Posts

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Polls Are Back

Strange thing about WordPress… you can stick arbitrary PHP code into templates, but not directly into entries unless you install a plugin to allow doing so, such as RunPHP (reason being that you need to be able to prevent unprivileged authors on a blog from posting questionable code in-line).

But even with RunPHP, my old external polling system just would not run (properly). Finally decided to re-implement polls with Andrew Sutherland’s Democracy plug-in, which is nifty (and Ajaxian!), but required re-entering every question/answer by hand, then re-entering result data via phpMyAdmin. Urgh. Anyway, we’ve got functional equivalence (see lower right sidebar).

Random quotes now handled by Random Quotes rather than my own code.

Much work still to do, but getting there…

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Impeaching W

Now that the possibility of impeachment is finally on the table, the only question is, will it matter? The incriminations are certainly sufficient to justify impeachment (Alternet):

There is no shortage of diligent documentation of this president’s violation of laws and misleading of the public — from the 1,284-page Torture Papers to congressman John Conyers’ 273-page compilation [PDF] of the lies leading to the Iraq war. But behind this incredible ongoing compendium of evidence against President Bush lurks the realization that publicly pointing to criminal behavior is not synonymous with bringing it to an end.

Pushing impeachment through a Republican Congress is going to be no small feat. And the public, bizarrely enough, doesn’t seem to care all that much (insufficient salaciousness?) And then there’s the question of whether it will make any difference — if the mindset of the administration doesn’t change, what will we have gained?

Music: Sun Ra :: Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie
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Comes a Time

… when you’re just so tired of looking at and dealing with everything, need a fresh start. Melt the creodes. Reset. New theme. Stop thinking about it. Maybe some things will come back sometime. Maybe not.

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itags.net

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes itags.net, a wiki describing the draft specification for “i-tags”

The basic idea of an i-tag (identity tag, independent tag, intelligent tag – take your pick) is that a user could tag an object on their own site (photo, video, sound file, text or an entire blog post), where the tag, and the object, would then go out through the RSS feed or be spidered, with some additional information that doesn’t now exist in tags.

More at the site. itags.net is run by Mary Hodder, who also runs the Napsterization blog on Birdhouse.

Music: Jeff Buckley :: Lilac Wine
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CSS Compatibility in MSIE

Don’t hack your CSS trying to make MSIE behave — force the perp into compliance instead, with Dean Edwards’ (unfortunately named) IE7. Uses JavaScript to detect MSIE and tweak its DOM to act as though it had a clue. Not only a great solution for developers currently struggling to create clean code, but also future-proof: When/if MSIE7 gets on-board, developers won’t have to un-do the hacks they’ve done.

Not that I’ve worked out all the issues on this blog yet… even with “IE7” in place. Getting there.

Music: Rufus Thomas :: Do the Funky Penguin
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Critical Rituals

A few days ago, Miles climbed into the car head-first, noggin down where feet are supposed to go, feet kicking in the air. Maybe you had to be there, but it was pretty comical. We made the mistake of laughing our heads off, so now he has to do it every time he gets into the car. Today we were in a rush to get somewhere and didn’t let him hang out upside down before we left. He cried half the way to our destination. Amazing, the rituals that are of critical importance to kids.

Music: Laika :: Coming Down Glass
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Naked in Public

I’ve threatened to do it half a dozen times, and finally went for it. After fiddling for a while trying to fix a broken comments problem, decided maybe it was time to switch from Movable Type to WordPress. Playing with it more and more lately, and liking it more all the time (though it still lags behind in multi-user/multi-blog functionality, despite the beta existence of WordPress M-U).

Import process went pretty smoothly, after tweaking PHP’s max_execution_time and max_upload settings. But a lot is broken too – fonts on archive pages, polls, Image From Nowhere, random quotes, blogroll, image pop-ups… Jagged edges everywhere, and much finessing to do. But decided it’s OK to be naked in public sometimes, so will wrench in spare time over the next few weeks. A public experiment – pardon the dust.

Ironically, the MT blog was using a ported and hacked version of Aamukaste’s Neat theme. Now I’ve returned to the actual WP version of it and need to hack my MT mods back in.

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Bye-Fi

Home stereo usage is plummeting. Wall Street Journal:

Even when consumers aren’t using portable devices, more are shifting their music consumption away from stereos. Among 1,031 adult respondents to a consumer-behavior survey published last year by the CEA, 34% said they listened to music at home primarily on a PC, compared with just 26% who said they used a stereo or surround-sound receiver as their main home listening system.

Tangential observations (triggered by the sorry iPod Hi-Fi announcement) from Doc Searles.

Music: Mott The Hoople :: One of the Boys (Single)
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Feeds on Feeds

Feeds on Feeds, a PHP / Magpie-based RSS aggregator you can run on your own server. Nicely interleaves recent posts from multiple sites chronologically. 10-minute install. Not gorgeous, but customizable. Recently implemented this for a far-flung group who wanted an easy way to keep up on each other’s blogs, and it was an instant hit – real-time group mash-up.

Music: Mott The Hoople :: Sea Diver
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Picture Theory

Woke up to Amy and Miles having a disagreement. Not the usual kind of disagreement parents have with three-year-olds, like “I don’t WANT to brush my teeth!” or “I don’t LIKE that kind of Cheerios!” This disagreement was of a different order:

Amy: “And this one is a Troodon.”

Miles: “No mommy, that’s a Gallimimus.”

Amy: “But the book says right here that it’s a Troodon.”

Miles: “Well, mommy, I think the author made a misSTAKE, because I know what is a Gallimumus like at the Lawrence Hall of Science and that is a Gallimumus.”

Miles has memorized so many kinds of dinosaurs / dogs / monkies / planets / trains, etc. it makes my head spin. But what really fascinates me about these kinds of conversations is the fact that he’s done so without being able to read. Whereas an adult will trust almost without question what’s written on the page to describe a thing, he relies entirely on the picture. So for him, it’s confusing when we rely on the printed word if that word doesn’t match his picture universe.

From Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory:

2.1 We picture fact to ourselves.

2.11 A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.

2.12 A picture is a model of reality.

2.16 If a fact is to be a picture, it must have something in common with what it depicts.

2.18 What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to depict it—-correctly or incorrectly—-in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality.