As I said in that last post, in WordPress 1.2

There was no separate junk folder that you could just empty.

Well now there is and it works. There’s a separate viewing screen for comments awaiting moderation and you can mark them as spam and clear them out with one fell swoop.

Thank you WordPress dudes.

on 2/15/2005 I posted about adding custom keyword searches to firefox through the address bar. At some point they integrated this feature into the contextual (right-click) menus and renamed it the feature Smart Keywords. It’s the same thing only now its not as much of a pain to do. enjoi

I finally did the wordpress upgrade from 1.2 to 1.5.1.2. It took a little while, but I finally handed in all my final papers and I decided I would do it as a little break/reward. I should have watched a movie or something, I haven’t seen one in weeks. Instead I’m upgrading my blogging software. I am pitiful.

wasn’t that bad, just followed their upgrade instructions — backed up the mysql databases and other files, uploaded the thing, copied the customized files back and zampapowpadoodlebameedoo, wordpress 1.5.1.2.

nonetheless, I did it cuz they claim that it features improves comment management. and man the management features on the last one truly suck. while 1.2 had the ability to corral spam comments into a bin to “await moderation,” it still required regularly going through the thing and cleaning them out. There was no separate junk folder that you could just empty. Having just installed this thing, I don’t know what the new and improved comment management stuff is, but I might report back on that soon.

nothing much interesting else to say right now, as I don’t do the posting my life thing on there really. but to break with the trend I’m working on a demo for my advisor and working on a paper for WoSLAD. Any workshop about spatial language which titles itself with an acronym that sounds like “Woah salad!” can’t be that bad. Although I hear Delmenhorst is not the coolest place on earth. I’m moving to DC on Saturday or Sunday.

this takes like 5 minutes and unlike most petitions and stuff circulating around your www inbox, this might actually work.

• read.
• act.

You can now send emails, faxes and print to congresspeople and world leaders, automatically from amnesty international USA’s online action center. You need to enter your address, and it will automatically determine who your senators and representatives are and send it to them.

I sent a bunch in the last few days supporting Amnesty’s recent report on Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, against making John Bolton UN ambassador, and some others to representatives and senators and I actually got replies back. At least one of the replies was not completely automatically generated, as it responded to the topic of the email (John Bolton). It may have been replied to by some intern or something, but generally when congresspeople reply with a specific topic it means they are keeping track of how many letter they got on these issues in their constituencies.

• PC case made out of fans (from slashdot)
• Do’s
• Don’ts

http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/

themes by aaron spuler. these are many and nice and don’t seem to available anywhere obvious on the firefox/mozilla site. found it checking out how the mozilla calendar project sunbird is coming along.

I have also been into the safari ripoff brushedtheme.

Apparently there is another way to do this, and it is posted online. Using an .xinitrc file is another clean way to set this up, and there are some other things you can do too. I didn’t find this one, but got feedback on the local northwestern OS X listserv:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004082505230779

thanks Conrad

Back in OS X 10.2 - Jaguar it was pretty easy to launch X11 apps through the native OS X Terminal.app combined with Apples X11 implementation. All you had to do was start X11 and launch a Terminal. If Terminal was running, you quit the app and restarted it after running X11. Since 10.3 - Panther, it seemed that this feature didn’t work anymore. I’ve looked around on the web for people who’d figured out how to do it, but the general concensus seems to be people don’t do it, they just use the xterm that comes with X11.

Well I don’t really like the xterm compared to Terminal.app, so I’ve found this whole using two different terminals annoying. Terminal is tightly integrated into OS X, with drag and drop file to pathname conversion, easy cut & paste, a GUI for setting preferences, and probably best of all, Quartz tranparency, which makes it easy to see code through the window, and looks bitchin. xterm is pretty much an old school unix term, which requires modification of a dot settings file or command line arguments to tweak its behavior and looks, and of course, there’s no transparency. A while back I gave up on trying to figure it out, but I tried something else today and it worked.

