Posts

Posted on

Links or Bookmarks?

Ignore this post if you’re not a WordPress user :)

There’s an interminable discussion going down on the WP-Hackers mailing list about one of those little semantic issues that snowballs perniciously into a major debate. WordPress’ back-end lets users manage URLs for inclusion in the sidebar. This area is usually used for the site’s blogroll, but many people use WordPress for non-bloggy purposes. The debate is over whether to title the administrative interface for this external URL manager “Links,” “Bookmarks,” or “Blogroll” (though “Blogroll” isn’t really on the table – that’s what it’s called now, and no one likes it).

There are a dozen good arguments on either side, but we’re trying to take the temperature of the WordPress user community. Helping out a bit by posting a poll here. Which term seems more intuitive / palatable / sensible to you?

Should WP's list of URLs be titled "Links" or "Bookmarks?"

View Results

Posted on

Lake of Paint

China Digital Times (a J-School-hosted site) links to a stunning pair of images showing an algae bloom in China’s Lake Dianchi so intense the water seems to have turned to paint (here’s how the lake used to look).

Algaebloom

Salon.com picked up and expanded on the post: Invasion of the great green algae monster, quoting Ming Dynasty poet Yang Shen:

A windy lake is Dian yet never any dust is seen,
The newly green isle Ding in the far horizon lies.
Beauty one enjoys here as in land south of the Yangtse River,
A vast rippling lake in spring with distant foam lily white.

The bloom is stunning – and tragic – evidence of the consequences of China’s economic boom and rapid industrialization. While it’s common (and largely true) to point out that China’s boom has been marching on heedless of environmental considerations, that’s not quite the case here.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect to the current algae explosion is that Lake Dianchi has been a target for environmental cleanup for more than a decade. The days when the city of Kunming simply dumped nearly all of its raw sewage and garbage directly into the lake are more or less over. Landfills have been created, sewage plants erected, waste water treatment facilities put into place.

But efforts to clean up the lake have come too little too late, insufficient to offset years of abuse. “The struggle is vast: Cleaning up Lake Dianchi means nothing less than bringing to heel the entire economic revolution that has swept China over the past three decades.”

What kind of poem would Yang Shen write, if he were alive today? … Would he observe, in tones of the darkest gloom, that a jewel of China’s environment that has been treasured for centuries upon centuries has been made unfit for human beings or fish in the space of one lifetime?

To quote BTO, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Music: Jefferson Starship :: Dance With the Dragon
Posted on

Watering Hole

A battle between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo, and two crocodiles at a watering hole in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. You can smell the animal adrenaline. As Lebkowsky says, “This is the herd I want to join.”

Music: Catler Bros :: Burning Monk’s Waltz
Posted on

Alligator Foot, Kangaroo Scrotum, etc.

Scanning the Groundspeak forums for threads on the weirdest things people have found in geocaches, came up with a short list culled from several threads:

  • A metal artificial hip
  • A dime-bag
  • A specimen cup
  • A speculum
  • Bottle rockets
  • A $50 JCPenney gift card
  • A large turd
  • A turtle
  • A stun gun (non-working)
  • Religion
  • A roach. Not the insect.
  • A personal pleasure device for women (hot pink)
  • A used Brillo pad
  • An old sock
  • A piston from a small engine
  • A varnished alligator foot
  • Surgical gloves
  • Emergency water packets with instructions in Japanese
  • A bag of molt from an iguana
  • Mini chess pieces put in an ear plug case
  • A urinal cake
  • A plastic squeaky toy figure of a Nun in black robes
  • Leopard-spotted furry handcuffs
  • A kangaroo scrotum
  • A pregnancy test kit
  • A jar of the cache owner’s dog’s ashes (as a travelbug)

So far Miles and I haven’t been treated to anything quite so outrageous, though we have found some excellent items (a French wooden submarine model kit still tops the bill), but I look forward to the day when I’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.

Posted on

Why I Love My Wife #377

Amy: “Would you mind if I got ruby grapefruit dish soap next time, instead of crisp cucumber?”

Me: “No, why would I mind?”

Amy: “Because it might not go with our kitchen walls.”

You think I’m making this up.

