WordPress.com is out of Beta… If you were wanting a WordPress blog (and why wouldn’t you?), but didn’t want to go through the steps of needing to find your own hosting, install the software yourself, and so forth, now you can. Nice.
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
Paul Graham has a new essay published, Web 2.0.
It opens:
Does “Web 2.0″ mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn’t, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don’t need it.
Interesting. There are things I like about the Web 2.0 meme, and things that I don’t; Paul’s generally an insightful essayist, so this looks to be worth a read.
HM-t-shirt.png (PNG Image, 697×790 pixels) I’m not sure where to find this t-shirt (since the image name says “tshirt” I’m assuming it exists), but this is awesome. In a very geeky way.
This was quite good.
MERD | Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate). Ask your doctor for a reason to take it.
Marriages, and any relationships, are imperfect; that is, whenever you have two different people, with different personalities, you will have the need to work at the relationship, in order to keep it strong.
Nevermind that opposites attract; even similar people will have slightly differing values, goals, ethics, interests, desires, hobbies, tastes, ad infinitum.
What, then, must be done?
I recently heard one of the pastors at my church mention that he and his wife make a list of the things that annoy them that the other does, and they bring it up periodically, so that they can work to minimize or eliminate these things through change, compromise, or both. This struck me as a great idea, but it also reminded me of a very similar concept: bug-tracking software.
So, here is my modest proposal; set yourselves up a bugzilla, and use it to track pet peeves. When your significant other is doing something that annoys you, this is a bug; put it in the system — maybe it can be resolved. When your significant other is not doing something which you think he or she should be doing, that is a feature/enhancement request — put this in the system.
Sometimes it may be a judgement call: putting the toilet seat down is clearly a feature/enhancement request. But is continuous channel-surfing a bug? or would “putting down the remote” be a feature request? You might consider your wife always telling you to clean your desk in your office a bug, but she might consider this helpful advice a feature in and of itself.
Okay, a bug tracking system might be overkill. The point is to find some way to honestly communicate about these things, and I’d bet in the long run it would make life easier.
We could take it a step further, and do a mammoth shared bugzilla, where everyone (anonymously) put their gripes and feature requests into one large bugzilla. The advantage might be that some other couple may have had the same issue, and could enter in their solution/compromise/conclusion.
It would be sort of like open source marriage counselling. ;-)
Note: though the germ of this idea came from that message I heard from a pastor here a few weeks ago, I did also recently find womenbugs.com - a somewhat onesided version of what I’m suggesting. Not highly trafficked, but sort of funny.
I Forgot My Administrator Password! A good tip for Windows XP.
Is this going to last? My wife just called and said she saw the price of gas under $2.
Hopefully this will be a trend…
Everybody loves Firefox, and one of the many great things about it has been its extensibility. As I write this, the Firefox extension page lists 793 available extensions, in 19 different categories.
When you get a list that large, and a group as large and diverse as the community of Firefox users, you are bound to get some extensions which really can’t be described as anything other than… silly. The mozilla update site even has a category for them: Humor. These are extensions which are silly, useless, funny, dumb, or possibly a combination of all those things.
Some of them are also extremely awesome. Without further ado, here are my favorite useless Firefox extensions (in no particular order; okay, actually, I saved my favorites for last):
- EggOn: This is a nice little timer. You can tell it how you would like your egg done (hard-boiled, soft-boiled, etc), and it will tell you when it’s finished. Really. Assuming you start cooking it when you click the extension, I suppose…
- about:kitchensink: Adds a kitchensink, which you can enjoy simply by typing “about:kitchensink” into the address bar. This was a joke in one of the versions of the older Mozilla browser, since Mozilla could well have been said to have nearly “everything but the kitchen sink.” The extension write-up suggests that it was also a joke of the developers at the frustration of overly many features being requested. The “about” syntax is, of course, due to a couple standard pages which use that format; about:blank was my homepage, for awhile. You may also enjoy about:mozilla, a classic text. (Older versions of IE used to display an ominous blue screen in the browser if you typed “about:mozilla”… it looks like this has been removed; pity, I thought it was sort of cool.)
- I must not fear!: Whenever you need it, this extension will display, for your encouragement, the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear, from Frank Herbert’s Dune series.
- Firesomething: If you’re an old-timer with Firefox, you might remember when it seemed like the browser’s name kept changing. It was really only a few times: when I started using it, it was Phoenix, the stripped-down, browser-only version of Mozilla. Then it became Firebird, which it remained for quite some time; accompanying mail client Thunderbird is still a testament to when this naming convention was around. But, someone had been developing an open source database called Firebird for some time, and eventually, to keep the peace, the Mozilla group changed the browser’s name to Firefox.
I think it was not long after this that this extension was written. Firebird? Firefox? How about Firechicken? This extension randomly creates a name from a list of words; you can even add your own words to the list (Mozilla MegaNinja?). For awhile this one had not been updated, I’m glad it’s back.
- Abe Vigoda Status: This handy extension lets you know whether Abe Vigoda is currently alive or dead. (As of this writing, Abe is alive and well.)
Of course, there is a story behind the joke. Wikipedia reports: In 1982, Vigoda enjoyed a little extra publicity when People magazine erroneously declared him dead.
There you have it. Enjoy, download, comment, dissent…
Here’s a question to make your brain hurt. Look at the following C++ function.
void reverseIt(char myString[]){
int length=strlen(myString);
char newString[length];
for (int i=0; i < length+1; i++) {
newString[i] = myString[(length - 1)- i];
}
newString[length]=myString[length];
cout << endl << newString << endl << endl;
}
If you know C++, or programming in general, it’s probably clear that this function accepts an array of characters (Java programmers will know this as a “String” ;-) ) and reverses it, character for character.
There’s an error in it. The strange thing is, if this is run (under gcc, at any rate), it will work properly except with strings whose length is a multiple of 16… then it will display random characters.
- What’s the error?
- (Extra credit) Why does it only manifest with strings that are multiples of 16?
I only just started using WordPress, not even a month ago, and I must say, I find it to be superlative. For a theme, I somehow stumbled upon K2, and it has suited perfectly; in fact, it has a lot of cool features of its own.
K2 is still a theme in “Beta” — the fact that a blog theme remains in beta ought to be a tip that this is not your average collection of CSS hacks and a few round corners. (Well, there are no round corners by default, but nothing would stop you from adding some). K2 is software. It’s like a theme with a shortlist of plugins builtin.
Among these are some AJAXian features; comments and a livesearch search bar (I’ve found that livesearch only seems to work when I’m not on the main page; hmm). Others include the option to have either fixed-width or fluid page width, and the ability to store several alternate style sheets a k2 subdirectory, and switch between them from the admin console.
The ability to use custom stylesheets within K2 makes K2 almost a “meta-theme” — you could wind up with something that looks nothing like the standard K2 theme (mine is pretty stock, still), but still had all the features of K2.
For an example of how far you could stretch this, compare this page (almost stock K2, I only changed a few colors and the header image) with binarybonsai. binarybonsai also uses K2 — in fact, it’s the blog of K2’s co-creator Michael Heilemann. It’s a great example of how far customization could go. Yes, normally that much customization would almost be called a different theme; but the nature of K2 lends it to be more of a core around which to do things like that.
If you’re a WordPresser looking for a newer theme, check out more of K2’s features; it’s a lot of fun to hack away at.
