Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

In a burst of energy better spent elsewhere, I tweaked the blog style to match my site a bit better. I’m still not fully satisfied with it, but it’s close enough for the time being. And it was unexpectedly easy - unlike MT, WordPress has just the one template file, in simple HTML with some PHP floating around it. MT, on the other hand, had a zillion templates, each of which I had to wrestle to get it to match the main site style.

I did have some problems, but they were mainly a result of being too geeky for my own good. For example, my tab navigation is generated with PHP - my PHP was fighting with WordPress’s PHP over the variable $siteurl. I renamed my variables, but what I should have done was put a static copy of the navigation into the template. But there were so many things in there already that were dynamic and could easily have been static that my little nav tabs seemed like a drop in the bucket. I did hard-code the title of the blog, which hasn’t changed in years and really doesn’t need to be fetched from the database every time.

I’d offer my revised CSS for public consumption but since I both changed the WP template and integrated the CSS into my larger site style (jp_tab.css - body class “wpblog”), it wouldn’t be much use to the beginning WP user.

Weird link of the day: Mean Kitty for Veronica

I ought to be doing some Boston blogging now that two guys can get married in the state of Massachusetts, but the truth is that Jemima has been geeking while Rome burns. I figure as long as we’re redefining words here in Mass., I can rewrite some URL’s for you.

So, I have the usual geek MT file structure in my moveabletype directory (with an extra e for character):

moveabletype/index.html        (the main index)
moveabletype/index.rdf         (one of several RSS formats)
moveabletype/archives.html     (the MT archive index page)
moveabletype/cat_anomaly.html  (one of 20 or so category archives)
moveabletype/2001_09.html      (one of 40 or so monthly archives)
moveabletype/2004/05/08/iq_by_state.html
                               (one of 900 or individual entries)
moveabletype/blogages/         (image directory for icons, etc.)
moveabletype/templates/        (template directory)

The new WordPress virtual file structure is a bit different:

wordpress/index.php         (the main index)
wordpress/wp-rss2.php       (the single RSS format)
wordpress/category/anomaly/ (one of 20 or so category archives)
wordpress/2001/09/          (one of 40 or so monthly archives)
wordpress/2004/05/08/       (one of 900 or so daily archives)
wordpress/2004/05/08/iq-by-state/
                            (one of 900 or individual entries)

So the question is, how do I redirect the first set of URL’s to the second set? I’ve seen advice out there for a few approaches involving PHP, JavaScript or mod_rewrite.
I decided to use mod_rewrite only rather than rebuild my thousand MT pages (never again!). I’ve been playing with it for a while now, and here’s my final answer:

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If this blog is green, then you’ve made it to the fourth major revision of Speak Stiltedly etc., etc. Long, long ago on a server far, far away, my blog began in a wiki. It quickly moved to Blogger at Blogspot. In a minor change, I gave up Blogspot and started publishing to my webspace at Freeshell. Blogger was annoying, and after the umpteenth mangled post, I made the big switch and installed my own MovableType at Freeshell.

Next came a minor move to my lovely free host here at irth.net, where mine is just one of many blogs on their big blog server. And there’s the rub, for the sad news came out last week that MovableType will be charging the big bucks for MT 3.0 for all users running more than 3 blogs (upped to 5 this weekend) on their MT installations. You can follow the details on any geek blog - I’m way behind on this bit of /. fodder, which seems to have blown the Google outsourcing scandal right off the blogrolls.

Needless to say, I don’t expect my free host to pay hundreds and hundreds and a couple more hundreds of dollars so I can have a relatively insignificant update from MT 2.661 to MT 3.0. But I am a geek, so I can’t stagnate at MT 2.661 for the rest of my blogging life.

It was time for a change, anyway, so I took Mark Pilgrim’s tale of Freedom 0 to heart and installed WordPress. It’s a lot like MT, but it’s PHP based with no static pages. I was a little disappointed by the lack of staticicity, but it does seem to whip the pages out pretty quickly on the fly and seems cleaner all around.

On the down side, I had some troubles testing it on my Mac - I couldn’t get mod-rewrite to rewrite URLs (perhaps because WP didn’t have permission to write an .htaccess file), and the keychain choked on the beta I downloaded (RC1.2). At the moment I’m running version 1.0.2 with a slightly tweaked version of the wp new template. I was also tempted by Toni and Scandinavia (all from Alex King’s contest). When I get a chance, I’ll convert my MT blog style over to WordPress to get the navigation buttons back.

Some links that will help you join me and the other rats here on dry land:

• Carthik on moving from MT to WP
• The NuclearMoose WP CSS tutorial
• The non-WP options: Textpattern (not GPL’d), Blosxom, the ultimate in static page generation, and the overkill of Drupal
• [Update:] How to remove extra linebreaks in WordPress - an essential step if you have old Blogger linebreaks still hanging around
• The WordPress Wiki
• It turned out I had to generate the .htaccess file myself in order to get the rewritten URLs, and when it still wouldn’t work, this advice fixed it

In An Oozing Of Gray Sludge, Fred explains why people don’t read newspapers anymore. Journalists just aren’t that good at it, Fred claims of his fellows, as their mediocre output shows. Blogs are better, free, and free.

