I’m a big fan of the Pragmatic Bookshelf site where a typical purchase includes the paper copy as well as a personalised PDF. So far, I have the Stripes, Core Data, and Beginning Mac Programming books/pdfs. They also have some screencasts which look interesting as well.

In the meantime, I continue in my efforts to migrate from the Java web-app paradigm to the mac desktop/mobile app way of doing things. I think my biggest conceptual hurdle is navigating the bindings in Interface Builder. I much prefer the old-fashioned way of coding … using text. Using a new-window-happy application to manage object bindings just makes my head hurt when trying to find the right triangle to click, the right checkbox or option to select, or trying to determine why something isn’t connected the way I think it is.

I’ve been too far out of the loop lately with recent technologies. However, I’ve been rapidly making up for lost time now that I have some solid reading time on the commuter rail. TechCrunch is a great site for keeping up with all sorts of new applications coming out, but this page just lists Ajax applications. I just looked at the Kiko calendar app and it’s pretty slick for a beta product.

That, some updates to the AppFuse project and a newly discovered Trails project left me with quite a bit to read through and digest. I’ve spent quite a bit of time reviewing the JBoss demo apps as well, as they are all built on java 1.5 and use EJB3. Unfortunately, my current project is still java 1.4 and very old (over 4 years now), so I usually delve into the demo apps to get a grip on them. I’m quite envious of the simplifications to J2EE webapps and the new features like Annotations and Generics. The simplified for loop is also quite nice. It’s good to see the language gurus weeding out the syntactic obstacles in these updates.

I finally bit the bullet and moved to a full-featured photo gallery tool. In my case, I chose Coppermine. It has quite a few nice features, and I’ve liked the other sites that have implemented it. So, I spent a little while moving over the image folders to the coppermine directory, re-linking the posts with gallery links, and deleting the old qdig installation. While qdig is quick and dirty, there are just too many things that it doesn’t do.

The other reason I decided to do this was that I accidentally blew away a bunch of pictures from old posts that used to be part of a separate ‘photos’ section. I tried finding back-ups, but could only come up with about a quarter of them. So, I’ll be digging up the original photos and re-organizing some of those posts so that they point to the coppermine gallery.

Lastly, I’d like to update the coppermine theme with one that looks like the coffee cup theme I use for the main site. That shouldn’t be too much work … we’ll see. I did find quite a few coppermine themes at Shuttertalk.com.

After downloading it, uploading the package, and trying to configure it to use ImageMagick, I had some trouble so I went to my hosting provider’s support site … almost. I use totalchoicehosting.com, but instead went to totalhosting.com and pestered their tech-support people. To their credit, they did answer my queries promptly, politely, and accurately … despite the fact that I didn’t have an account with them. It turned out that totalchoicehosting has a nice feature where they will auto-install several packages for you. Coppermine turned out to be one of them … so I never had to go through the trouble in the first place.

This is from the BBC. I had no idea it was literally possible to play a computer game to death.

A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.

OK, so the first thing I noticed after moving the content from a sub-directory to the main root was that categories were getting sorted by the ID. Since Uncategorized was the first entry, that was always at the top. It took me a few minutes, but digging into /wp-includes/template-functions-category.php found that the list_cats method had a default sort on the ID column. I changed $sort_column = 'ID' to $sort_column = 'name' and it’s looking a lot nicer.

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Well, it’s been so long, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to get into the weeds with a new editing system. I’ve used MT for so long, and gotten used to its quirks that other systems seemed to be intimidating. Well, when I saw the coffee-cup template for WordPress, I had to take the plunge. A couple of minor tweaks and it was up and running.

Another thing that helped me take the plunge was that there were poor choices for photo gallery management in MT … at least from my limited perspective there was. So far, QDig is looking like a nice alternative to the more complex systems out there. I have looked into a couple others for WP, but found them lacking. Specifically, IImageGallery and PhotoPress looked promising, but took far too much to get working and were pretty un-intuitive to manipulate. QDig is looking very easy – we’ll see how that works out. I am using IImageBrowser for multiple image uploads … that is working great. I’m also trying out one of the no-follow plugins and a referrer-spam blocker too.

