The text ads on facebook and google make me think of ubik, and with the power of greasemonkey, it’s possible to actually make them all for ubiq - so many use proper nouns that it should be a simple regex.
Tired of the same old message of the day? What’s a unix user to do? Simply install our patented ubik fortune database wherever you keep fortune files! Safe when used as directed. Do not use internally. Do not execute the ubik fortune database. Do not run as root. Do not add to your login.
Start with a basic ad.
Pay your bill on time. Chase +1 rewards you when you pay your bill on time. Apply now for Chase +1.
Munge it with something like…
$ad=~s/[[A-Z]+[a-z]]+/Ubik/g; `
And get:
Pay your bill on time. Ubik +1 rewards you when you pay your bill on time. Apply now for Ubik +1.
But it’s not very easy to take:
With the Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor, the HP TouchSmart PC gives you all the power you can handle. Get the magic now.
And programatically get:
With the Ubik, the HP PC gives you all the power you can handle. Get the magic now.
I’ll play with it.
In the meantime, I wanted to grab some Ubik ads to make sure it was going to make sense. Once I had them, I compiled a fortune file. Enjoy!
> fortune ubik
Friends, this is clean-up time and we're discounting all
our silent, electric Ubiks by this much money. Yes, we're throwing
away the blue-book. And remember: every Ubik on our lot has been used
only as directed.
> fortune ubik
"Tired of lazy tastebuds?" Runciter said in his familiar gravelly
voice. "Has boiled cabbage taken over your world of food? That same
old, stale, flat, Monday-morning odor no matter how many dimes you put
into your stove? Ubik changes all that; Ubik wakes up food flavor,
puts hearty taste back where it belongs, and restores fine food
smell."> fortune ubik
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the
suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they
inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they
do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the
name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I
am. I shall always be.
I integrated two existing greasemonkey user scripts for wikipedia, and added lots of element { display: none; }‘s to the style sheet, and ended up with a userscript I’m calling Simplepedia:
Wikipedia’s design and style is tiring and cluttered:
There is just too much going on!
Without the entire left bar, banner ads, footers, and tiny sans serif type, wikipedia is much more inviting:
There are still issues – some hard coded elements just can’t be undone. The front page language selection doorstop is completely lacking ID elements, and I don’t want to follow their lead and hard code a DOM-walking cleanup. Entire tables exist just to pad out other tables. There are numbered lists that are actually unordered lists with each list item hard coding their number values. Colors and fonts are called out inline all over the place in css in place of proper classes and ids.
