Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Control key utility of the day: Capslock to Control.

Long ago, I set up Apache on my mac to handle a subdomain of ficml.org for testing the site. I followed some of these instructions at Evolt—mainly the netinfo stuff. Yesterday, I added a new virtual host, but the netinfo instructions didn’t work this time. Apparently the lookup order has changed (for no good reason) in Panther; MacWrite explains the new hosts-file regime.

The article mentions several ways to handle the change. Since I’d already added my info to NetInfo, I decided to change the lookupd order so that NetInfo (NI) would come earlier. That involves making an /etc/lookupd directory and inserting a hosts file into it that says:

LookupOrder Cache NI FF DNS DS

That may mess other things up—who am I to question Apple’s new lookup order, anyway?—but at the moment it’s working.

Don’t forget that this Saturday, August 14th, is going to be a tax holiday here in Taxachusetts. You can spend up to $2500 (under certain restrictions, such as not being a business).

This isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Food (outside of restaurants) and clothing (priced under $175) aren’t taxable in Massachusetts. Since back-to-school shopping is mainly a clothing thing, the mobs at the mall this Saturday won’t be saving much. On the bright side, the Apple Stores in Cambridge and Chestnut Hill and at the Northshore Mall will be open 24 hours for the holiday.

Saturday is a good day to buy a Mac. Just don’t try to write it off as a business expense afterwards.

I had an attack of Tengwar last week, so here’s a new link list, far beyond the dimensions of my previous Tengwar entry:

• Haven’t the foggiest? Try Omniglot’s introduction to Tengwar.
• M?•ns Bj??rkman has a more detailed explanation of Amanye Tenceli.
• Nice fonts: Tengwar Annatar (my favorite), several at Orlando Bloom Central, also at Tyalie Tyelellieva, the standard fonts from Dan Smith, Tengwar and runes from DaFont (see the later pages), Tengwar Parmaite, Tengwar Formal, , ,
• My favorite Tengwar transcription program is YaTT
• Or try the on-line Tengwar transcriber.
• On using a Tengwar program to reproduce the Ring inscription.
• See the crazy things people do with Tengwar.
• Omniglot has a nice chart of Tengwar for English.
• Eric Raymond has la tenguar: a Tengwar system for Lojban.
• Prefer Dwarfish? Check out the chart for the Angerthas Daeron
• The Fellowship of the Wordsmiths can help you use Tengwar for Elfish.
• They’re the people translating the Silmarillion back into the original Elfish.

Here’s my ring inscription:

Awards of the day: the winners of the 2004 Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards have been announced.

I can’t believe I forgot to blog yesterday—maybe I’m all blogged out. Somewhere around here is my one thousandth entry, but it’s hard to tell exactly which one it was. If I had to guess I’d say my GRRM review was it, but this entry could also be the one.

Joseph Scott has instructions for linking your WordPress category feeds. Mine weren’t working at first, until I realized that I needed to update my .htaccess file. The instructions are in the WP admin interface, under Options | Permalinks. I may hack the WP source for slightly nicer display of category feed links.

[Update:] There you go, category feed links, with an image. I changed the line in index.php that produces the category list to:

<?php wp_list_cats("sort_order=asc&sort_column=name
&feed=feed&feed_image=/jemimap/gifs/rss.gif"); ?>

(Note: The line is broken for display purposes only.) I think “feed” produces the RSS2 feed, though you can change it to get atom or a few other choices. The path is the url of the image, which is adapted from the graphicpush XML and RSS icons.

I also fixed my feeds to be full text. Apparently WP doesn’t generate both full text and summary feeds (although a full-text rss2 feed includes summaries anyway). The setting is under Options | Reading in the admin interface.

I really ought to check my web stats more often. In the past month I’ve gotten over 5,000 hits on an obscure and uninformative blog entry from 2002—just a quiz post, and the quiz results there all have broken images.

Somehow this entry has been climbing up in the results for “Quizilla” in Yahoo’s and therefore MSN’s search engines for at least six months now. Why my silly quiz results and not someone else’s? Why that particular entry and not any of the others in my extensive quiz category?

I’d suspect one of the new trends in comment spam and referral spam, but there’s no spam on that particular entry to explain it . I can only conclude that something is amiss in Yahoo’s search technology. I use Google, so I don’t see this kind of result weirdness, but maybe Yahoo/MS people are used to it.

Get a real search engine, people.

Political link of the day: Major Geeks has a list of what Kerry has done for the space program.

Both Quicksilver and Calenderclock have been updated again since my previous entry. You can read more about Calendarclock at macosxhints.

Quicksilver now requires plug-ins for pretty much anything beyond simple Finder actions. I couldn’t find the plug-ins anywhere on the site (which as I’ve noted before is specially designed to discourage people from using Quicksilver), so I figured I’d have to live without them. Then I noticed that not even my Safari bookmark for the WordPress admin page (where I’m currently typing this blog entry) showed up. I couldn’t live without that (Quicksilver is highly addictive), so I went on another hunt for the missing modules.

They turned out to be hidden on the front page of the site, well below the download and forum links where there used to be nothing at all. Since my screen is only 12″, the plug-ins were off the page. I don’t even know why I scrolled down, but there they were! And now I have the Safari, iTunes, and Dictionary plug-ins. Quicksilver uses a proprietary scheme, qsinstall:, to do the plugin install, so it’s really easy once you know where they are.

Some other Mac links:

• A macosxhints article on getting the URL out of a .webloc file.
• I’m planning to try out WebDesktop from ~stevenf. Making your browser your desktop sounds like Window-style overkill, but you never know.

Miscellaneous links:

• If you’ve been hanging on to β24 of Quicksilver like I have, it expired this weekend. You can pick up β26 [update: now β27] at Blacktree, Inc.
• DaringFireball has a Mac humor entry in which the Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding RealNetworks‚Äô Harmony.
• Belle Nuit HTMLBook will compile multiple HTML pages into a nice PDF book.
• Peter¬†Maurer’s Calendarclock is a nice combination of the menu bar clock and your iCal items. It’s already replaced Menu Calendar in my menu bar.
• Did I mention how to turn your iPod into a remote control?
• The Apple Developer Connection has an article on installing a local copy of the W3C HTML validator on your mac.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used IRC; I think it’s time to download a new client. I used to use ShadowIRC, but it’s time to move on. Ircle and Snak are still the big shareware names, but I was looking for something that won’t give me guilt when I neglect the shareware fee.

On the free front, I found Colloquy and Fire. The latter also does AIM, MSN, and Yahoo chats, plus ICQ, but I’m trying out Colloquy first because it looked the prettiest.

[Time passes…]

I’d forgotten just how annoying IRC could be. After a long struggle, I got onto DALnet, but there was no one in the chat room. SearchIRC is a good place to find channels, and New IRC Users has a handy command list, marred only by the annoying floating menu. News flash: DHTML is no longer cool.

Thanks to Liz for this link to SecureMac.com, with (happily) no news since May.

It’s a link dump, but it’s a fresh one:

• Bitoogle, the Google of Bittorrent, looks great but is down for the count.
• A List Apart has a cool article on
  preventing bandwidth theft using mod_rewrite and PHP.
• Some fun free fonts from Letterhead Fonts.
• More spam amusement at spamusement—spam-based cartoons by stevenf, now with an RSS feed!

In other net news, yours truly is now a guest blogger at Gene Expression—today I blogged about creationist museums.