Posted on

The Truthiness of Inkjet Printers

If your inkjet printer says it’s out of ink, don’t believe it for a second (until the ink goes faint on the page). Most printers lie like a rug, claiming to be out of ink long before they actually are. Epsons are the honest-est, reporting “empty” when down to about 20%, while some Kodaks report empty when only 36% of the ink is gone. Not to mention the problem of multi-cartridge printers claiming to be out when only one color has run dry.

It’s the old “Give away the razor, sell ’em the blades” (Gillette in days of yore) thing, aka the “Give away the camera, sell ’em the film” thing (Polaroid in days of yore). Only razors and cameras didn’t lie about the need to replace consumables like printers do.

Which is one reason why we only use a b/w laser at home, and send out for color prints when needed. Inkjets only look cheap.

Posted on

PHP Inside Image Files

Interesting new hack in the wild – embedding PHP (or other*) code inside an otherwise valid image file. And why would anyone do that? Think of a site that allows users to upload avatars or icons or other images, then displays those images back to the public. If the site isn’t taking sufficient precautions during the upload and display stages, a hacker could create an image file with PHP embedded in the byte stream, then name their file myfile.gif.php. A site that then sloppily displayed whatever images were uploaded to it would then display the image inline, and its embedded code would be executed.

The kicker is that even if your site is doing common checks to verify that it’s dealing with a standard image file, such as running the getimagesize() function on it first, those tests may yield a false positive, since the first n bytes check out just fine. You need to verify the filename extension as well, and not serve images from a directory that’s PHP-interpreted. Other suggestions in the article at PHP Classes.

* There’s no reason this same hack wouldn’t work with .ASP or .NET or ColdFusion sites as well, or with image formats other than GIFs.

Music: Tom Verlaine :: Rings
Posted on

hilltopharvest.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Hilltop Harvest — our first farm site!

Hilltop Harvest is a 4th generation farm owned by the Pless family and located in the fertile farmlands of southwestern Minnesota near Redwood Falls. During the summer, hundreds of people come to our farm, enjoy the fresh air and sunshine, and of course, our mouth-watering strawberries and raspberries.

Hrm… I wonder if they’d trade a few crates of jam for a year of hosting? :-)

Music: Dave Cortez And The Moon People :: Happy Soul With A Hook
Posted on

Flow

Flow I’ve been enjoying listening to archival episodes of Sonny and Sandy’s congenial Podcacher podcast, packed with helpful geocaching tips and adventure stories. I find the geocaching community’s obsession with FTFs (first-to-finds) and high-number finders annoying, but enjoy the deep-woods or out-to-sea live recordings and occasional semi-philosophical musings. In a show from last March, Sonny talks about something near and dear to my heart – the concept of “Flow.”

OK, the topic is a little fluffy-fuzzy, but there’s something important to human happiness here. The bit focuses on the ideas of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, “who has devoted his life’s work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled.” Csikszentmihalyi’s idea is that “flow” is achieved in the balance between challenge and skill. A pro snowboarder on the bunny slopes is bored because skill is high and challenge is low; an amateur on a black diamond run is anxious, because skill is low and challenge is high. But an amateur on a bunny hill and a pro on a black diamond both experience the same balance between challenge and skill, and thus both experience the same state of “flow,” where time and cares slip away, and the activity becomes total, consuming.

The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

The conversation is focused on geocaching of course – a game where skill and difficulty levels vary hugely from cache to cache – but any activity, properly balanced, can lead to a sense of flow. Even walking through the city, if attention is focused, can deliver this sense of timelessness and involvement. I often have similar thoughts when biking, or navigating through crowds on foot.

This is exactly why I get so annoyed (experience anxiety) when people stand on the left side of the escalator, or try to get on the train before others have gotten off. These things feel to me like cultural apathy toward any sense of collective flow. I want to feel like we’re all psychically coordinated, a school of fish thinking as one, rather than a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other in chaotic Brownian motion.

Loose thoughts for a Saturday morning.

Posted on

The Nietzsche Family Circus

What’s more insightful and hilarious than a stack of Sunday papers with all the Family Circus cartoons cut out, sans captions? That same stack paired with a pile of Friedrich Nietzsche quotes, sans context. The Nietzsche Family Circus has it all: Guile and wit, philosophy of mind, charmless drawings paired with penetrating reflections on the will to power. So very hard to pick just one.

Nietzshe