Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

News to nobody

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Something I just discovered, thanks to a comment at Etherfarm. If you’re running Windows XP, on-screen text legibility can be drastically improved by switching on ClearType.

To do so: Start Menu > Control Panel > Display > Appearance tab > Effects… button > Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts option > ClearType menu choice > Apply.

Observe:

2003/07/graphics/standard

Without ClearType

2003/07/graphics/cleartype

With ClearType

Of course, text under OS X looks like ClearType-enabled text under XP from the getgo, without having to drill down through dialogs and menu choices to find the option, if you even know that it’s there. But, admittedly, at least the option is there, and it does help.

Random is fun

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There’s something wonderfully surreal about listening to my iPod on the way to work, and going directly from Coolio’s “Ugly Bitches” to “American Wake (the Nova Scotia Set)” off of Bill Whelan’s ‘Riverdance’ soundtrack.

About that homework

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Here’s what I was thinking about yesterday with my Homework post. Marilyn Monroe’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” reminded me strongly of a Björk song, but I couldn’t think of which one. I’ve tracked it down — ~~have a listen, and compare and contrast~~. I’m quite curious as to whether Björk may have had this in mind when she recorded “It’s Oh So Quiet”.

Homework

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Bring Marilyn Monroe’s “I Belong to Daddy” in to work tomorrow so I can let Bethany hear it and compare with some of Björk’s work (there’s a specific Björk song I’m thinking of, but for the life of me, I can’t remember which one off the top of my head).

What's going on?

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All of a sudden, the right-hand sidebar, rather than displaying on the right side of the page, is being shoved underneath the left-hand sidebar, after all the main content — at least, that’s what’s going on in IE6 on the PC.

Grrrr.

I have no idea why.

Found the offending post, and removed it for the time being. Haven’t figured out what the issue was, though. Hrm.

Greek Mythological family tree

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Wow. Just wow. A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology, by Harold Newman, looks to be fascinating.

It was about 20 years ago when Jon O. Newman, a federal appeals court judge in Manhattan, walked up to a staff member in the New York Public Library and asked, “Do you have a book anywhere in this library that has a complete genealogical chart of Greek mythology?” They didn’t.

“O.K., second question,” Judge Newman said. “If there were such a book, would you buy it?”

“We’d have to,” the librarian replied.

It was what the judge had wanted to hear. For years, his father, Harold Newman, had pursued a hobby — an elaborate genealogy project — trying to link all characters from Greek mythology in a single family tree. Judge Newman wanted to finish it.

Now, the Newmans’ work has been published by the University of North Carolina Press as “A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology: Comprising 3,673 Named Figures of Greek Mythology, All Related to Each Other Within a Single Family of 20 Generations.”

More details can be found at the New York Times. It’s a bit on the pricey side at \$75, but man would that be a fascinating book to spend time browsing through.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

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Wandered up to one of the downtown theaters today to catch the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Enjoyable, and worthwhile as either a matinee or a rent, but enough problems that it’s not a definite must-see.

Plotwise — well it was basically a Bond film (perhaps that was why they got Connery’s involvement?). Insane mastermind criminal bent on conquering the world, and our intrepid heroes have to stop him at all costs. The true draw was the heroes themselves, all of whom were drawn from literary works: Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll (and, of course, Mr. Hyde), Tom Sawyer, and the sole female member of the group, Mina Harker (wife of John [?] Harker, assistant to Professor Van Helsing during that nasty incident with Count Dracula — yes, she’s a vampire). That alone made some of the scenes quite entertaining to watch, as various references would occasionally be dropped in (though not as many as I felt could have been).

Unfortunately, the plot has holes — well, holes big enough to sail the Nautilus through, some of the most astounding of which involve Venice, which is apparently some alternate-reality Venice. I’m still trying to decide which surprised me more: sailing the Nautilus (roughly the size of an aircraft carrier) through the canals of Venice, or driving a car pell-mell through the streets of Venice. Streets? Yeah, streets. And there’s more to come….