If Fred is right, and as a non-newspaper reader I suspect that he is, then journalism is just another entry on the list of professions which have taken on the tinge of mediocrity. The publc sector is the worst culprit, of course - no one likes DMV workers. Public school teachers have a bad rep, at least in big cities like this one where people move out of the city limits for the express purpose of finding better public schools. Tech support, whether phoned in from India or provided by your company’s local IT staff, is a good example of a private sector profession whose practitioners are frequently accused of incompetence.

I have an explanation for the growth of the mediocrity sector: brain drain caused by the growth of the non-mediocre sectors. There are too many other professions available to the sorts of smart people who once became teachers or journalists. Not only are there proprotionally more doctors, lawyers, and professors than our society previously required, but there are whole new professions: aerospace engineering, biopharmaceuticals, computer programming, etc.

You can always do something else - no one has to teach or report to earn a living. Because good teaching and journalism require both skills native to the profession and also knowledge of the field, the (potential) good teachers and journalists will always have the option of going into a particular field rather than teaching it or reporting on it. Some don’t, but the brain drain means than many do, lowering the overall quality of the profession. There is, generally speaking, more money in the field than in teaching or reporting on it. Likewise for IT - if you’re good at tech support, economic forces will push you to become a programmer.

So there’s a downside to having a big brain sector - not enough brains to go around. Combine it with a decaying industrial base and the complete disappearance of the agricultural sector, and you get a culture of inappropriate career placement - or in other words, mediocrity.

Link of the day: Pixelpalooza winners

It’s a toasty 66° here in Boston, down from the 80’s earlier in the day. I helped Veronica install Panther on her iMac tonight - which is to say, I helped her sit around and watch Panther install itself without any problems. The hardest part of the job was turning off BrickHouse in favor of the built-in 10.3 firewall. Convincing her to use cool 10.3 software like QuickSilver, PithHelmet, and NetNewsWire wasn’t easy, either, and I forgot all about the latest version of Konfabulator (1.6).

Veronica seems to have no interest in a life of DivX crime, which is just as well since her old iMac probably isn’t speedy enough for optimal movie viewing. Her cable modem was also dropping down almost to dialup speed - not good when you have lots of updates to download.

Now with HSV!

The 4096 color wheel has been updated to version 2.0. I changed the algorithm and the image, mainly for the purpose of adding greys. See the new SV (saturation and value) square to the right of the wheel. It’s easier to click around than to explain, but I am attempting to explain HSV on the about the color wheel page.

Also included at no extra cost is the French version and the php script for making the wheel and alpha-transparent SV square. It would be way too much work to create the SV square for each hue, so instead I simulated it using greyscale colors and alpha transparency. I thought it was a very cute trick myself.

Many thanks to Jerie for being my IE/Win tester. You Windows users would still be suffering under IE’s execrable PNG support if it weren’t for her valiant efforts. As it is, IE 5.0 is a wash - you won’t get the nice SV square if you’re living that far in the past. Mac/IE is weird yet basically functional, as usual, but take my advice: get a real browser.

I’ve been working on the color wheel again. This time, I’m going for an HSL- style wheel, instead of the funky lobes in the current version. So I’ve been trying to figure out the difference between HSL and HSV, with a side of HSB. (Is HSB the same as HSL, or is a new beastie?)

For a taste of the intuitive HSL approach, check out The DHTML Color Calculator. It’s lots of fun to sweep around the wheel with the >> buttons.

Metaphor of the day: the Titanic, on its anniversary. (Thanks to Seema for the link.)

QuickSilver is up to Beta #22, though not much seems to have changed. You can read about it and other Launchers for Mac OS X at MacDevCenter.

But my big Mac discovery for the day is Celestia, a cross-platform 3D outer-space simulator. It’s not exactly user-friendly, but you Windows and Linux people should be used to that by now. I downloaded it for sci-fi writing purposes, though it has educational and entertainment value as well. It’s free and the documentation is linked on-site and also in the Celestia users’ forum.

As long as I’m mac-geeking, here are a few more mac links that have been piling up:

• Mandelbrot on Cocoa is a fun fractal explorer I may have mentioned before.
• Here’s a macosxhint about disabling command-Q for Safari, so you don’t accidentally lose all those open tabs. It didn’t work for me, but you can just add an extra key (like option) to the quit command using System Preferences | Keyboard and Mouse | Keyboard Shortcuts. Did I mention that one before?
• Trapeze will extract text from a PDF, for a price.
• OS X for geeks gives helpful mac advice from a geek switcher.
• I know I’ve mentioned the VLC media player before, but I’m plugging it again because it played a corrupt educational video for me that Quicktime wouldn’t play.
• MacOSXHints has yet more free backup advice.
• MacDevCenter has an article on DarwinPorts, an alternative to fink.

Thanks to Liz for alerting me to the first Mac trojan horse ever. The OS has made the big time, even though the virus doesn’t actually do anything and isn’t contagious either.

It’s just nice to know somebody out there cares enough to write for OS X.

Horseman of the Apocalypse: Ghost Town (also here)

So I was reading about a cool browser history browser at slashdot - TrailBlazer. I was wondering, not particularly hopefully, whether it would run on OSX. It turns out it only runs on OSX. Those of us who remember the Bad Old Days sometimes forget that Macs are now Too Cool For Words.

Trailblazer is just a toy, but everyone’s gushing over a new launcher called QuickSilver. It’s amazingly cool and absolutely free - don’t Mac without it. The documentation leaves much to be desired, but this quick tutorial will get you going. MacOS 10.3 is required.