Monthly Archives: September 2002

Curly Quotes for Movable Type

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I’ve finally gotten around to writing the instructions for Movable Type users to implement the curlme function using Brad Choate’s MTRegex plugin. The regex is the same, just the manner that it’s being implemented is a bit different. I’ve tested this out pretty extensively across this site, and there have been no problems. In fact, it’s in action right now. Once again I would like to thank Mark Pilgrim, who inspired this all.

he best instructions I can give, since I’m not a MT user myself, are to follow the very excellent instructions I’ve summarized below, replacing the MTAddRegex tags with the new ones.

  1. Install the MTRegex plugin.
  2. Create a new template module called curlyquotes with the following code:
    Code depreciated, see latest version
  3. $MTInclude module="curlyquotes"$> to the top of all your templates.
  4. Replace all occurences of <$MTEntryBody$> with <$MTEntryBody
    regex="1"$>    .

And your done! Post any questions you might have and I’ll respond ASAP.

Houston Wireless Meeting

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Just wanted to let everyone know that the Houston Wireless Users Group is meeting tomorow at Kaveh Kanes. Here’s the announcement from Barrett:

Tuesday September 10th is the second Tuesday of the month…which
means…it’s meeting time again! Steven/Erewhon will be speaking about
video via 802.11b and a neighborhood-wide “wireless security mesh”
starting at 7:30 PM @ Kaveh Kanes. This is our first presentation on
the application of 802.11b technology outside of simply extending
Internet access. It should be fun.

MySQL Fork

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It seems that as of today, I think, MySQL 4 is now going to be available in two flavors, Pro and Classic. The Pro version will have transaction support, while Classic is a “version optimized for raw speed without transactions.” It took me a few minutes to find explinations of each, here’s their product information page.

Zeitgeist

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The Zeitgeist for this site is now officially online, though it still needs some work. My plan is to add a new statistic to it every night for two weeks, so check it often to see what’s new. It’s great practice for my SQL and PHP skills, and I highly recommend making your own if you would like to hone your programming chops. I also have a similar page over at Mullenweg.com that gives some interesting info gleaned from our genealogical database, though I must admit the life expentancy data isn’t heartening! If you have any ideas for possible statistics for this site leave a comment and I promise I’ll implement every feasible idea.

Sunday Slump, IMAP

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Sunday is the day when my love/hate relationship with email really comes to forefront in my mind. On Sundays my email is slow, in the sense that I don’t get much of it. Every other day of the week I can barely keep up with the volume that comes through, and I recently un-subscribed from all the lists I used to be on. I don’t get much email on Sunday, so I send a lot out. Still in the back of my mind is the hell that is Monday morning, when email pours in from everywhere and it takes me days to recover. Oh well–can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Speaking of email, I am in the process of switching all my mail from POP3 to IMAP, which means transferring about 240mb of messages to the server. What’s nice about this though is that I’ll be able to access all of my mail, archives and everything, from any location. I wish I had done this years ago! It’s so much more convenient not having to worry about synchronization problems, and it’s given me a chance to develop a very robust filing system. I had to rethink things a little because with the IMAP server I’m using you can’t have something have sub-folders and have individual items in it. Overall I feel more secure about things because now even if my computer crashes and burns I still have all my important communications on my bulletproof server (knock on wood). If anyone is interested in moving to IMAP mail let me know. FYI, Spyder Hosting now offers it with all their accounts. Also if you tell them I sent you a nice discount might come your way.

Macro

Photolog

Through Kymberlie I found a very cool photo contest at photojunkie that I’ve decided to enter. The theme of the contest is “Macro,” which is one of my favorite features on my camera. I have a ton of macro shots, so thinking of what to do was a challenge. The first thought that came to my mind was a face, and I had a particular model in mind but she isn’t available this Sunday, so I dove into the photolog to find one that suits. Kudos to Bridget. Without further ado, here it is:

KemahTake a second look at the horizon :), we’re actually on the big swinging rides at Kemah.