I think this is one of Bush’s best ideas … to push for alternative fuels. In ten years, if we can drop our production by 50%, the world will be a tremendously different place. Of course, that assumes China doesn’t pick up the slack in consumption. But if all things were equal, the money flowing toward oil producers would drop dramatically and force revolutionary changes. The US is the largest consumer market and will, by default, force the ball rolling.

[ Rivals Join To Develop Hybrid-Car Technology (washingtonpost.com) ]
In 2004, Americans will buy about 80,000 hybrids, Bruynesteyn wrote — a small fraction of the more than 16 million vehicles that will be sold overall. But he projected the hybrid market to climb to 470,000 vehicles in 2007 and to 3 million a year within a decade.

Of course, I’m only echoing the ideas of others that have written on this. Friedman from the NYT, Phil Greenspun has something on this, and probably lots of others. More links to come if I have the time to dig them up.

Looks like some A-list bloggers are meeting up next week for a get-together. I’d really like to go, but we’ll see how things pan out. Lots of issues on the family front are coming up in the next couple weeks.

[ BloggerCon: ]

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You’re invited to the Scripting News Christmas party on Saturday December 11, 7PM-9PM, at the Hong Kong restaurant in Cambridge.

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Here are some reasons others hate java:

• Philip Greenspun’s Weblog: Java is the SUV of programming tools

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• Gripes about Java
• Java Bashing

But my reasons are purely practical. It takes me multitudes of time longer to do something with a java utility than a perl utility. Errors are a nightmare to decipher. Build processes take hours for large projects where pre-compilation is required. Libraries and JDK versions are a huge hassle to keep up with, especially if you have external vendors writing code for you … they inevitably use a feature of 1.5 when you’re still stuck with 1.3. The java classes we work with are amazingly obscure and complex … most likely to produce a level of job security for the company that developed it. There’s just far too much to complain about than rave about.

So, Henry asks me about how to do this expanding menu thing. Here’s how I was able to get this done. First, there are two ways to make things invisible using CSS. One is to set the visibility property of an object, the other is to set the display property. Setting the visibility to hidden will make it invisible, but the object will still take up the same amount of space. So, a ten line paragraph set to hidden will show ten lines of white space. Setting it to display: none will remove it from the whole flow, as if it weren’t there. Since I wanted the menus beneath to move up if one is collapsed, I chose the display method.

Next, I needed some icons. The Netscape Devedge sidebars have this whole expanding menu tree, but I only wanted one level. They use nice + and – icons too, so I stole those and edited them to remove the extra space around them. A javascript method uses those as links to open and close the menus.
Read the rest of this entry »

I hope people enjoy this design, I had fun coming up with it. There are so many good ideas out there that it’s hard to settle on just one. I think I’ll do some extra work and come up with an alternate design based on another one that I really enjoy.

This one was based on the Deco design by Marc Trudel, one of many at the CSS Zen Garden. The one that really looks like fun is the Golden Age Comics one. Although the design is borrowed from Marc Trudel, I significantly modified his css to obtain the effects I wanted. He used background images everywhere, while I used pure css to define colors, borders, etc. If I add any images, it will be a header one that tries to solidify the site. Right now, I think it’s pretty, but lacks a focus.

I also really enjoyed coming up with the open/close icons and code. I never really did find anything that met my needs out there in the world of javascript, so I rolled my own system. I have a menu object constructor that has a method for toggling the menu block on and off, one for displaying it on initialization, and a cookie check to remember what you had opened/closed so it would restore the menus to that state when you come back. At least I think it’s cool, and that’s what really counts.

Another coolio thing is that I have a menu block for upcoming photo galleries. I’m using the Global Listings get shorty download free

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MT plugin to list the categories from a separate photo blog. Right now, there’s only one picture of Peter in there from his first birthday. I have a bunch more to put up and the design of that page needs some work too.

