Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Trackback changes and Category links

by

Well, for the moment, I’ve had to give up on my goal of staying pop-up free. Grrr. I thought I had it for a while, but as it turns out, TrackBack pings won’t automatically rebuild the page that they reference, so they weren’t showing up at all unless I forced the page to regenerate. So, until I find another way of managing it (apparently displaying TrackBack pings inline can be done using MySQL, but I’ve yet to dive into that), I’ve gone back to the default pop-up method of displaying TrackBack pings. Thanks to Phil for the suggestion he e-mailed me — while it didn’t work, it was a good idea (and, incidentally, congrats also on getting that CSS bug fixed…ain’t debugging fun?!?).

The second change tonight is the addition of Category-based navigation links for the individual entry pages. On the page for each entry, just below the previous entry/next entry links, there are now links that lead to the previous entry and next entry in whichever category the entry belongs to. I’d wanted to do this for a while, but just finally found the code to get it working — much thanks to ScriptyGoddess and Pixels in Time for the assistance with the code in setting this up!

Kinda freaky – voices from the past

by

Okies, this was kind of weird. As usual in the evenings, I’m sitting here at my desk, working on my ‘puter and letting iTunes grab songs at random. The current track is ‘America No More’, by the KLF, off of the single for ‘America: What Time Is Love?‘.

The song is a combination of war sound effects (planes, helicopers, missiles, explosions, and the like), a bagpipe tune, and samples from various broadcasts from around the time the song was written, in (I believe) 1991.

All of a sudden, I hear George Bush Sr.’s voice coming out of my speakers…

…the legitimate government of Kuwait will be restored to its rightful place, and Kuwait will once again be free. Iraq will eventually comply with all relevant United Nations resolutions, and then, when peace is restored, it is our hope that Iraq will live as a peaceful and cooperative member of the family of nations, thus enhancing the security and stability of the Gulf.

I guess it sounded good at the time, huh?

Wired goes CSS

by

I’ve occasionally babbled here about my continuing efforts to create a modern, standards-compliant site, using CSS, ensuring that my site validates, and most recently, adopting current accessibility standards. In doing so, I’ve joined an ever-growing group of sites across the ‘net working to follow current web standards.

As is typical for movements like this, it’s the ‘little people’ that start the ball rolling (in this case, primarily weblogs and personal sites), then the ‘big boys’ follow. Today, one of the first major, heavy-traffic sites has unveiled their new standards-compliant design — Wired. They detail their decisions to move to the new format in their article “A site for your eyes“, and web guru Jeffrey Zeldman gives his thoughts (and praise) on his site today. Congrats Wired!

iMac caught with PC in illicit love nest

by

iMac and PC caught in poolside trystIn a surprise development that has rocked the computing world today, paparazzi have made public a photograph of Apple‘s popular iMac computer cavorting poolside with what appears to be a Microsoft Windows-based PC. The photograph in question shows the two models of computer — who have been publicly embroiled in bitter enmity for nearly two decades — lounging beside a swimming pool and playing chess, both of them entirely in the buff. The iMac’s towel is draped coyly over the back of its lounger, while the PC is sitting on its towel.

Spokespersons for the two computers have angrily denied any implications of a hidden relationship between the long-feuding enemies. “Look, it’s amazing what can be done with Photoshop these days,” fumed a Microsoft spokesman, speaking under condition of anonymity. “Now, why don’t you just go bother Britney Spears or something?”

Test post

by

Test post to see if regex is working correctly.

(sigh) It’s not. But I’ve asked for help, so hopefully it will soon (incidentally, regex is a plugin for MT that should allow me to get smileys and other search/replace goodies working again without having to hack into MT). Just so’s ya know what I’m babbling about.

MovableType upgrade

by

I’ve just upgraded to MovableType 2.5. This will probably break a few of the features (off the top of my head, the smileys will need to be fixed, and possibly the ‘recent comments’ section), but I’ll get those re-enabled as quickly as I can.

Addendum: ‘Recent Comments’ are working again. Most likely, nobody even noticed that they were gone for a couple hours. Ah, well. On the plus side, they now work with the standard MT installation, and don’t need a special hack. Hooray for upgrades!

Animatrix

by

What is the Animatrix?

Well, okay, so my first answer would probably involve something along the lines of Betty Page making a cameo in a Roger Rabbit cartoon. But that’d be wrong.

Animatrix screen grabIt’s actually the title of a DVD coming out sometime in 2003, where (as far as I can tell from the trailer) nine stories set in the universe of The Matrix will be told using various styles of animation. Sounds cool, and quite a few of the shots in the trailer are little short of mindblowing. Certainly seems to be worth keeping an eye out for, in any case.

Theologian of the Year

by

I’d be interested to hear what Dad thinks of this link — ‘The Door’ magazine (who I don’t know anything about at all) chooses their Theologian of the Year:

Perilous times call for bold theology.

Let’s face it. Evil is running rampant. Terrorists strike without warning. Corporate executives defraud the public and their own employees. Politicians tear apart the fabric of national unity for their own agendas. Popular culture has become a banal river of unadulterated trash, a “hellmouth” slowly dumbing down our sense of reality. The people are paralyzed by indecision, ennui or terminal cynicism.

Meanwhile, the ozone layer is perforated, glaciers are melting, and crazies set wildfires that denude the landscape. While Generation X passes the baton to Generation Y, adolescence is still hell, AND THERE’S ONLY ONE LETTER LEFT!

We need someone who can not only deconstruct the problem of evil, but kick it’s hiney; someone with a preternatural sense of comic timing and an eye for fashion.

We need Buffy.

Dad (along with other people) has been telling me for a while just how good of a show ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ really is. One of these days I may need to see if I can rent the DVD season sets and start working my way through it. Neat article, though.

Incidentally, The Door looks like it may be an interesting site to explore — from their ‘About The Door Magazine‘ page:

We satirize something we love — the Church, and more generally people of faith — with the hope that our prodding might generate some course corrections while inducing a laugh or two…or three.

The basis for The Door‘s mission is a scriptural injunction to mock idolatry. The prophet Elijah did it best, during his contest with the priests of Baal. But an expanded discussion is found in the Talmud, that compendium of Jewish oral traditions that we find a continuing source of light on New Testament understanding. The rabbinic teachers said Israel was forbidden to mock or jeer anyone or anything except idolatry. The prescribed epithet was, “Take your idol and put it under your buttocks!”

Laughter is good

by

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than perhaps you think for.

— Ishmael, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

The hunt is on: MT, MySQL, and PHP

by

While I’ve done my best to track any changes I’ve made to Movable Type in my ‘MovableType’ archive category, I’ll freely admit it’s not organized quite as well as it could be.

However, it looks like there’s going to be a lot of good information regarding MT, MySQL, and PHP appearing soon, as Jonathan Delacour and Allan Moult start migrating their MT blogs to new installations. Jonathan will be writing from the perspective of a Windows user, Allan from that of a Mac OS X user. Definitely worth keeping an eye on in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, Shelley Powers sees the migration beginning, and immediately begins her hunt for the wild MT documenters. The game is afoot!