Sean Connery was, well, Sean Connery. As enjoyable as he is to watch, I can’t say that I’ve seen him in a role that really required much of him in a good long time. It’s unfortunate, too, but lately he seems to be just riding on the “Sean Connery is a crowdpleaser no matter what” wave, instead of getting anything actually challenging.

The rest of the cast — adequate, and they all filled their parts well, but none of them particularly stood out, for good or for ill.

Effect wise, it was a mixed bag. Some of the shots I liked a lot — the Nautilus, for example, I thought was gorgeous (if a little ridiculously large). Gleaming alabaster, with silver filigree and decorations, even to statues on the fore and aft of the submarine. Impractical, but gorgeous to look at. The shots of the Invisible Man were also quite impressive, especially when he had facepaint on (to make himself visible) and you’d get a shot of him from behind. Hard to describe, but fun to see. Other shots were less impressive, including an exploding building towards the beginning of the film, which was something of a surprise. I know there’s a push to do as much as possible with CGI, but would it have been so difficult to actually create a practical explosion effect? Oh, and Mr. Hyde just didn’t impress me in the least. Ah, well.

End result: not great, but not horrible, as long as you don’t think too much. Worth matinee prices or a rental, but not anything to stand in line for an evening show over.

Oh, two last things. First — I want fight scenes that can be watched, not fight scenes that have so many half-second cuts that it’s impossible to follow any of the action. Second — can we please have a movie that doesn’t have the obligatory five-minute “Look! If you give us enough money, we’re gauranteeing yet another vapid sequel!” sequence before the end credits?

Roger Ebert’s review is priceless, by the way.

Tweaking TypePad Templates

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Up until now, all the various design tweaks I’ve made on this site have been conducted from within the TypePad interface, without my mucking about with any of the code. That’s starting to change, however, as I start to incorporate some of the conventions I’ve gotten used to with my templates at The Long Letter into the site here. I’m taking things a little slowly to make sure I don’t break anything (permanently), but work has begun.

Some details and thoughts on my changes follow.

(The following notes will be updated as I work my way through the various templates and make my changes.)

All templates

Two minor changes have been made to all the templates.

The first is purely cosmetic, in that I’ve adjusted the indenting of all the HTML code so that it’s easier for me to track through. As a side benefit, it should be a bit easier for other people if they go poking around in my source code.

Secondly, and important for usability, I’ve noticed that in the default templates, none of the hyperlinks have the title attribute set (the text that shows as a tooltip in most browsers, or before the URL in the status bar in Safari). I was somewhat surprised by that, but it’s a fairly simple fix for most of the tags.

Archive Templates (category and monthly)

The default templates for archives display every post in its entirety in reverse chronological order (exactly which posts are displayed depends on the archive type — all posts in a single category for category archives, all posts in a month for monthly archives, etc.). That may work well if you create short posts, or don’t post terribly often, but for me, it’s a nightmare. I tend to babble and create (ridiculously) long posts, and while this site is new, if I do end up adopting TypePad for my permanent home once it’s open for business, then I’m going to want to import all two years plus of my archives. Obviously, with the default templates, this could make for extremely long archive pages.

So, to combat that, I set up my archive templates to create essentially a ‘table of contents’ for each archive page. Each archive page now displays the title of each individual post, linked to the post’s individual entry page. After that comes the post excerpt, then a brief listing of the post’s metadata (post time and whether any comments have been added — were I creating a multi-author weblog, post author would be included also).

With this setup, while each archive page will still grow over time, it will be substantially smaller than it would be if it were displaying the entirety of each post. By including the post’s excerpt, it allows for a little more contextual indication of what each post is about, so it should still be relatively easy to find individual posts.

Currently (as of 8:20pm, July 13th) I’ve only altered the category templates to reflect this scheme, but monthly archives should be updated shortly.

7/13 8:54pm: Monthly archive pages have also been updated.

Archive templates (individual)

Not too terribly many changes here, aside from the aforementioned HTML re-formatting and adding title attributes to the hyperlinks. I did tweak the post metadata line so that the permalink is attached to the timestamp on the post rather than a single word that just says ‘Permalink’, and then added permalinks to individual comments with the same style. Other than that, it’s primarily the same.

