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.