lifebsideben

I’ve been trying in spare cycles here and there to deeply integrate a WordPress-based blog into prince.org, for the staff (myself and all the moderators) to be able to muse on new policies, changes, whatever. We have a forum for that currently in the message boards area but that’s not the most effective way to disseminate stuff, as a lot of folks don’t actually read that forum, and there’s nothing that calls out new posts there (or differentiates the moderator-authored ones from the general question/complaint posts).

It was an interesting coding experiment to dive into WP’s guts a bit and figure out how to do this properly. I like the final solution; essentially the latest WP code gets dropped into /blog/ on the site, and a custom theme and plugin are symlinked in when I deploy the site, from my codebase. I don’t need to change a single line of WP code, and I get integration with my own session management/user database/authentication, a completely custom look and feel, and a nice administrative panel. I think added a new homepage module (in the upper right) to help guide some traffic to it (since I think postings there are really relevant to all visitors), which was trivial since I have a standard methodology for that. Overall I really think it’s a big win, and for probably less than a total of 10 hours work, with about 25% of that being CSS (which I suck at).

If you want to see how it turned out, head on over and check it out: the prince.org staff blog.

Tags: blogging, coding, princeorg, wordpress

I was surfing for some movabletype vs wordpress comparisons based on a discussion at work (I’m firmly in the WP camp due to the extensive plugin and theme work I’ve done for the prince.org blog, but still curious to know what’s up in the MT world), and came across this entry from Dustin Diaz discussing it. The most telling part was actually one of the comments, from Molly Holzchlag, who wrote the Teach yourself Movable Type in 24 hours book:

Dustin, did you hear me shouting in enthusiastic agreement when I read this post? I’m sure you did.

While I still fight spam, WordPress has made it a lot easier to do so. And yeah, I might have written a book on MT, but I was so fed up with the product that the very week the book came out I switched to WordPress.

I agree that MT has some nice features. But I’m very happy I switched all told.

Now, granted this is from 2 years ago, and things can change a lot in 2 years, but damn, that sucks when the person who just published a book about your product changes their mind and enthusiastically jumps to the competitor. Must have been an akward book tour

Tags: blogging, Books, diss, wordpress

Ryan, working on the WordPress codebase, changed the category code to be more flexible. Here’s his commit entry:

“In your cats, making them back compat.”

OK, that’s pretty good. Lolcat phrasing, about code, with an actual cat(egory) reference. That’s a triple score!

Tags: coding, lolcats, wordpress

One of the facilities for 365main lost power to customers for 45 (!!!!) FORTY FIVE!!!! minutes yesterday. Bye, twitter, bye, movabletype, bye livejournal, bye typepad… that’s UGLY. You. just. can’t. have. this. happen. and. stay. in. the. datacenter. business. Here’s their status update. Pretty lame. Exodus and Equinix had their problems, but something as simple as handling power fluctuations on the PG&E grid was certainly never one of them.

OK, I goofed, and I didn’t have quite enough in my checking account to cover my AmEx bill, which has an online banking-initiated payment for “whatever amount is due” to be paid, when the bill is due. Bank of America bill pay went and made the payment anyhow, and I got a $35 overdraft fee. (2 days after I transferred money in to cover the extra amount from savings!) So yes, I’m stupid, but $35 for an overdraft? I called to try and get it reversed, and because of a problem a year ago (similar but not the same) where they *did* reverse the fees, they won’t do it now. Arrrgh. I was certain when it happened a year ago they told me in the future it would automatically transfer the funds from savings (which had plenty of cash), but apparently, that wasn’t set up. They claim it now is, but who knows.

Anyway, yes, I’m an idiot; but $35 seems awfully steep. I can’t imagine this actually costs the bank *anything* (well, perhaps the interest on the “negative” amount they “loaned” me for a day). Certainly not $35. It appears these fees are incredibly lucrative, however, and Bank of America has recently raised the overdraft feeso as well.

Most importantly, from a computer-science / user-experience standpoint, the automatic bill pay system gives a bunch of options, including “only pay if it’s less than X amount”, etc. Why isn’t there a checkbox for “don’t pay if amount exceeds available balance–email me instead”? That seems simple, and logical. Maybe bill pay and the accounts are two separate systems, but it seems simple enough to bridge that gap–they’re all part of the same financial institution and they at least appear to be unified in the web interface. Of course, I guess that would cut into the possibility of some of that $17BN the industry generates from overdraft loans and fees, according to the link above from the Center for Responsible Lending…

Tags: banks, bitching

So there’s this new Star Wars videogame coming out in uhm, next Spring, but our biz-dev guys managed to cut some deal with LucasArts earlier this week, so of course, we had to get a branded site out ASAP. Here it is, just launched: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, with an exclusive trailer and awesome concept artwork gallery to boot! The team did an awesome job turning this around from concept to deployment in less than 4 days, of course, leveraging tons of the stuff from the other sites for GTA, Harry Potter, and Pirates of the Caribbean. An awesome effort and it looks great. I especially recommend the two videos about the “Euphoria” and “Digital Molecular Matter” physics engine stuff… looks really awesome. Even if the game turns out to be too hard to play, I wouldn’t mind just whipping stormtroopers who are trying to cling on for dear life, at a bunch of wooden structures I’ve built (go watch the videos!)