Now that my site is in somewhat decent shape (doesn’t validate against anything though … bummer), I can start returning my emails that I’ve neglected for so long.

For those regular readers of mine, I’ve recently moved from a very poor hosting provider to one that seems pretty decent. The web forums are great for filtering out the losers in the crowd … and there are quite a few of them out there. Take a look at WebHostingTalk forums for a quick sanity check. Do a search on any provider and just read the top 5 or so. Had I done that last winter, I wouldn’t have been in the spot I’m in now. It’s not fun screen-scraping all the pages and re-building my mt database.

Please bear with me as I migrate all of my old content into this new database. I’m upgrading to MT 3.0 as well – it has some nice features. The nice thing about the new host (totalchoicehosting.com) is that they have the ImageMagick libraries and perl modules installed so I can do some photo-blogging. Stephanie really wants to do some of this too, so it’s important to upgrade.

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So, the whole Diebold fiasco

is almost over … at least for the ones being targeted with DMCA notices.

But, as soon as that breaks, here’s some more fuel for the Diebold fire:

[ The Register ]
“The machines were in an advanced line of Diebold ATMs built atop Windows XP Embedded, which, like most versions of Windows, was vulnerable to the RPC DCOM security bug exploited by Nachi, and its more famous forebear, Blaster.”

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[ Wired News: When Cash Is Only Skin Deep ]
“A Florida company has announced plans to develop a service that would allow consumers to pay for merchandise using microchips implanted under their skin.”

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Great stuff today. Why War is waging a campaign to keep some leaked memos available and Diebold is waging one to shut them down. Diebold makes the voting machines used in Florida and elsewhere.

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[ Why War? Features ]

“I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations.” [source]

Links: Black Box Voting, Swathmore College’s attempt to shut down students who link to why war, Copyfight.

After looking at some of the memos, it looks like Diebold is running a subsidiary that specializes in flawed software.

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Looks like I was hit with a comment spammer recently. This weekend, lots of comments were added that linked to not-so-nice sites out there. I had been hit before, but just with onesy-twosies. This weekend there were about a dozen. Coincidentally, Scripting News linked to this smap-blocker:

[ MT-Blacklist: Stop Spam Now :: The Daily Journey :: JayAllen.org ]

Let’s see how it works!

download torn curtain online Update: Added a hack to the notification email that lets me edit the comment quickly. Here is a page with lots of ideas: [ http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/004325.php#004325 ]

Update: Here’s the link to my blacklist.txt file that the plugin creates.

Great article today on the whole DVD code issue:

The Supreme Court of California ruled yesterday that the First Amendment right to free speech did not mean trade secrets could be published on the Web with impunity.

link: [Court Rules That Trade Secrets Can Outweigh Free Speech ]

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I was talking with my wife’s grand-father this past weekend and the topic came up about the furture of technological societies. I remembered that Bill Joy had a great piece on this, so a little google-digging came up with his Wired article, circa April 2000. I still can’t get over the fact that he takes the unabomber’s precepts and extrapolates them with marvelous lucidity. It’s very scary reading if you’re up for it!

[ Wired 8.04: Why the future doesn't need us. (Bill Joy) ]

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First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

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Good stuff in the science world today with limited and controlled fusion through the use of xrays. Of course, we don’t have the engines yet that can use this energy, but it is a great step. Perhaps my children can fly to Mars someday….

From the BBC: BBC NEWS | Technology | Net speed record smashed

“Using a quantity of data equivalent to two feature-length DVD-quality movies, the transfer was accomplished at an average speed of more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.”

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Addendum: After reviewing an article on webmonkey, which referenced the above article, I found that the P2P group has a weblog! Looks like they’re using MT, and I love today’s entry: “Rip, Mix, Burn”.

