{"id":604,"date":"2010-07-24T02:23:09","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T09:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=604"},"modified":"2010-07-24T02:24:54","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T09:24:54","slug":"conventions-not-the-fan-kind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/24\/conventions-not-the-fan-kind\/","title":{"rendered":"Conventions &#8230; not the fan kind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve picked up a fair number of conventions over the years &#8230; notations, ways of writing things to make the type of thing that I&#8217;m writing clear.  Most of these I&#8217;ve picked up from others, some are my own. Here are a few of them:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Novel titles<\/strong> are written in ALL CAPS<br \/>You write novels this way to make it clear that it&#8217;s a BOOK you&#8217;re talking about, dag nab it. Examples: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Frost-Moon-Anthony-Francis\/dp\/0984325689\">FROST MOON<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atlas_Shrugged\">ATLAS SHRUGGED<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ulysses_(novel)\">ULYSSES<\/a>. I picked up this convention from my publisher, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bellbridgebooks.com\/\">Bell Bridge Books<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Search queries<\/strong> are written in [square brackets]<br \/>You write search queries this way, rather than with quotes, because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/websearch\/bin\/answer.py?hl=en&#038;answer=136861\">quotes can appear in search querie<\/a>s. Examples: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?sourceid=chrome&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;q=frost+moon\">[frost moon]<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&#038;safe=off&#038;q=%22frost+moon%22\">[&#8220;frost moon&#8221;]<\/a> &#8211; note the results are not the same. I picked up this convention from The Search Engine That Starts With a G.\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Command line text<\/strong> is indented in a special format where the prompt is bold, the command is bold italic, and the command response is plain text.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This last one takes more explanation (and breaking out of the unordered list to overcome WordPress CSS theme issues). When including <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Command-line_interface\">command line<\/a> responses in email, you indent the entire excerpt to set it apart from your message, then put the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livefirelabs.com\/unix_tip_trick_shell_script\/apr_2003\/04212003.htm\">command prompt<\/a> in <strong>bold<\/strong>, the command in <strong><em>bold italic<\/em><\/strong>, and its response in plain text, like so:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>centaur@mobile (Sat Jul 24, 00:44:54) [501] ~:<\/strong><br \/><strong>$ <em>imagelink comicon-2010-01.jpg san diego comicon 2010<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&lt;a href=&#8221;http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/images\/comicon-2010-01.jpg&#8221; alt=&#8221;san diego comicon 2010&#8243;>&lt;img src=&#8221;http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/images\/comicon-2010-01.jpg&#8221; alt=&#8221;san diego comicon 2010&#8243; border=&#8221;0&#8243; width=&#8221;600&#8243; \/>&lt;\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Some WordPress or theme weirdness is making this formatting a little harder than it is in Gmail. I think this is fixed to the point that you should be able to see that the &#8220;informational&#8221; part of the prompt (when the command was executed) appears on its own line, with a colon and line break to separate it from the command proper. The command proper is prefixed by a dollar sign, a UNIX standard that distinguishes it from the response text that follows. This communicates and distinguishes when you did it, what you did, and what you got.<\/p>\n<p>This one is mine. I&#8217;ve been developing this convention over the years as a way of communicating results from the command line in email. I have to admit, this is driven in part by a bit of egoism: I want people to know that the results I&#8217;m sending them can be done in one line of <a href=\"http:\/\/tldp.org\/LDP\/abs\/html\/\">Bash<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/\">Sed<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Awk\">(g)AWK<\/a>. And the remaining part is, I want people to learn that yes, they too can in a minute do immense amounts of computation with Bash, Sed and AWK.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s all for now. Next time: why the Einstein summation notation is cool.<br \/>\n-the Centaur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve picked up a fair number of conventions over the years &#8230; notations, ways of writing things to make the type of thing that I&#8217;m writing clear. Most of these&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,4,19,58],"class_list":["post-604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-development","tag-dragon-writers","tag-hard-science","tag-information-retrieval","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":647,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions\/647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}