Richard Allen, a member of the British Parliment, now has a WordPress-powered blog. How cool is that? Politician blogs in general are a great idea and I wish more mainstream politicians in the US would pick it up. (What if the President had a blog?) Look for more politician’s blogs in the future, as I’m exploring doing some web work for a local candidate.
Lucky Bear
Why Josh is the coolest ever:
So in my normal browsing I occassionally come across things that are humorous and I share with whoever I’m chatting with at the time. Via Ad Rag I came across this picture that I accompanied with the commentary “lucky bear.”
Fifteen minutes later Josh comes back with this:
However contrary to popular opinion that is not where I’ve been the past few days. That’s a whole other story.
Gallery: 6-13-2003
Auto-imported from old gallery:
Gallery: 6-12-2003
Auto-imported from old gallery:
Zoom Zoom
Nothing says “have a nice Monday” like a shiny new Athlon 2600 in the mail. For the past 5 minutes I’ve been opening and closing programs just to see how fast they start. I think after this post I’m going to go back.
More Updates
The new release of WordPress is out and kicking, so get it while it’s hot.
The photolog is also back up, but it’s ugly. An attempt to make it standards-compliant with some help from Gerrit Kaiser crashed and burned when I realized that I was overwriting files with older versions and that was breaking a lot of things. So right now it’s in a very half-baked state but as Kevin said the other day, any update is always preferable to nothing. So I’ll save face by calling it “public redesign” of the photolog.
Gallery: 6-9-2003
Auto-imported from old gallery:
It Is Done
I was late, but then again that’s nothing new. Earlier this afternoon at Saint Ambrose Church I completed my Confirmation.
Upgrade Day
Just finished upgrading the server to address a mod_ssl vulnerability and get PHP 4.3.2. It went swimmingly, which is always nice.
In the process of upgrading about half a dozen sites to WordPress .71 to test it out before the code is released. It’s a good process because the sites need updating (security problem again) and it’s a good way to find any bugs that may have made it through so far.
I’ve always remarked that people tend to write about bad things more than they write about good things. Journals, blogs, diaries, all tend to be one-sided, at least in my experience. As is such though yesterday started quite badly, after I emerged from my migraine-medicine–induced haze I had a pleasant evening with my family.
Today has been great too; been hanging out with Mike and Christine at Kaveh Kanes (where the chai is tasty and the music is grooving) getting Christine set up in email utopia, where spam is like the distant buzzing of a fly you think you heard but you’re sure it’s really just in your head. Back to work! There looks to be some frisbee in the plans this evening…
Update: Mike has a meta moment.
Terrible Headache
My throbbing head from the moment I woke up is telling me to stay away from work, but commitments keep me tied to the computer screen. I don’t remember the last time I had a headache this bad, and my medicine has yet to kick in. Perhaps some time away is in order after all.
Summer Showers
I woke up this morning to a delightful storm outside, which I think is the best possible way to wake up. It’s also the best time to stay in bed, which I did for a while and just enjoyed the storm from the comfort and protection of my semi-slumber. Houston really needed the rain.
There have been a few changes around here, for one I decided that wider is better, and content now stretches like it used to. There have been a few tweaks here and there, and I was hoping to bring the photolog back up but some WordPress work is going to prevent that today. Also you’ll notice that the endorsement box at the top is a little nicer and it has a new extra touch. If you visit this site using Internet Explorer, which is a satisfactory product but looks dead from an upgrade point of view, you will see a small promotional message extolling a virtue of the official browser of PhotoMatt.net, Mozilla. It’s the browser so good I installed it for my Mother. Yes, it’s that easy. If you tried it before and it didn’t suit your fancy I highly encourage you to give it another go, as it has progressed by leaps and bounds and is hardly recognizable as the slow dinosaur it used to be.
There are new shares of PhotoMatt available if you’re into that sort of thing. BlogShares finally figured out I’m worth something and adjusted my price accordingly, so I thought a few extra shares out there would spice things up. I’ve decided to take a very passive approach to the whole game. Besides, Brad has made me rich enough to retire to a small island and relax. Thanks Brad!
Flush Time
The quirks on my laptop were just getting too weird, so when the control panel stopped working I decided it was time to do a system recovery. I have actually never done one of these before as I’ve always used home-built systems except for my last laptop, and when I wanted to do a system recovery on that I couldn’t find the CDs. Well this came with six CDs to do just what I need, so I guess we’ll see how this goes. It’ll be a pain reinstalling everything, but I think deep down inside I really enjoy doing that. Funny side note: when it was starting up the CD drive made a sound like the violins from Psycho. How appropiate. 16 minutes and 59 seconds later, all done.
