My Favorites

Recently Consumed

• A Signal Shattered
  Jack has been contacted by advanced alien life. An interstaller shark known as Wheeler, who has set himself up as a sort of cargo-cult god, has given Jack technologies that are indistiguishable from magic. Wheeler’s goal is for Jack to either destroy himself or become like Wheeler. Wheeler’s mistake: Jack is a hacker.
  

Daily Links

• Up With Grups - The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood [New York Magazine]: Those insipid Ponce de Leon’s who bust generation gaps and give their toddlers mohawks… may actually be on to something. And somebody at New York Magazine needs a serious lesson in readability. Save your eyes, read in a very narrow browser window.
  » culture humour str
• How to be depressed: A quick guide to getting less out of life: “Unless [this article] is so brilliant that I am spontaneously contacted by Penguin publishing, who beg me to convert the article into [a] self-help book that goes on to sell six million copies, then I have failed. I really suck. I do.”
  » funny geek health satire

My Favorites

Recently Consumed

• Signal to Noise
  Quite good. Nylund takes a first contact situation and twists it slightly, his setting a too-believable dystopian Earth whose decayed morals seem to be writ large in the universe. There are many well-written players, a great deal of intrigue, and few survivors.
  
• Gridlinked (Tor Science Fiction)
  This one kind of sucked. The premise was okay, but the plot was a tad muddled and the writing itself was just not good. The first Amazon recommendation I’ve ever had disappoint me.
  

So I fixed my problem with wordpress’s blogger importer script with one line of SQL and a fairly simple PHP script. Being a complete SQL n00b, I backed up my database first anyway. Here it is: SELECT ID, post_content FROM wp_posts WHERE post_title REGEXP '[0-9]{18}' That was it. I’m starting to like this stuff.

Daily Links

• domEl() - custom function for easier DOM manipulation: Cute.
  » dom javascript scripting
• Unskilled and Unaware of It: To summarize: people who suck at something often don’t realize they suck, their limited skills giving them no way to correctly evaluate their own performance. To further simplify: dumb people don’t know they’re dumb.
  » funny science socialscience
• Putting the We in Web [newsweek]: “Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it’s all about … you.” And Stewart and Caterina are on the damn cover of Newsweek (looking fabulous, btb).
  » bubbletwodotoh flickr msm socialweb web webtwodotoh

My Flickr Photos

My Favorites

Daily Links

• Caterina.net: It’s a bad time to start a company: “6) There’s too much going on. […] I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who’s talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain’t the Chief Party Officer.”
  » bubbletwodotoh

My Favorites

Daily Links

• Lost Widget [skia.net]: “Every 108 minutes, the button must be pushed. From the moment the alarm sounds, you will have four minutes to enter the code into the microcomputer processor.” It’s CC’d, so there is so going to be a konfabulator verion soon.
  » cc funny lost mac tv widget

My Favorites

Daily Links

• Secret to a long life - get even more often [Sydney Herald]: “The study cites [service industry-types] as being at risk of seriously harming their health. `Every time a person [represses] his true feelings there are negative consequences for his health.’” Oh, and gravity makes things fall down. Amazing, I know.
  » health science socialscience

It’s a very iterative process for me. My first web site was a two-celled table, and I can trace the design of this weblog, up until the change to wordpress, all the way back to that original, primitive ancestor. That is how I design, change by tiny change. I have never in my life considered opening photoshop first when designing something, my primary tools are a text editor and a browser. Save, reload, repeat.

All this, naturally, is my way of explaining why this still looks a lot like the default wordpress template, with a few tiny changes that normal people (ie, not me) probably wouldn’t notice. I did, I think, manage to put my signature on it with an economy of changes though. And by ‘my signature’ I mean the Three Orange Dots™.

My Flickr Photos

My Favorites

That ‘Daily Fluff’ entry is the result of a script I wrote. It pulls my photos and favorites from the Flickr API, my links from the del.icio.us API, and when webcron tells it to run, turns all that into a post on my blog. I’m eventually going to add items & reviews from my junklog account, as well. This took me two days to do, primarily because I was at first trying to use Wordpress’s XML-RPC interface to create the post, with very little in the way of success, until I realized I was being stupid. It is much (much, much) easier with a db-driven app like wordpress to just insert the post directly into the database with PHP. Of course, I had to learn how to do that first.

In other words, yes, so far I’m having fun with wordpress. <glee>

Daily Links

• The Toronto Star: How to spot a baby conservative: “Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. [The study’s author] reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics.”
  » culture funny politics socialscience

My Flickr Photos

My Favorites

• WordPress Codex
  Something tells me I’m going to be spending a lot of time on this site.
  (tags: wordpress wiki reference)

Yeah, I converted, and it was crazy easy with the importers they have now. Beating this beast into a form more pleasing to myself, though, is going to take a bit longer.

Already I don’t like that all of the posts I imported without a specific title defaulted to their unix timestamps. I found a couple of places where I was able to hack it into displaying something else instead of the ugly 18-digit number, but I’ve yet to find the silver bullet that will fix this problem everywhere titles show up in wordpress (which is a lot of places). If anybody could point me at the specific function in wp, it’d be appreciated.

One success story so far is that I got category lists to use proper grammar. This is why below you will see this post is tagged “wordpress, hacks and php” instead of “wordpress hacks php”. The relevant function is get_the_category_list, ask me how if you’re interested. And yes, I really am this anal about small details like that.

Further updates as events warrent.

As somewhat of a fan and a follower of neologisms, let me say first that I find the word itself appalling. Podcast. Oy. But. I’ve been told I have a nice voice. I’ve spent the last four years of my life, less this last little stretch, talking for a living. I’ve finally had to admit that I now find talking to be a lot easier than writing, a bit of a switch for someone whose ‘aha’ moment with the internet involved using it to express a ragged bloody scream of adolescent rage and alienation that he couldn’t express any other way. So, yeah, 1) bright new medium still mostly uncluttered due to hosting costs being what they are, 2) I have the technology and possibly the skill, but 3) the question remains: do I have anything to say? This is all I have to say today.

Blogger Code 2.0. Yes, really.

B9 D++ T+ K– S++ F- I O+ X- E L C Y3 R+ W+ P– M5 N- H++