Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

While surfing the blogs, I came across a
guy who wrote an Emacs interface for MoveableType. Just the thing for me, I thought; all my geekiness in one convenient elisp package…but it wasn’t exactly a convenient package. First I had to download SOAP for MT, so MT could communicate with metablogging tools. Then I had to download a laundry list of things that mt.el, the emacs mode, required: xml-rpc.el, the url package, the w3 package and the elib package. The author provided the first, but I had to check url and w3 directly out of source, and then it took me a while to figure out that yes, elib hasn’t been revised in seven years. (I was reluctant to download something from 1995.)

Nor was this post posted from emacs. When mt.el was finally working, I got an error back from MoveableType itself, saying it couldn’t find the metaWeblog perl module. I think that means that I can no longer put off upgrading to the latest version of MovableType. Wish me luck…

[P.S.] I upgraded to 2.21, though it looks the same as 2.0. There are new geeky things lurking beneath its placid blue exterior, though.

[P.P.S.] Testing from emacs…1..2..3…

[P.P.P.S.] Whoo-hoo! Now there’s an evening successfully
frittered away.

Whenever I balance my checkbook lately (usually on the T), I wonder why I bother. In fifteen years I’ve never caught a bank in a mistake - my arithmetic skills only get worse, and the banks’ better. I may as well give up and take their word for it. They must have really good software.

But I digress. Mozilla has been called a web-designer’s browser, a slow car on the information superhighway, and a toy for geeks who just can’t get over Netscape 2.0. (That last one is me.) My mac is old, so Mozilla was extra slow for me.

But not anymore! I downloaded Chimera, a version of Mozilla with native OSX widgets and other geeky things. And, of course, Tabbed Browsing. You’re nobody if you don’t have tabs.

Speaking of tabs, a new beta of Opera for Mac is out. I’m over Opera, myself, but if buggy open-source betas make you nervous for your Mac, you might want to try a buggy commercial
beta of Opera instead.

Yesterday was Bring My Mac To Work day, so I took the opportunity to download the emacs source tree from
gnu.org and build Emacs for OSX according to the directions kindly provided by the prince of Emacs for Mac, Andrew Choi. I owe him my last three Emacs builds and a few binaries, too. I now have a bleeding-edge Emacs.

Confused? Emacs is a text editor, the way The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy. One you’ve known Emacs, you’ll never go back to vi or Notepad or whatever pale shadow of a text editor you’ve been using. There’s even a wiki devoted to the text editor to end all text editors. If you’d like to try the latest OSX version,
drop me a note and I’ll build an installer for you.

Due to technical difficulties beyond my control (antique phone lines), I
was unable to blog yesterday. I did collect some cool and geeky links, though.

If you don’t know already, you should be using
Mozilla, the coolest browser on earth,
open-source and
popup-proof.
(Popup-killing advice compliments of
blogzilla, the Mozilla blog.)

To brighten up your Mozilla, try my favorite mozilla skin,
Orbit,
available from DeskMod. For the
truly geeky, or just those who want an easy way to clean up the cache and
history files after a long day of not-working at work, try the
XULPlanet preferences
toolbar. Note the convenient popup-killing checkbox. (I’m not sure why
you’d ever want to allow popups, but the option is there. Or just
the cool reminder of the millions of popups you’ve slain just by using a
real browser.)

On the image processing side, I discovered to my dismay that
Spinwave is forcing you to register before using their on-line image crunchers
to shrink your web images. Fortunately, I found a new site for cutting those
pesky jpegs down to size:
jpeg wizard. Gifs don’t
tend to need as much shrinking, anyway.

While on the prowl for jpegs to shrink, I found a goldmine of totally-free,
public domain images paid for by Your Tax Dollars:
freestockphotos.com. Skip
down past the quasi-religious links to the government photo repositories.

I’ve been thinking about style today, as well as playing with my wallpaper.
I found some nice 2-column css backwards-compatibility advice at
saila.com,
and went with the realworldstyle
approach for my current Sudden and Unexpected web site project. This is,
by the way, not what they pay me to do.

On the wallpaper end, I hit paydirt at
space.com
and decided on a lovely comet-armageddon design by
Greg Martin.

I found the truth about .gif
on the same site as Lori’s Lego link. I’m thinking covetous, copyright-violating thoughts
about his navbar, too. I wonder if I can do that with CSS…

Well, I’ve fixed the Netscape 4.x problem again. Moveable type wrote over my stylesheet last time, because I was trying to be sneaky and edit it on the server instead of through the MT interface. You can set up MT to work that way, but you can’t do it both ways. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too…

I’ve also finished going through my old Blogger entries to give them MT titles and categories. So now, if you look in the Quizzes category, you’ll see all the online quizzes I’ve ever blogged. And so forth. It wasn’t necessary, but it was geeky, so I did it.

