For my benefit more than anything. I always forget how to change the keymap on a linux console session:
loadkeys /usr/share/keymaps/i386/dvorak/dvorak.map.gz
This seriously could have saved me an hour or two earlier today.
QWERTY is so painful! Switch to Dvorak. You’ll thank me later.
Update: Matt Brubeck informs me I could just use loadkeys dvorak in most modern distrobutions. Thanks!
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From Jeffrey Zeldman, A Little Death:
To avoid pain, we began to feel less. The price is a wall you build around yourself. At first the wall protects you; then it merely shuts you off from the light of experience and the warmth of love.
A birthday present from Google: I have overtaken that other guy and I am now the #3 Matt in the world. Go look at it now, because Google can be a harsh mistress. If things continue to go well I might reach #1 and have to take down all my sites, like I promised.
For those of you commenting on the phantom ping from yesterday, I actually posted something and took it down. Don’t worry, a little editing and it’ll be back.
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This is it. Last year my birthday was loud and surprising, this year it was chill. Both have their attraction.
Awww thanks. 🙂 Mad props to Craig for the WordPress header (currently in rotation).
While I’m here I’d also like to wish a happy birthday to Dave, who had a birthday a few days ago and didn’t tell anyone. 😉
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.
Dan Hale here – Zach’s dad, and the guy who created the panorama. I did this one entirely by hand in Photoshop. I made nine shots that day, placing the people in only the middle third of the frame of each. I shot with a super wide lens – a 17mm on a 35mm camera. The stitching was painstaking as I wanted to overlap the shots in such a way as to hide the transitions. This process was complicated by the fact that the cloud movement between shots varied the brightness, contrast and color of light. Evening that out took a lot of work. I did have the presence of mind when I did the shooting to use a constant shutter speed and aperture. I could go on and on about this labor of love. All in all it recon it took me 14-17 hours or so of work in PS to get to its current state.
Wow. Hat tip: Zach.
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Today I was cleaning up some of the trackback code for WordPress when a number of things struck me about Trackback, which I’m sure someone has thought of before but I’m surprised they haven’t been addressed in the specification.
First off, what is trackback? On movabletype.org there is a Beginner’s Guide to TrackBack that is pretty thorough. Interestingly though they mention the names of several “tools” that have implemented TrackBack (as <strong> no less) they don’t link to any of them. If you’re not familiar with Trackback go read the first section of that to get up to speed.
A commonly requested feature is the ability to send a trackback ping when editing an entry. This has been especially needed since we’ve implemented post status flags (so you can, for example, save your post as a draft and work on it later). There are a couple of logical steps to implementing this, the first of which being that we need to track what pings have and haven’t been sent yet. Then the posting code had to modified a bit to only send trackback pings when an entry was published, and to not ping a URI that had been pinged before, et cetera. Not terribly hard stuff, just a bit of code to go through and some testing to make sure everything worked right.
Now that we have a nice record of pings that have been sent, I thought it would be nice to add that data to the default template for WordPress, as Trackback suffers from the same one-way linking problem it was trying to solve. That is, if I trackback another site my ping will show up in their comments or their trackbacks, but there’s nothing on my site indicating I sent that ping.
Then I realized that this set of pinged URIs I had was close to useless. What does a URI like http://www.movabletype.org/mt/trackback/55 mean anyway? If you enter it in your browser you get an XML error back. If you append a query string to it with ?__mode=rss with some implementations you will get a RSS .91 feed of trackbacks sent from that entry, from which you could extract the actual URI of the resource that http://www.movabletype.org/mt/trackback/55 is relevant to, but what a hassle. You can sweep things like this under the rug with a convoluted “auto-discovery” functionality (which is using sloppily embedded RDF instead of <link>… why?) but these problems are easy enough to solve that they should be.
(A side note, a URI tied to a unique ID system specific to a particular software platform does very little to suggest permanence to me. Are we going to have sent ping URI link rot?)
The hiatus is over.
Peace and blessings manifest with every lesson learned
If your knowledge were your wealth then it would be well earned
The holidays could not have been better, a delightful mix of friends and family that I will remember fondly for years to come. Presents, the least important part of the holidays, were notable this year in quality and thoughtfulness. Thank you. Presence, friends I have not seen in some time have been in town, and the new place has been somewhat of a hub. I consider myself lucky and blessed to be surrounded by such great people.
Just as writing is a habit, not writing is a habit. In my quest for relaxation over the past weeks I have developed this bad habit, and now it’s time to break it.
I have been extremely busy as of late. I always say I’m busy, but now more so. I’m doing my best to catch up before school starts, and software helps, but there are still personal notes to write, 614 photos to optimize and upload, countless emails to respond to, clients to work with, and incidentals like eating and sleeping.
Most importantly, I turn 20 in 5 days.
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I am enjoying the holidays immensely, just keeping too busy to post much. I’ve got a couple of things in the pipeline, stay tuned.
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