I would eventually like to see if the live comment preview I have working on my individual pages on The Long Letter will work in this layout, but I’ll probably save that for another night, just in case it turns into more of a battle than I think it will.

Main index template

Again, like the individual archives, not too many changes — primarily just the formatting of the metadata line, with permalinks moved to the post time. Not that exciting, overall.

Main archives template

The default main archive template is functional, but nothing more than that. A simple list of links to the monthly archives, with links to category archives (if you’re using categories) below that. Not bad, of course, but I wanted to do better.

The monthly archive links I’ve kept more or less the same, with the exception that rather than listing out one on top of the other (and using up a large amount of vertical space for very little information), they list out horizontally. Of course, you can’t really tell that now, but when we roll around to August it’ll be more obvious.

For the category archives, I’ve included the post titles to the last ten posts in each category beneath the category title. The title itself links to the full category archive page, while the post titles link to their respective individual pages. It’s not much more information that what was available before, but it does give a little bit more, and can make searching for a recent post a little quicker than digging through each archive page if you don’t quite remember what category it got tossed into.

Kickshaw grumbles

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Last year at the Bite of Seattle, I discovered an incredible local acapella group called Kickshaw that blew me away when I walked up in time to hear a flawless acapella performance of one of my all-time favorite songs, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”.

After their version of “Dance to the Music” came up in iTunes today, I hit their website on a whim and discovered that they’re going to be performing at the Bite of Seattle food festival next weekend. Got all excited, started planning to go to see them again — and then realized that they’re playing at 6pm on Friday. I’ll be at work. Grrr. Not thrilled with whoever scheduled that. Didn’t they know that they should have consulted with me first?

Uh, yeah. Right. Anyway.

On the bright side, come early August, they’ll be performing at the Taste of Edmonds food festival, which is just about half an hour by car from here. Prairie’s expressed interest in going, so hopefully we’ll be able to head out that way and catch them there. Would be very cool to get to see them again.

[N]echo aggregators

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There’s been something of a ruckus in the geek/tech side of the blogosphere for a few weeks now that I’ve been loosely following, but not involving myself in (primarily because much of the tech bits go far beyond what my lil’ brain can handle).

To give a very loose summary:

  • RSS (what the acronym stands for varies depending on who you ask) is a machine-readable text format that allows (among other things) websites to syndicate other websites content, and allows special programs called news aggregators to display many sites content in a single simple interface (I use NetNewsWire).
  • RSS was created by, among other people, Dave Winer.
  • Many people were not entirely happy with the functionality the RSS specification(s) offered.
  • Many of these same people, rightly or wrongly, for various reasons, do not get along with Dave.
  • Much drama regarding the RSS specification ensued.
  • A group of people decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to create a new syndication format.
  • Dave, rightly or wrongly, was less than thrilled.
  • Much more drama ensued.

And that, more or less, brings us up to where we are now. If you’re curious about any of the details (and haven’t already been either watching from the sidelines or caught in the crossfire), a few Google, Feedster, or Technorati searches for various combinations of ‘dave’, ‘winer’, ‘rss’, ‘pie’, ‘echo’ and/or ‘necho’ should give you far more information than you would probably want in the first place.

Anyway. The Necho (as I believe it’s currently called) project is coming along steadily, and while it’s still being hammered together, Necho feeds are currently starting to pop up around the ‘net. I even have one here.

What surprised me while going through my newsfeeds tonight is that Dave, while he may come across as an ass at times, is certainly not one to sit on his ass while some new technological goodie comes across his screen (even if it’s one he’s not entirely thrilled with). He announced today the ~~first~~ second aggregator that supports Necho feeds (Fredik Lundh beat him to being the first). I have to say, I’m impressed.

The ~~war~~ ~~drama~~ disagreements may very well continue for a while, but Necho does seem to be picking up steam, and whether or not Dave approves, at least he’s lending his support. Even if it’s just “for bragging rights”, the support is there, and in the end, that’s a good thing.