Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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:

(more…)

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.

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.

It’s the middle of the night and I’ve been up geeking. As a result, there’s a new version of the color wheel that saves all your colors in a hidden list. Click “show full list” to see them all. Many thanks to Nate Steiner for the suggestion, and to Nicolas Taffin for the French translation.

I’ve also tried to explain the web-safe/web-smart/unsafe colors and provide some other fun and useful color links on the new color index page.

Word count: 2650
NaNo link of the day: The Internal Cliffhanger

Thanks to RJ, I now have a ghostly, RSS presence on LJ. You can add my blog to your friends list using the instructions on my syndicated account page. I guess it means just adding jemima_blog as a friend. RJ is using RSSify to turn her Blogger blog into a syndicated account as well, but if you just want the plain RSS, here’s RJ’s feed.

RSSify is a good solution to the lack of Blogger RSS feeds; I stumbled across it back when I found myRSS. Unfortunately, you need access to the blog template to use RSSify, so I couldn’t use it to get feeds. But if you’re a Blogger blogger and you want to provide a feed, it looks pretty simple. It only took RJ a couple of minutes to set up, and the result is a full entry feed with just some minor link problems that most users won’t notice.

I must, I must, I must catch up in NaNo.

Word count: 750

Sometime after I installed Kitty, I noticed a weird grey shadow under the links on my ever-so-cool splash page. Today as I was surfing the mac blogs (through NetNewsWire, of course) I discovered that Safari 1.1 (the version that shipped with Panther) is the only browser that supports the CSS text-shadow property. My shadows were set to silver because silver was the color in the code for the confetti menu my splash page is based on. Since I couldn’t see the shadows when I was designing the page, I didn’t know what color to use instead of silver - I just left it there.

So I tweaked the menu a bit - basically, I took the background color of the page, subtracted #222222 from it to darken it, and fixed some other little problems. Also, Jerie and I went on a Stargate font hunt, so I got my Stargate A font back (it’s available at Shrine of Isis - Fonts). Since chances are you aren’t running Panther, you can click on the thumbnail below to see just how cool the kittified page looks in a real browser.

I also saw a couple of cool color generators in my travels: ColorMatch 5k and ColorMatch Remix. Go slide the sliders - they’re addictive.

Because their link was broken, I was rooting around for the RSS feed at Science Daily. Eventually I found it using the search at Syndic8. I also found myRSS, a great way to make RSS feeds for brain-dead sites (mainly Blogger) that don’t generate their own. They’re just headline feeds, but that’s better than nothing.

So I went on a feed spree. The links are to the summary page at myrss.com.

• Lori’s blog
• Seema’s blog
• RJ’s blog
• Half-Bakered
• O’Grady’s PowerPage

Here are some other cool RSS feeds I’ve picked up lately. The links are to the actual feeds. You can drag the link itself from Safari to NetNewsWire - very cool!

• Doonesbury
• Dilbert
• The Drudge Report
• SciScoop
• A List Apart
• Emacs for Mac OS X (flakey)

Panther update: Kitty got on the plane in Oakland, CA.

A List Apart is back, with a new design and a nice article about making navigation tabs out of Sliding Doors. It’s chic, but I think I’ll stick with my boxy tabs for a while yet.

Late-breaking mac sighting: Anchorage, Alaska!

I’m still amazed by the idea of MailBucket. I was looking up RSS readers for Jerie and found that some Windows readers (eg., NewzCrawler) which can’t hold a candle to NetNewsWire, nevertheless do interesting non-RSS things like reading newsgroups or regular web pages. Add the MailBucket email-to-RSS gateway and you can do virtually everything with an RSS reader.

But if you really wanted to do everything, you’d use emacs, wouldn’t you?