desktop/facebook_icons.zip

Fire up Pidgin and head to the Accounts window to enable your Facebook account. Enjoy.

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