It turns out that you can get the Terminal.app in X11 just by running it through X11. Two easy ways to do this:

1. Launch an xterm, then launch Terminal.app from the command line: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal &
2. The other option is just to stick that same path in an X11 shortcut by adding it to the Applications pulldown on the menu bar when in X11. I think you can make Apple Script launchers to do this also, but I haven’t messed with that.

Both methods do the same thing, I prefer (2) which doesn’t require launching the old school xterm. But doing it this way, my X11 apps seem to launch no problem through Terminal; likewise for X11 forwarding.

A couple peculiarities to note. First, the Terminal window will start up underneath your other windows, not on top. Second, the Terminal icon will show up in the dock, but if you already have a shortcut in your dock to the Terminal, it won’t bounce and get an arrow under it — the system will put a second, active Terminal icon in the dock (or third, or fourth depending on how many times you launch it). I don’t know why those two things happen, but it’s probably obvious to some real Mac hackers.

Tiger’s (10.4) out now, but I don’t have Tiger yet, so I don’t know if this trick works there. I don’t think too much work went into upgrading Apple’s X11 for Tiger, so I would guess that it still works, but these upgrades are bananas.

• 4/21/05 Cal’s Liquors & Bar
• 4/23/05 Open End Gallery. part of Version 05.

small bathroom fire show
monday 4/18
at the funky buddha lounge
728 W. Grand Ave., Chicago
(Just east of halsted/milwaukee, and the grand blue line stop)

not sure when it kicks off, prob after 9.

my band is playing friday night at the buddy gallery, 1542 n. milwaukee ave., 2nd floor., in wicker park by the damen el stop.

b there or b a square

This editorial covers a story that hasn’t seen much light in the mainstream media. The story’s fairly new and came to my attention through this video clip from Bill Maher’s show, which I saw on robin’s blog. Paraphrasing Maher’s comments, if this had happened under Clinton, he would have been lynched. But clearly, Republican presidents receive special attention, which we know given the whole missing munitions scandal, the little Abu Ghraib boo boo, and the minor fact that the main reason for going to war turned out to be incorrect. Clearly, all of these things were nothing compared to lying about sexual relations with an intern, an act which undermines the trust and the very fabric of American society–much moreso than male prostitutes with FBI/CIA clearance in the Whitehouse.

But at least somethings are getting out there, like the failure of Bush’s education policy

My band’s next gig is this Thursday, Feb 24th at 8pm at the Abbey.
we are opening for dälek (matador records, from
newark, nj). The lineup also features Cex , who we play before, and the Drastics, who we play after. Tickets are available online. It’s $10 at the door and $8 online, but I think there’s a $1.25 service charge online, so price is abt the same. The show is written up as a Critic’s Choice event in the Chicago Reader, so I guess it might sell out, but capacity is 600, so I doubt it. Should be ice cold.

Also, we got into the studio one night in Decemeber and recorded a demo, which is finally mixed down now. We recorded it for the purpose of getting more gigs, but oddly enough people keep asking us if we are selling anything, so we will be selling copies of it. It came out decent, sounds better on headphones, but decent. I would say that I enjoy listening to it, but it’s my band, so. . .

I finally found the feature I was looking for. In some older versions of Firefox, you could type “dict word” into the address bar and it would return the Dictionary.com definition of the word. At some point, this built-in special search was taken out, and replaced with the default search from the address bar, Google’s “I feel lucky”.

This article details how to add in your own custom search keywords to search just about any site. All you need to do is make a bookmark for the search string, e.g. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s, where %s is a placeholder for the search string; Go to Manage Bookmarks; Click Properties for the bookmark, and type a keyword in.

.

I am elated.

This dude in Alaska is building an 18-foot-tall, anime-inspired, working, robot exoskeleton. They call them mechs or mechas in anime, rpgs, and other geeky sci-fi circles. I found this CNET article while looking for something else.

This is pretty nerdy too. I’m always looking for a good desktop background/wallpapers. Let me know if you have some good ones. I’ve been using the cartoons from exploding dog, but I usually end up going back to the high def images that are included in the OS X screen savers. The pics of space, nature and beach stuff are formatted for the screen and a lot nice than any similar stuff I’ve found on the web.