Anyhow, my appreciation and congratulations to the team, great job!

Tags: Games, gaming, movies, work, Yahoo

I was skimming this month’s Doctor Dobb’s Journal, which doesn’t take long in recent years due to the Microsoft-centricity of the ads and overall relatively lightweight article content (there’s always a gem or two, though, which is why it gets skimmed at all), but ran across an ad for a programmer’s editor that grabbed me, not in a good way.

The ad says “Need a Code Editor that’s Powerful - Flexible - Robust and Supports over 40 Languages?” (For the 1 person who reads my blog who isn’t a geek, by this of course, they mean programming languages)… “Introducing Dr Koder, The Powerful, Dynamic Code Editor(tm)”.

OK, this is fairly wrong on a few levels, as obviously it has to be powerful, and “dynamic” to some degree, and edit code. So why trademark that expression, I have no clue. But the more important bit is “Dr Koder”. No period after the Dr., but I would assume they mean it in the form of “Doctor”, even though there’s no crazy tagline like “heals your code quick!” or “diagnoses your code ills” or similar. So forgiving that, the main point is, “Dr. Koder”, with a K yet? What is this? No self-respecting developer, let alone software engineer, is going to proudly reply to “what editor do you use?” with “I’m a Dr. Koder man!” It just sounds lame. No wait, not just that… it IS lame. A terrible name. Obviously, the engineer(s) who wrote this thing, got naming rights. Don’t do this. Get some consensus, ask around, hire someone… something.

Adding to the hilarity, is the “ComingSsoon! Signup [sic] for your copy Today!” As if, developers wait around for that next great editor with baited breath, and stand in line to get it the first moment, etc. That’s for iPhones, not code editors. Here’s how it works with editors: you download a free trial. If the trial is cripped in any way besides time-limited (and that, something reasonable along the lines of 30 or 60 days), you ditch it. You try it with a small project. You read the manual (well, only after figuring out there’s something you’re “not quite getting”). You see if it compares to Eclipse. You see if it’s got some magical redeeming features / look and feel / behavior (a la TextMate on the Mac only), and if not, stick with Eclipse (or heaven forbid, the Microsoft Visual Studio tools if you’re so deeply stuck in that world), or emacs/vi if you’re a diehard Linux geek and don’t understand the productivity gains of a modern IDE. That’s how it works. Dr Koder has no chance at this point, in other words. Maybe they should get the free trial up and running, and only then advertise it.

Meanwhile, I’ll be using my free trial of Dr. Browzer to surf the web–it kicks Firefox’s ass!!

Tags: advertising, bitching, coding, engineering, software

I caught the first full episode of Fonejacker, a new British show composed of crank calls instigated by comedian/actor Kayvan Novak, and illustrated mostly in Monty-Python-esque (well, Terry Gilliam-esque more accurately) paper-cutout-style animation. This was surprising to me, because it seemed pretty clear from the title it was going to be a bad documentary about phone phreaking. It definitely wasn’t, and really, is pretty amusing, at least for quick laughs. There’s probably 15% of it I’m just not getting due to the accents and/or UK-specific pop culture references. It’s more sophisticated than the Jerky Boys, and more able to keep a straight face than you and your friends ever were making prank calls; but overall, a reasonable waste of time. Also, it’s the kind of humor that is just over the line enough to likely trip the PC police’s radar (and FCC’s, based on the language) if it were in the US–at least on broadcast TV.

I still wish it were about phreaking, though

Tags: fonejacker, humor, pranks, TV

I run Spamassassin on my server where I have my primary email account (yes, I still run my own email server, I know, that’s so 1995). Anyhow, I haven’t upgraded Spamassassin, or its rulesets, in about 3 years, and the volume of spam that’s been slipping through is really getting insane. Sure, the clients can weed out a bunch of it, but their rules aren’t as sophisticated as everything that SA can do. I finally took the plunge and upgraded it, which actually was pretty painless considering I am running an ancient version of RH (really ancient, don’t ask) and was moving from an old RPM to a new source-build. I still had to upgrade probably a dozen or more CPAN modules, although that generally went smoothly. And of course now, I actually set up a cron job to update the rules, which should keep things working nicely.

The results? Instantly, I saw a massive improvement in terms of what SA was able to correctly flag as spam! I got my inbox back! I estimate it’s catching about 95% of the spams that were slipping through prior to the upgrade, now. There’s also a couple false positives I need to deal with (from Bacula, most concerningly), but that is the next mini-project.

As a nice bonus (ok, the real reason I was doing this), the mail on my iPhone is now much more hammy, which makes it infintely more useful as a mail-reader!

Tags: Computers, email, linux, productivity, software, spam

…is that you end up demo’ing it to everyone who noticed you have one

It’s a pretty awesome device, and the (relatively short–90 minutes) wait on Friday was definitely worth it! Bragging rights are fun, sure, but besides that it’s just such a hugely more useful device than my previous (Nokia 6682)… the browser is such much better you can’t compare, Wifi is great, and overall usability (except for it being a little “slippery” by default, without a case) is leaps and bounds over any combo device I’ve ever had.

Now if we can just get Flash working on it… c’mon Apple, let Adobe play We all love QuickTime but let’s be serious!

Tags: apple, hardware, iPhone