Pre.postero.us is the code project that's been taking up most of my late-night hacking time these days.

You know how all your friends send you an e-mail with one single link in it? This is a way of sharing then will all your friends at once, grouping them by topic, and presenting them in a cool (visual) way.

The underlying code is still a little ugly, but I'll eventually put it all up here.

The new version has auto-expiry: links which nobody follows get older and fade away. Literally. Clicking on them updates their date a bit, but not 100%. I'm still tweaking how quickly to expire links and how much to refresh their dates.

This is all one big experiment. Try it out and let me know what you think.

A quick Python/PIL hack with makes thumbnail images for arbitrary images all at once. It shrinks the image so that it fits inside a square of specified size, which I find to be nicer than changing the aspect ratio or cropping. You don't like that, you can change the code pretty easily. Works equally well on Windows or Linux.

The code relies on the excellent Python Imaging Library, so go fetch it if you need it.

This was an experiment in generating images with PIL, the Python Imaging Library. The idea was to create a tilable background image of random, but similarly colored blocks, like so:

In the end, the GUI interface is useful for making color palettes for webpage design or what-have-you.

I don't have a web-demo of this code yet, but it would sure be cool to do, and not all that hard. Hmmm...

Graphviz is a suite of programs which take simple text input files and make automatically-laid-out graphs from them. It's fun for graphing websites, program subroutines, relationships among friends/topics, flow diagrams, etc.

It's the power behind the clickable image maps in myWiki, and it's the motivation for my foolery on Pre.postero.us.

Creates pretty good fake words using two frequency tables: one for the initial pairs of letters, and then a table of third letters conditional on the previous two.

Use these for passwords. They're immune to brute-force dictionary attacks and they're pretty memorable. Throw in a number for extra security. Or start naming prescription drugs. Or registering domain names...

Sootract fastra biquatio squacy confante pervis vartican. Riumbo pessmote boduck grumicat, houndi dumbeasy.

So I started playing around with the code from PyWiki and modified it so that it would feed into a clickable Graphviz image map. I like the results, but it could still use a little tweaking.

I also tossed in a simple file-uploader so that my mom could upload images.

The code for all this is still pretty ugly, and needing work. I'll post it up sometime, but don't hold your breath. Until then, PyWiki will probably work for you.