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim importance of being earnest the online fo this little tidbit of fun! test out Greg’s Place, or perhaps Scripting.com

. For some reason, it won’t work with Henry’s site ;-(

This is incredible. This is a great example of the fluidic nature of the web. It bypasses the shortsighted obstacles that outdated companies try to erect. This takes file-sharing totally off the backbone, and completely out of the sphere of control by any group(s). I can see this all over campuses as soon as it hits the market, and it may be hitting the mainstream very soon. The pent-up demand for something that bypasses the craziness of Kazaa or Gnutella is very high right now. Look for this in a school near you! Link: O’Reilly Network: Warsharing, anyone? [February 07, 2003]

“The inserted ACCESS POINT (IEEE 802.11b) can serve according to manufacturer up to 250 users at the same time. Access to the stored files is possible over ftp, CIFS (Common InterNet file system) or NFS. By a Ethernet Cradle available as accessories the equipment can connect accessing Clients by WLAN in addition with the InterNet. As safety functions the Fsv-pg1 incoming inspection coding with alternatively 64 or 128 bits offers, stored files can by password be protected.”

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I think the Y2K bug is still poking it’s little head up here and there! Boston Globe Online: City summons 106-year-old Norwegian to start first grade at school

“She was born in 1897, but computers in Os township, near the west coast city of Bergen, misread the ‘97′ in her birth date as 1997. Thinking her to be just six-years-old, she was sent a letter about her new school.”

Just discovered a net technique that many sql gurus will have already known, so please don’t laugh, I don’t claim to be the be-all and end-all of sql!

We do a lot of table updating at my company, updating price data, school data, etc., etc. We had some detailed and arcane info on how to do oracle exports/imports, which have worked, but were always quirky due to database upgrades, tool library paths, etc.

Using a trial version of Toad

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, I can view the schemas in a nice GUI. Lots of neat tools there too. So, I grab the create-table script Toad makes, and make a back-up table. Then, just execute this: insert into tbl_bak select * from tbl_orig. Nice! No more imports, etc. Just back up the table, do whatever perl-db-upload I have to do, and I can always go back with the reverse of that process. Takes only seconds to copy huge amounts of data, since it’s all on the server. This saves me some headaches.

This looks like fun! Now to put it into place….

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So, Adam Goldberg is looking for shopping cart systems for his site, theTechPub.com. Thanks to his hard work, he found a really good one that I’ll try to get installed and see if he can use it. Looks like he’s running into some sort of permissions issue. [freshmeat.net: Project details for Interchange

]. If I can get this set up for him, then maybe Stephanie can start that online store she’s always talking about

This book looks like a good read! I haven’t read any sci-fi in quite a while, so I think I’ll pick this one up for a read, and to help a fellow blogger.

(Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom).

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The other source of books I found was at O’Reilly’s Open Books Project. Lots of goodies there, like CGI programming, MySQL Reference, etc.

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And thirdly, one resource where I have gone for quite some time now is Informit.com. With registration, you can choose from lots of older titles that are out of print now. Informit is actually a sister company to the one I work for, Prentice Hall.

Finally, a break from the insanity. Copyright laws in Europe may just be the antidote to the crazy American system we have. Seems like they’re taking on some of the most crucial points in the digital world.

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This is my first entry using Movable Type. Over the past couple years, I had used Greymatter, and before that, Radio and Frontier. MT has a better interface than the others, and it’s written in Perl, and so on, and so on. It was great to easily import my old GM posts into MT’s MySQL db.

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That’s the other note of interest. I switched hosts from Shore.net to Dot5hosting.com which is pretty cool. They have tons of great featurs for under $10 a month. You can’t beat their services and price combination. Squirrelmail, ftp, SSH, majordomo, MySQL, etc., etc. Although I can’t seem to ssh yet, everything else is working great.

Good time for a re-design too… Try viewing this with NS 6+, it handles the attached background image correctly. I had to use an IE CSS hack to get the plain color background in the main content block instead of having it display the image incorrectly.