Archive for June, 2005
06.19.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:20 pm by UnwashedMeme
The
evening after Jerash we went to the castle at Ajloun: Qal’at
ar-Rabadh. On the top of a hill (as are most castles) it It was built
about 1184 by an Arab general and close relative of Saladin to
protect the local Iron mines and limit crusader expansion. It was
also one of a number of stops in a pigeon post chain that could get
news between the Euphrates frontier and the Cairo Headquarters in
twelve hours. It was ransacked by Mongols, rebuilt by Baybars
and occupied by the Ottomans during the 17th and 18th
centuries. Earthquakes took their toll, but it has been rebuilt a
good deal since. Not a bad castle. We apparently didn’t take any
pictures, but it is almost exactly what you think of for “Small
Castle”. Two or three stories, some rooms a dungeon, all clean
cut stone and cement. The view up top was nice.
The next day on the way south to Petra we visited Karak which was
a small town on top of a hill (with sheer cliffs on 3 sides) enclosed
by walls with a castle in it. The location is a defensive stronghold
referred to as far back as the Old Testament. The construction that
is there today was started by knights of the First Crusade in 1142.
The most interesting occupant was Raynald of Chatillon who arrived
with the Second Crusade in 1147. A vicious ruler he took pleasure in
enclosing the heads of prisoners in a wooden box (think helmet) and
tossing them off the castle walls. The helmet helped ensure they were
still concious when they hit the rocks below.
In 1180 he robbed a caravan on the King’s Highway in violation of
a truce between King Baldwin and Saladin. It wasn’t until 1183
that Saladin was able to launch an offensive; arriving right
when Raynald was celebrating the wedding of his son. His wife sent
plates of food from the banquet out to the Muslim army. In return
Saladin inquired which tower the newly weds were occupying and
made sure his men didn’t catapult that one.
Karak survived the siege but the Crusaders were defeated at the
Battle of Hattin in 1187 partly due to the strategic ineptitude of
Raynald. Saladin spared the lives of the Lords and King, but
personally decapitated Raynald of Chatillon.
The castle is very large. There are over 7 layers dug into and
built above the hill. The construction isn’t as clean as Ajloun’s
(althought that might be partly Ajloun’s reconstruction). This castle
is awesome to roam about. There is some barbed wire and some guard
rails blocking the less obvious dangers, but for the most part you
are on your own. There are lots of halls and rooms to explore. Calvin would love this (and the next) castle; his
Mom would be nervous.
Standing on the keep. I
din’t really want to climb to the very top (not really visible in
that photo), it would have been scrambling up rocks about 3 feet wide
with a choice of a 15ft drop on one side and a 300ft drop on the
other. Did I mention the constant 25MPH Wind?
From there we continued to drive south on the King’s Highway (past the ominous black extinct volcano) south to Shobak Castle.
The castle sits rather impressively upon the hill. It was the first to be built by the crusaders in Jordan, and the last to fall. It was taken over by the Mamluks who rebuilt it complete with calligraphic stones and catapult balls.
This was another great castle to roam about in. It even has a couple of secret passageways. Stories say it goes down 375 steps into the mountain to get to water; unfortunately it was getting late and all I had was Laura’s keychain flashlight with which to explore so I didn’t get very far into it.
All the info from this post comes from the Rough Guide to Jordan.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:18 pm by UnwashedMeme
The next morning I slept in a little bit then went to meet Laura
at her work place: Wild Jordan. Wild Jordan is part of the Royal
Society for the Conservation of Nature, and the center is a gift from
America through US Agency for International Development.
The taxi to there was a bit of an adventure. The driver knew just
enough English to misunderstand me. It wasn’t until Laura called me
and got someone who knew Arabic to give directions that everything
was sorted out. The center is really nice. There is some office space
that helps coordinate the ecotourism in Jordan, a gift shop and a
cafe. There is a great view looking out over Amman
from the balcony.
From here we picked up Laura’s friend Sonya who had also come into
town the night before on a different flight. The next destination was
Jerash which are the ruins of an ancient city. The area has been
settled since prehistoric times. The city itself was founded around
170 BCE and was centered on the Temple of Zeus. However most of the
ruins are Roman from after Pompey liberated the city in 63 BCE. There
is a very well preserved theater (with an Arabic
bagpiper wandering around) and a nice mosaic. There’s lots of other stuff as well; those are the nice pictures I have.
A lot of the city was damaged or destroyed after a number of
earthquakes. At the Temple of
Artemis there are a bunch of columns still standing. A really
nifty thing about these columns is that if
you stick your fingers in at the
base you notice that they sway in the breeze. It’s almost like they
have a pulse.
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06.13.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:48 pm by UnwashedMeme
Left Jacksonville at 5pm on Tuesday on an Airbus up to
Philadelphia– I actually napped most of
the way. About half an hour wait in Philadelphia
before boarding a Boeing 767 for Amsterdam.