Size Matters

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Earlier today I was browsing last month’s server logs and noticed something remarkable: 11,465 hits from Googlebot in August. I was flattered, but how could this be? I didn’t even get a PageRank till about a week ago, so what was the lovely Googlebot doing all that time? Anyway I started to think about it and in terms of sheer quantity of pages, this site is massive. It is entirely possible that those hits could have been just a standard site crawl. Just running the numbers in my head, there are about 9500 pages under the Photolog (~3050 images, 3 pages each, albums), a couple of hundred JazzQuotes, a couple of pages under Toys, and then all of the actual blog content, and you could easily have over ten thousand pages on this site. Of course I never think of it that way because it’s all dynamic. Wait till I start putting the site stats up, it’s very interesting. Whew!

PalmTalk

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We filmed the first episode of PalmTalk today! It was different in some ways from what I was expecting, espescially in terms of how things flowed, but I was very impressed with some of the things they were able to do technologically with the cameras and effects. The guest, Lorraine Young, was really charismatic and had a great product to demo. All in all, I would say it was, well, a first episode. Ever seen any of the early episodes of Friends? There are definitely some things that are going to change before next week, and things are only going to change for the better, so I’m excited. I’m also curious to see how the whole thing turns out after all of the post-editing stuff they do. Anyway, I’ll see on Tuesday. The main dowside is I think I left my laptop AC adapter there, or at least I hope I did, because I can’t find it. Right now my laptop is hibernating until I get it back.

After the taping I had a very nice dinner with Sarah at one of my favorite chinese restruants, Ming’s on Montrose. After that I headed down to Kaveh Kanes, a great coffee shop downtown on Prarie with free WiFi internet access. Tonight was the monthly meeting (first Friday of the month) for people who listen to the radio show Technology Bytes, which is on Wednesday nights. I’ve heard it several times before and it’s a fun show to listen to. The people who were there were very interesting and we talked for a very long time from topics ranging from Apache 2 to Amiga to Minix to BeOS. I must admit that I was there partly by accident–I thought it was a HWUG meeting. I really enjoyed it though and afterwards I ended up going to House of Pies around 1 to continue the discussion with two unix/freebsd sysadmins I met there. It’s strange how much you can find you have in common with someone in such a short period of time. Also it was nice to meet the people who actually do the show, and you can tell they’re really technically competent and nice to talk to. Oh, and got another ‘tech support’ consulting job today, fixing a paper jam! What will I do next?

Hardware Work

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It’s strange how tides can change so quickly in my business. I thought my plate was full with three seperate websites in various stages of development, but within the last 48 hours I’ve been contacted by four other clients looking for very traditional consulting work. The “going back to my roots” comment in the cloud post might be turning out truer than I expected. How I got my start in the computer business was six or seven years ago building computers from parts and selling them with razor-thin margins–and really good support. Now all I need to do is start turning a profit . . . 😉

Cloud Pictures

Photolog

When I was young I would go on trips to exotic locations and come home with nothing but pictures of the clouds in various cities, states, countries. Looking back I would say that clouds are certainly a unifying aspect of global scenery. 9-4-2002–Going back to my roots. You can never have too many cloud pictures :). Actually I really enjoyed the way the light and dark clouds contrasted in some of these pictures. Grab a full size if you feel like replacing that boring cloud backgroud that comes with Windows 95 and on. Tip: when viewing a photo you can click on it to see a really big (2048×1536) version, which usually varies from 300-600k in size.

Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival 2002 Schedule

Music

So far I’ve only seen this in print form, and when they put it online last year it was in the form of a inaccessible, unsearchable image, so as my public service for the day I’ve written out the schedule for the upcoming Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival, and added links to the artists where I could find them. I’d like to expand this with personnel of each group, so if you know who’s in what band let me know in a comment or email.

