Archive for September, 2006

Quite some time ago, I saw a posting by Matt Cutts, detailing when he tends to write new blog posts. I thought it might be interesting to see what kind of posting habits I tend to have, so I ran some similar commands to gather the data. Through the magic of Excel, I’ve come up with some interesting results.

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I recently “discovered” the Optional Excerpt feature in WordPress, which is sad considering that it’s been in plain view the entire time. From here on out, readers of my RSS feed will get a summary of each post instead of the first N characters. This should help make each post’s intent more understandable. The only problem is whether or not I’ll remember to create an excerpt with each post. I’ve clearly got to train myself to take this extra step before posting.

One other interesting feature that I recently learned about is the “post slug” field. This allows the author to specify what text to use when creating the permanent link for the post. How awesome is that? No more awkward contractions in the permalink URL’s!

Here’s a handy tip for all you WordPress 2.x users out there. The inline uploading feature of the “Write Post” administration page was completely useless to me. I never have, nor will I ever, upload files to my web server using the WordPress interface (that’s what we have SCP and SFTP for). What irritated me most, however, was that I couldn’t turn this feature off, thereby hiding the iframe that contained the uploading controls. It took up a large amount of space on the admin page, and it looked ugly. But I’ve figured out how to “disable” it. Here’s what I did:

In the wp-admin/ folder, I opened up the file named edit-form-advanced.php. Doing a search for the word upload yielded a block of code controlled by the following conditional expression:

if(current_user_can('upload_files'))

I simply commented out this block (including the conditional) with some c-style comments. I did the exact same thing for the edit-page-form.php file. Voilà: no more inline upload! I’m so glad I’ve been able to reclaim that wasted screen real estate.

CoLT version 2.2.1 is now available at Born Geek. Included in this minor update are two new localizations, Ukrainian (uk-UA) and Dutch (nl-NL), as well as a snazzy new extension logo icon. These two new localizations brings the number of supported languages to 15. If you would like to volunteer to translate CoLT into your language, head over to BabelZilla and sign up for a free account. Then, visit the CoLT translation forum post for the relevant links to translate the extension. BabelZilla makes translating easy (you can do it in your web browser)!

I’ve got several disjointed thoughts for you today.

I’m going to make a valiant effort to pre-order a Nintendo Wii via my favorite online retailer, Amazon.com. The Wii looks like an incredible platform, and is the only modern gaming system that has gotten my attention. With any luck, Nintendo will really score with this system; I can’t wait to try it out.

The new theme I’m working on for this site is moving along nicely. I’ve gone through a number of test designs, and I’ve finally settled on one that I like. Development work is still taking place (I only estimate it as about 75% completed), but I hope to roll it out here at the site in the next 4 to 6 weeks. Keep your eyes peeled.

Last month, I mentioned the new photo album software I was planning on writing. I’ve come a long ways with that project, but I still have a long ways to go. A number of design paradigms have changed mid-stream, so code rewrites are plentiful. I’m looking forward to rolling this out on my site. I estimate this at a 40% completion level.

I recently whipped up a database driven list of my music. What can I say? I’m a cataloging freak.

I’ll leave you with a great Kent Brockman quote:

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together.

There are a few categories of software applications that suck across the board. Instant messaging clients are one primary example (though Google Talk is changing that). Another seems to be CD-RW burning software. I’ve tried a number of applications, all of which seemed to either not work or not have the features I desired. Does anyone have any recommendations for decent burning software? The free packages I tried (Deepburner and CD Burner XP Pro) didn’t impress me, and the Nero Express version I got with my CD writer is really old (5.something). I hear Nero 7 is horrible, but that 6.6 is pretty good. What do you use and prefer?

I recently mentioned the stuttering problems I was seeing in some games (Half-Life 2 to be precise), and my attempts to fix it with nForce 4 drivers and a fix from AMD. One of these changes, strangely enough, has made my computer run hotter (the graphics card now reaches up to 50 degrees under load, which is still somewhat cooler than my previous card, but warm nonetheless).

Before installing the nForce 4 drivers, I created a restore point using Microsoft’s System Restore. And, after I noticed the heat problems, I tried to go back to the state the machine was in before I did the driver install. But restoring to my saved point doesn’t work! After a reboot, Windows reports that it was “unable to restore to the previous point” and that nothing has been changed. I’m not exactly sure why I tried System Restore, because it has never worked for me before. Has anyone else ever gotten this thing to work? As far as I can tell, it’s completely useless.

Version 4.4 of Googlebar Lite is available over at Born Geek. This new release features support for the latest Firefox 2.0 nightly builds, a new Croatian (hr-HR) translation, a bug fix, and other miscellaneous changes. Also released tonight is version 2.2 of CoLT. This new build adds support for the latest Firefox 2.0 nightly builds.

With Firefox 2.0 RC1 on the horizon (the branch apparently froze last night for check-ins), I think it’s time for another of my opinionated views on the new Firefox theme. I have mentioned before that the new theme looked pretty bad, and apparently a number of people agreed. Thankfully, the theme was revamped in the September 11 nightly builds, and it looks a lot better. But people are still complaining. I like the new 2.0 theme much better than the previous attempt, but I still feel the Firefox 1.5 look and feel is ideal. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

So this leads to my main point: themes (or skins, whatever you want to call them) just seem wrong. So much time, energy, and development effort gets put into how stuff looks. Couldn’t all of that be better spent in making Firefox better than it is today? Let’s have faster start up times. The Places feature looks cool. And I’m sure there are other great ideas on the horizon. Can’t we work on those instead of arguing about the icon used for the “Home” button?

At some level, a certain look will always have problems. One can’t please everyone all the time, especially when it comes to looks; everyone’s idea of beauty is different. So, set a look that most everyone agrees on (e.g. the current Firefox 1.5 theme) and leave it alone! Put all of the development effort on cooler features, not on shinier icons. In the end, I think everyone will be happier.

I’ve put up another photo set, this time of an outing to Pilot Mountain State Park. It was fairly hazy out yesterday, so I was not able to get any decent shots of the surrounding landscape. But I did get a few nice macro shots. Be sure to check it out.