There’s a killer thread going in ASC about contest suggestions, and I have more ideas about that alien transmitting messages to me through my molars (i.e., the muse), but for the moment I must keep up the illusion that I work here.

I’ve been wanting to get freeshell into my hosts file for a long time, so I wouldn’t have to type out the full dns name every time I wanted to telnet or ftp over there. Sometimes Mac isn’t quite Unix, and in this case, there was more to getting my mac to read a hosts file than I felt like figuring out until this morning. My mac came to work with me this morning (how about a Bring Your Macs To Work Day, to show the benighted WinWorld what they’re missing?), and I wanted to put the local fileserver in there too.

I found a likely looking link: Mac OS X Hosts Revisited, which taught me not only how to get the hosts file read, but also how to kill ads with it. Basically, it redirects all requests for ads to localhost. There are a lot of ad servers out there, so I’m still waiting for them all to be processed before I can test out my new ad-free mac.

I was up too late last night trying to figure out why my hits had gone down to about seven a day for the past two weeks. It couldn’t be that my hit counter wasn’t working at all, because I was getting that trickle of hits. So I thought, maybe those are the noscript hits, and the javascript referrer bit is broken - but I did get some referrers in my few hits - that wasn’t quite it. I tried the perl script directly; that was working fine. I tried the javascript alone and it wasn’t working, but I hadn’t edited it in months - certainly not on April 9th.

I tried moving the javascript to another directory and presto! I could see it again. The problem was clearly my cgi-bin directory. It must have cropped up when I added the .htaccess file for TWiki authentication. Trying to undo that without breaking twiki took me a while, but eventually I got it. Jemima is watching again…

I didn’t mention while blogging back to Lori that I did enjoy what I skimmed of the article by David Brin she’d linked - much more than I liked his Star Wars article she mentioned a while back. I find the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek is more space opera vs. hard scifi than the political differences he saw - not that he didn’t have a point there, but what’s unacceptable in real life is often exactly what we want out of literature.

I’ve been tweaking the blog again. If you’re using Netscape 4.x and you want to see what I fixed, compare this now-legible blog to the Moveable Type default template at papascott.com. I did with a sneaky trick that imports the style Netscape breaks - Netscape 4.x doesn’t understand @import, so it doesn’t import the things it doesn’t like. I don’t like the fixed font sizes, myself. All remaining minor style problems remain.

On the html side, the recent entries list doesn’t seem to be linked - I’ll have to look into that when I do the list for the category archives, and see if I lost something important when I edited the default templates.

Ok, all set. You didn’t see me off doing that because this entry was still in draft mode. MT is too cool for words. Now that the blog is sufficiently yellow, I’ve been trying to find a good definition of particularism for Lori.

There are also historical and political versions of particularism. As a term, it’s similar to intuitionism or constructivism, which is to say, it gets around.

That quote just doesn’t look right, now, does it? I need to fix the fonts. The serif font is going to be the first thing on the chopping block.

(The category of this post is geekspeak.)

My eyes were starting to bleed from all that blue, but the blog is now properly khaki and in with the site theme.

Lori reports success with the F11 button - if you’re using IE6 for Windows and you can’t scroll down, hit F11 twice and that should clear things up. There’s another fix I could apply, but it looks like it would slow down the page download. Microsoft ruins the web yet again, with its bad shoes. (You remember in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, how a civilization collapsed from an oversupply of bad shoes? Everyone had to keep buying new shoes, until the entire GDP was going into footware. Bad shoes drive out good.)

Speaking of Microsoft’s long-term plan to eradicate human civilization, IE5-point-whatever for the Mac isn’t displaying the background of the sidebar properly, so the cute dotted (well, probably not dotted in IE) divider looks like it’s a quarter-inch too far to the left. Of course my standards-compliant browsers are doing just fine.

I think I’ll just leave a note down the bottom where the scrolling stops - “If this page looks like crap, then your browser is crap. Hit F11, or better yet, hit opera.com.” Strangely enough, and despite rumors to the contrary at the MT site, Netscape, the World’s Most Incompetent Browser, is displaying the pages moderately well. It eats the outside margin, but that’s nothing compared to IE nuking my borders.

In honor of the end of ASC voting, I posted my new filk to the newsgroup. AAA ends Friday. Vote now or forever hold your peace.