Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Microsoft switchers – oops!

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So Apple‘s had their ‘Switch’ campaign going on for a while now, touting stories from ex-PC users who have switched to Macintosh computers. Apparently the campaign is doing fairly well — at least well enough for Microsoft to start a similar campaign of its own.

Unfortunately, since they (apparently) couldn’t find any customers that had actually made the switch from the Mac to Windows, and were happy about it, and willing to talk about it — they had to combine fictional accounts a hired freelance writer’s story with stock photography, as pointed out on /. earlier today.

Apparently, this isn’t a rare practice, either. I especially like the page where the people in the photograph are using a Mac 6100.

Methinks Microsoft’s marketing folks need to work on their game a bit.

Thanks to Scripting News for this one.

Small update to RSS feed

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Lately I’ve been reading a ton of sites daily (65 at current count) via NetNewsWire Lite. While this allows me to skim through a huge amount of information in a short time, one of the disadvantages is that none of the RSS feeds that the sites provide give any information on comments to a given post (this isn’t a limitation of NetNewsWire at all, it’s part of how the RSS feed is written). Since I’ve often found some really interesting stuff in the discussion threads after a post, this is a bit of a downside.

So, while I doubt that very many people subscribe to my RSS feed, I figured I’d at least make my feed give me the information I want, and changed my feed template slightly. Where the code used to say…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]></content:encoded>

…I’ve altered it to say this…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]><MTEntryIfAllowComments> <![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryCommentCount$> Comments)]]></MTEntryIfAllowComments><MTEntryIfAllowPings><![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$> TrackBack Pings)]]></MTEntryIfAllowPings></content:encoded>

…so that in my RSS feed, there’s a short display line that tells whether I’ve gotten any comments or TrackBack pings for an entry.

Maybe if I’m really lucky, someone a little higher up in the blogosphere heirarchy will stumble across this and the idea will start to spread.

Trackback changes and Category links

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.