You can use those images as wallpapers, I have been for a while now. I have no idea what happened to them in Panther (10.3), but chances are, you still have them in the /Previous Systems folder.

If you type .slideSaver into the Finder search box, you should find them right away. In Jaguar, the screen savers were located in .slideSaver files, which are actually directories, in the System > Library > Screen Savers directory. In Panther they’ll still be there, under Preview Systems. You can right click the .slideSaver and select ‘Show Package Contents’ to get at the .jpgs.

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PC Magazine has posted a review of its top 15 extensions for Firefox. There are some good ones in there. I just got DictionarySearch , which allows you to highlight words and right click them to bring up a new tab with dictionary.com definitions or google search them. I’ve had been using the Dict extension, not reviewed in the article, which looks up words the same way, but gives you a pop-up window w/preformatted definitions of the word from websters & wordnet. I’m also tried the Tabbed Browsing extension, which lets you tweak the tabbing preferences, but haven’t really found the need for the extra control there yet. I’m thinking about trying the AdBlock extension, for automatically filtering ad images from loading and ScrapBook, which lets you save local copies or snippets of webpages like bookmarks, to avoid bookmark links dying on you.

This is a pretty sweet visualization of the words used in each of Bush’s State of the Union addresses. Click the more link, or visit the nytimes.
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I saw this post on AppleMatters today about the Macs being more cost effective than PCs. This is a brief response. I have a lot more to say about this matter, but don’t feel like spending more time on it.

I generally prefer Apple over the competition for a plethora of reasons, but I’m gonna play devil’s advocate on this one, being a grad student & strapped for $$$. Despite the introduction of the Mac mini and cheaper iBooks, Apple is still high end and more expensive than a cheap Windows or Linux box. The cost is not up front, their prices are competitive for what you get. Their chip speeds will generally be slower, but since the OS is better, you don’t usually notice the difference (maybe for some gaming apps).

The cost is mainly in the service. Servicing a PC is usually cheaper. PC components are cheap and you can often do the labor yourself. Even on laptops, where you can’t do the labor as easily, the service packages on most brands are better than Apple’s, which is only once year, unless you pay more for extended, which I highly recommend, given that minimum cost of service is generally their flat rate of about $300.

For quality components, OSs, UIs, etc. Apple’s top notch. You will generally feel better and enjoy working on the Mac. Things tend to be where they should be intuitively, and they’ve gone through great pains to make it feel that way for just about everyone from the tech expert to the computer illiterate. But their service is really not very good for a company that prides itself on user friendliness. It’s expensive and hard to get.

I don’t recommend Macs to students like myself anymore, as spending an hour or two on the phone or at the genius bar only to be told you need to drop the mandatory $300 to have a fan replaced is not the kind of thing someone strapped for cash and time can do. If you have cash, buy an Apple, and a BMW to plug yer iPod into. If not, the cheapo Windows boxes and minimal time invested in tuning & security is often the way to go. I still prefer Apple, but I work on Winows at work and XP is pretty decent.

I had to shell out $300 last year when my logic board died. I ended up getting the money refunded, which took like 6 months, through their iBook logic board refund campaign, since it turned out thousands of the iBooks in the batch mine was from had faulty boards, but until they made the official refund announcement it was $300 just to look at the thing. The geniuses were of no help. The battery on my iPod is dying now, and although I bought the extended service thing for it (~$60 I think) they give you a hell of a time about replacing it, requiring you to leave it with them for a few days to run diagnostics. This includes erasing all your music, which at the time, I didn’t have 100% backed up, so I had to go home, back it up and I haven’t made time to get out to the Apple store to get it checked up yet. I need to do that… and get the oxygen emissions sensor replaced on my car so the damn check engine light shuts off…

Oh, and regarding the author’s comments on the security of the IE 6 browser, that’s just incorrect. The security it uses for sending info encrypted is the same as any other browser, https is standard stuff. Granted, people may be spending more time trying to hack the browser and exploit its security flaws, but all browsers are buggy, all of them can be tricked.