I sat in the front row of the coach section. Last time I flew
across the Atlantic I sat in the last row of coach. I like the front
more: more room to stretch your legs, you can actually lean the seat
back a little bit, which you can’t do in the last row. The downside
is that the tray table in the front row are really bad and you can
see everything your missing in first class.
When I found out they wanted $5 for drinks I started to wish I’d
gotten a bottle of the Glendfiddich Solera Reserve from the duty free
shop– about 25% cheaper than Dorn’s. Oh well.
I slept a bit, probably less than on the flight to Philly. I gave
up after a couple of hours and started to read The Stars My
Destination (TSMD) by Alfred
Bester (thanks Daniel). I got about 15 pages in. I also chatted with
my neighbor quite a bit.
I was supposed to have a four hour layover in Amsterdam. I had
hoped to take the train from the airport into Amsterdam (supposed to
be about 25 minutes) and walk around a bit and maybe get some lunch.
Fate decried that it wasn’t to be. The plane got in a bit late, then
I was bounced between desks for a while trying to get a boarding pass
and make sure my luggage was transferred off of US Air and onto Royal
Jordanian airlines. By the time this was accomplished I was supposed
to board in an hour. As much as I wanted to go the gamble didn’t seem
worth it
I got some lunch and read a bit more of TSMD
while I ate. I became so engrossed with the book that I got to the
gate late anyways. Still had another 15 minutes of sitting before we
boarded though.
The Royal Jordanian flight out
of Amsterdam was like a party plane. On US flights they try to keep
you in your seat as much as possible. Here everyone was up in the
aisles the entire time talking with friends, chasing kids (lot of
them on the plane), and playing catch (ok maybe not catch).
Landed at 8pm Wednesday. The
Jordanian airport was pretty small and the line for Visas was slow to
get through. Got through the red tape, found Laura and had a pleasant
drive into Amman.
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06.02.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:03 pm by UnwashedMeme
UPDATE: Any new development is at: https://trac.acceleration.net/JsShellServer/wiki. This page may be interesting for a what is it / history perspective, but isn’t updated.
We’ve been using the Javascript Shell a lot, and more recently been modifying it a bit.
It is great for doing the experimental development, but when it comes time to wrap up a bunch of functions and commands into a .js file for inclusion on a webpage or a Greasemonkey script it doesn’t work all that well.
What I really wanted was the ability to be editing a javascript file in Emacs, which has a decent javascript-mode, but have the same kind of interactivity as you do with the Shell or when developing in Emacs with Python or SLIME.
Emacs slave does just that. Helmut Eller did the dirty work of digging through XPCom references and such to be able to host a server inside of Firefox, and some nice elisp (inspired by SLIME I believe) for interacting with it.
Helmut Eller decided Javascript wasn’t for him and went back to hacking in Lisp. I’ve made a few modifications/improvements so that it better suits my needs and hereby present it to everyone else so that they can continue to take advantage of this fine bit of code.
- It’s now embedded inside the Javascript Shell with a button at the top to start the server.
- All evaluation is done within whatever context the shell is in. This means that you can modify the DOM of webpage you are looking at interactively from Emacs.
- The debugger is turned off. Partly because one of the features (the debugger service flags) will crash Firefox when you try to read them. The other reason is that when running Tabbrowser Extensions, Greasemonkey, and all the others I get a lot of Javascript errors and don’t really want to go into debugging mode for each one of them. If you are interested look into set_debugger_hooks().
- I rewrote some of how the Shell does the evaluation so that it will return a value instead of doing something that resembles CPS with the javascript: url that went to print directly. There was a comment about needing that for browser compatibility reasons so I’m guessing this version won’t work outside of Mozilla now. Oh no, my extension that uses Mozilla XPCom objects won’t work in IE!
Setup
You need to install my modified version of Extension Developer’s Extension. Given that Ted and Jesse seem to be going in a different direction with the Shell than I am. I should probably go ahead and split this out into seperate extension. I just haven’t done it yet (and secretly hope this might become part of the ‘official’ version of EDE).
You need to also get js-mode.el which I put in XEmacs\xemacs-packages\lisp\prog-modes. You should also add the following to the Emacs init file.
;;Sweet Sweet javascript mode
(add-hook 'javascript-mode-hook 'js-mode)
(autoload 'js-mode "js-mode" nil t)
Use
Once you have restarted Firefox after installing the extension open the Shell, there should be a new button at the top “Start ShellServer”. Click that. From Emacs, open a Javascript file and hit M-x js-connect RET RET. You’re now connected. Try to evaluate the current function definition hit C-M-x. C-c C-r for current region; C-c C-e for current line. To see the others you might want to just go look at js-mode.el
I haven’t had any problems with it yet, but I seem to have repeated Helmut’s trick of getting it going, then setting it aside to play with Lisp some more. If you see an *ahem* ‘Opportunity for enhancement’ or if you do something cool with it let me know.
“I really want someone to make Javascript a ‘real’ language. Like with libraries and package-management and all the other things that make a language good.” -Russ
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