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Wordpress
It’s been about two weeks since I switched from Blogger to Wordpress here on Geoff Holden.com, and I figured I’d let you in on how it’s going.
I think Wordpress is a great product, it was easy to set up, writing a custom theme for it was straightforward, and it had the ability to import all my old Blogger posts. It even has the ability to run multiple blogs out of one database (which is good if your host limits you to one, but you have multiple domains… it don’t apply to me, but it’s nice to have the option). What has me really impressed though, is the inclusion of Bookmarklets. I keep two on my Firefox personal toolbar, one that starts a new post with a link to the page I’m currently reading, and another that adds a new link to the page I’m currently on.
The plugin architecture is also really nice. I only have a couple installed so far, but I’m still going through them, deciding what I want.
BTW, I so need one of these.
Mindlessness
As seen on Lori’s site:
- Grab the nearest book. Don’t search for something cool. Grab what’s actually closest to you.
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Rather we have to ask how invariant representations are formed in every single cortical region.
Man, my books must seem pretty dull.
Edit: That line was actually from page 125 of the book I’m reading; I accidently opened to the wrong page… Oh well.
Quiet Weekend of Movies
The holiday weekend was a pretty quiet one for me. Besides working on XFN Graph, it was pretty much a weekend of TV and movies. The TV watching was improved greatly thanks to MythTV (see previous post). The movie watching was very entertaining. I managed to watch two classics that I’ve meant to for quite some some: Scent of a Woman, and Rain Man. Rain Man I picked up at Future Shop for only $9.99 (which I thought was a great price for a ‘Best Picture’ winner), and Scent of a Woman was on A&E last weekend and recorded.
I’ve also been spending some time judging student-created websites for the IEEE. So far everything I’ve seen is pretty good, and unless one of the pages I haven’t seen yet pulls ahead, it’s going to be a pretty close call.
As a side-note, I started looking at Tellico today to manage my DVD collection (thanks to an article in the current issue of Linux Journal). It seems like a good product, but I think I’d like to see :CueCat support so I could scan the barcodes instead of typing. (Yes, I managed to get one of those little devices back when they were available and free) It has the option to export to HTML, XML, CSV, and even PilotDB. I think it should be a good way to keep track of my movies, and hopefully my games as well.
Constantine / XFN Graph Tool
I finally saw Constantine this week. Although it looks like it could be a terrible movie, it’s actually pretty good. I had heard mixed reviews of it, but I’m glad I gave it the benefit of the doubt.
Also, I finished putting together the first version of XFN Graph, a graphing tool for XFN links.
MythTV
I finally got all the pieces I needed to complete my homebrew PVR, so I finished the construction/configuration this weekend, and the project page is up.
I think it’s going to totally change how I watch television, and will seriously reduce the amount of shows I end up missing and then downloading from TV Torrents.
I also saw Being John Malkovich for the first time last night. I had thought that Adaptation was a strange movie, now I realize that it’s a sliding scale, and mine just slid a lot.
Backups Talk
I gave my talk on Backups Thursday night, and I just posted my presentation on here. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, it’s kind of funky looking in IE, and it dosen’t work properly in Konqueror. Oh well.
In other news (who am I kidding, it’s not news) I saw “Hitch” Wednesday night. It’s a pretty good movie, I’ll give it my full reccomendation.
Paranoia
I just recently finished reading Paranoia by Joseph Finder. Although it’s not the type of book I normally read (science fiction, fantasy, general tech.) I did find it to be an entertaining read. It’s the story of a slacker who throws a lavish retirement party for a blue-collar worker (on the company dime) and gets caught. Instead of firing him, or having him arrested for fraud/embezzlement, they train him, help him get a job at their biggest competitor, and put him to work as a mole.
All in all a good read, I’ll reccomend it to anybody who enjoys the ‘thriller’ genre.
Major Site Overhaul
As you may have noticed (well, you had to notice if you’ve been reading this page… so all five of you should notice). This page just underwent a major overhaul. I necided that the old page had too many ‘words’ on it. It was too texty, and realisticially who was coming here to read the RSS feeds (with the exception of the SLUG site, which I may try to get back on here).
This overhaul also marked the move away from Blogger and to WordPress. Blogger was a fine start, but it’s nice to have the configurability that WordPress provides.
Web Standards. IE, are you listening?
I started working on my presentation for my next SLUG talk Sunday evening. As I’ve previously mentioned here, I decided to do it in Eric Meyer’s S5. The experience has been pretty good overall, I managed to modify a theme I liked to give it a personal feel. Now, the interesting part was when I opened it up on Internet Explorer at work and got this. Now, if you’re like me at all, your first thought would be “What the hell are those odd lines?”, well those odd lines are the borders of a table on a different slide, who’s div is currently invisible. What’s really odd is that after the slide with the table is displayed, the lines go away. The less noticable problem is that IE didn’t even make an attempt at showing my Tux watermark (maybe it determined that it’s the Linux logo and simply refused to advertise for Microsoft’s competition). This is what the title slide looks like in a proper browser.
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