Toronto was transformed at night on Saturday October 5th for some art thing called nuit blanche. Basically, it’s an event open all night with gallery’s across the city open for the public. Tom, Lucy and I spent all Saturday night and Sunday morning making trips to these exhibits, and had breakfast at 6-7am with Mike.

I was also surprised by meeting Armen there, and his brothers. It makes sense now.

While loads of fun (I didn’t know what we were doing when we met up. And I didn’t know how much I would enjoy it when I found out. But it turned out to be a great way to spend a Saturday night), I didn’t get home until later in the morning, where I crashed in my bed and didn’t wake up until 16:00 today. I didn’t manage to get any pictures because I didn’t bring my camera, but I did get a video of blinkenlights on my cell. They took over City Hall, and it was an entertaining light show. They also had it rigged up to play pong and tetris, but it was not well executed.

One internet phenomena that seems to be popular at Mozilla (at least, for some people) is rediculously cute animals and broken english in both in spelling and grammar known as lolspeak. So much so that Paul O’Shannessy (zpao if the name doesn’t ring a bell) created the bookmarklet that takes flickr images and turns them into canvas drawing overlaying text to it (called LOLify). The bookmarklet was based off of flolcatr, which brings more lols (well, some of the time anyways. The true lols come of the pics of middle-aged women).

Using that as inspiration, I worked on turning into a Firefox extension. Particularly because I wanted more flexibility out of it. For example, right now the bookmarklet takes random stuff out of the flickr comment and puts them into the image. But I wanted to add in my own stuff to either the top, middle, or bottom of the image and be able to align it left, centre, or right.

After spending all night doing it (I was afraid I would lose interest or get lazy if it took more than one day to complete), I uploaded what I had to addons.mozilla.org. After a good nap, I went back and fixed some pretty ugly errors and uploaded a much better version. I ended up with the name of kyoote (cutie), because it’s one of the words used to describe a fennec. And fennecs are extremely unrepresented as cute animals, even though they are adorable. And from today forward, let friday also be known as fen[nec]day.

Original image taken from deadstardro

So sit back this fenday and enjoy a meowtini

Update: Clarification based on comment

If you use screen + irssi a lot, you’ll know that sickening feeling when “screen -r” gives you a message that there are no screens to be resume. This happens when the computer is rebooted, and you lose all your screens. To add salt to the wound, you probably had your channels in some very specific window. For example, #seneca could be windows 2 and #developers could be window 6. And you can’t quite remember what was between 2 and 6.

While I can’t solve the computer rebooting problem, I have figured out a way to make connecting back to all your channels painless.

The first thing you have to do is create a network. A network would then contain a list of channels. Here’s the syntax to create a network :
/network add -nick cesar -realname “Cesar Oliveira” -autosendcmd “/^msg nickserv identify password” mozilla
It’s pretty self-explanatory.
-autosendcmd sends a message to the server once you are connected. In my case, I identified myself to nickserv with my cryptographically strong password (The /^msg means I don’t want to see the input. That way it doesn’t open up a new query window in irssi).
The last parameter is just the name of the network, which doesn’t have to be the same name as the server your connecting to (eg. irc.mozilla.org).

Then you add channels:
/channel add -auto #seneca mozilla
/channel add -auto #firefox mozilla
…
/channel add -auto #kittens mozilla
mozilla should correspond to your network. #seneca will be window 2, #firefox will be window 3…

Finally, when you get disconnected, you can connect to the irc server :
/connect -ssl -network mozilla irc.mozilla.org

Enjoy!