5th Annual Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival
September 26–29, 2002

Sponsor: Kemah Boardwalk

Cosponsors: University of Houston-Downtown, Houston Professional Musicians
Association, Local 65-699, H&H Music Company

Founder and Festival Director: Robert Wilson, UH Downtown Arts and
Humanities Falculty. Member and Director, UHD Civic Music Program

Thursday, 9-26

6:00-6:50 McGinty Brothers Quintet
7:10-8:00 Steve Allison and Resolution
8:20-9:10 Eddie Lewis and Living
Rhythms

Friday, 9-27

6:00-6:50 Woody Witt Quartet
7:10-8:00 Tribute Quartet
8:30-9:30 Trumpet Great Bobby Shew with HPMA Big Band
10:00-11:00 Pamela York Trio

Saturday, 9-28

12:00-12:50 Salsa Maria
1:10-2:00 Tony Campise
2:20-3:10 Ron Wilkins
3:30-4:20 Carol Morgan
4:40-5:30 Carlos Garnett/Will Cruz Latin Jazztet
5:50-6:40 Norma Zenteno Latin Jazz Band
6:45-7:00 Presentation of the Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Achievement Award
7:10-8:00 Sam Jackson Jazz Orchestra
8:30-9:30 Saxophone Great Ernie Watts
with the Pamela York Trio
10:00-11:00 Warren Sneed

Sunday, 9-29

1:00-1:50 Young Sounds of Houston Teen Jazz Orchestra
2:10-3:00 Ethan Atkinson Group
3:20-4:10 UHD Civic Jazz
Orchestra with Trombone Great Ron Wilkins
4:30-5:20 Sax No End
5:40-6:30 Mike Wheeler
7:00-8:00 The Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra

Continue reading Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival 2002 Schedule →

Smart Quotes in PHP

Asides

One of the true joys I find in reading different websites is when the author of whatever text you see has taken the time to make his text typographically pleasing to the eye through the use of proper typographical elements. CSS has enabled designers to shape text on the web in ways that allow for far greater control over presentation than the creators of HTML ever envisioned. However, I see many sites where it’s obvious that great pain has been put into the layout and presentation of the text, but there are still things like single and double prime marks being used instead of true quotes or apostrophes. Part of the reason for this is it’s a pain to enter the proper entities in when you type, especially if the entry is being added through a normal text box like most blogging software use. While I’m not going to go start a society (more) I still have written a small function in PHP that will hopefully make the world a better place, one curly quote at a time :). Thanks to my dad, Mark Pilgrim for inspiration and the code that got me started, and Barrett for help.

A little background: This whole thing started a few hours ago when I was writing a paper and when I looked back to proofread I saw that there were a number of occurrences of words like it’s, where writing out the HTML entities had become so ingrained in me from various situations where I hand code that it was now translating into my ‘normal’ typing. At that moment I immediately thought of ten other reasons why it’s probably better for the content to be entered into the database as a single or double prime and then translated to its proper character on display. Most of all, it’s just easier, and the free flow of ideas into your writing is not impeded in any way. My mind also went back to an entry I read on Dive Into Mark early last month which addressed a similar issue, but from looking at the code I saw no easy way I could drop that into my site. And thus this very generic function was born. It can be dropped into any PHP application anytime you want to make some text display worthy. Without further ado: Update: fixed a display issue, and a small bug.

Continue reading Smart Quotes in PHP →

Connection Happiness

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I’m here at school on one of the ubiquitous wireless connections and things are moving at least an order of magnitude faster than they usually do. I have no idea what’s changed, but I’m not complaining. Before it was like being on a 56k connection, and I was actually using it to see how my pages would load at slow speeds! Now it feels like decent broadband.

In other news, I got the smart quotes function so it doesn’t mangle my HTML, in fact it’s running on this site now, but it took a slightly ugly workaround and I’m searching to see if there’s a better way. Watch this spot.