Updated Updated
The updated blogroll on the sidebar is now powered using WordPress Links instead of Blogrolling. It’s always nice to use your own project. One more thing knocked off my very long list of things todo this early Monday morning. Speaking of things to do, Alex’s Tasks might be just what the doctor ordered for organizing me a bit. In the past the most sucessful system I used was my Palm, but that’s relatively inflexible and I can’t forsee a situation where I wouldn’t have internet connectivity anyway.
While I’m on this meta post, I should let you know that PhotoMatt.net is seeking a summer editor. Rebecca Lammons, who has edited almost from day one, is not going to be online very much for the rest of the summer. So if you have a keen eye for proofreading and visit the site when it updates drop me an email and let me know why I should give you administrator access to this blog. What do you get in return? Well, you will be less frustrated by the errors that crop up occassionally (okay, frequently) in the posts. I can also promise fame, fortune, prominent linkage, and something from your Amazon wishlist at the end of the summer.
Blogging by Degrees
There’s a new tool called Downhill that attempts to find the connections between two weblogs. It’s a neat idea however nothing I tried worked. It also seemed to force an old URL (the www. one) for this site, so I don’t know what that means. You might have better luck though, so check it out. [via CamWorld]
Wow
What a night. That is all.
Jedi Gets Lawyer
The latest on the Star Wars Kid says that there are lawyers involved now, and they’re not happy with whoever originally put the video on the web. (It doesn’t look like they’re mad at the people who propagated it.) What really sucks is Ghyslain might not accept the money (man, monthly archive permalinks suck) presumably because they think (after lawyer fees) they may get more out of whoever they’re taking action against. A disappointing ending to what has been a pretty fairytale-like story so far. Andy just informed me that they will accept the gifts, which I think is a great thing. Obviously something about the movie or the situation inspired a lot of people to donate, many probably because they related to the situation. Hopefully things will turn out alright after all.
AOL vs. Microsoft
In his charmingly caustic way Hixie compares how AOL and Microsoft fared in the recent settlement. I am very disappointed, as AOL using Mozilla would have made things interesting. Around here Mozilla has been steadily climbing in the stats. What about the rest of the world? Check out the Google Zeitgeist. After an amazing climb, they show IE 6 tanking for the first time ever, while IE 5 jumps up to actually above IE 5.5. That’s a little disturbing. Also for the first time I’ve noticed they say “Netscape 5.0+ (including Mozilla)” is represented, but for the life of me I can’t find the purple line. Do you see the purple line?
WordPress Picking Up Pace
Today has certainly been an exciting day so far. First of all, Donncha has joined the WordPress team, bringing the number of developers officially to three. There have been several other inquiries and I think it’s exciting and the development will move along pretty fast.
I’m trying my hardest at least. I got a couple of things out of the way this morning: first the displays of comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all combined and present chronologically interspersed amoung each other. They really are all comments, and now they display as such. This also eliminates some link clutter, Josh will be especially happy since according to him “The trackback link is the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Next I went through most all of the code and converted all the mysql_* functions to use the ezSQL class, which I found through Simon (who is running an excellent CSS series right now, by the way). ezSQL has become a huge timesaver and cleaned up a lot of code in different projects I do, including Mullenweg.com where it sped up things quite a bit as well.
As that was happening I refactored all of the template code, taking out some things that weren’t necessary anymore and just in general cleaning things up. After I finished all this I was disappointed to see that there wasn’t a noticable speedup, but that’s actually in line with the profiling I did a couple of weeks ago that showed the bulk of the processing happening in some of the character conversion code. If someone else can focus on features for a few days I’d really love to dig into that code and see if we can’t get a substantial speedup from optimizing it. Of course a lot of this will be less significant once we get Smarty caching in place, but having a very streamlined and efficient application before caching never hurt anybody.
For now though it’s time for a break, and lunch with Kathy and Elaine is just what I’ve been looking forward to.
Brand New PHP
The latest version of PHP looks fabalous, and contains a number of necessary fixes on top of the normal feature enhancements. Besides Python, I can’t think of another language that progresses as nicely as PHP. It looks like Apache 2 support is finally golden as well. This should be an interesting upgrade.
Well That’s Odd
For some reason on my laptop explorer.exe has taken it upon itself to eat as much memory as possible. When I started typing this it was at 268MB, now it’s at 302MB and climbing. I wonder what will happen if I just let it keep going? This should be interesting. Update: It dropped back down to about 8MB, which is normal. I wonder what an earth that could have been. When am I going to stop using Windows permanently? I seem to flirt with other operating systems, but I can never commit.