WordPress 2.7 Wows Me

I had installed WordPress 2.7 as a beta last month.  When the final release came out WordPress notified me, but instead of like previous versions, it just let me click a link and it handled the upgrade on the server with very little fuss.  It was like buying a 2008 Honda knowing that when the 2009 Hondas came out you could push a button and for free your Honda would upgrade to the latest.  Before several steps were required, now, I just click a button.  Wow.

The new interface for administration is very clean and polished and easy to use.  Wow.

The ease of editing posts has been taken up just a notch, which is quite nice.  Wow.

I can install plugins from within the plugin interface without having to download and unzip zip files, it just works.  WOW!

Thanks to Matt and the rest of the team at Automattic for a fantastic release that is well worth the upgrade.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

I finished installing the sound dampening accessories on our new dishwasher tonight. I had waited on the off chance of leaks from the new installation. No leaks meant silencers were to be installed. This washer is quiet now. The air gap which prevents backflow contamination is now louder when it’s draining than the washer is when it’s running.

I am going to say this: if you have a washer without a backflow prevention mechanism such as an air gap: get one. I can think of no other cheap installation that could be better for your home repair money. I could have possibly saved my old dishwasher from replacement had I known about the air gap. Installation took all of 20 minutes because I’m slow and wanted to triple check the connections.

So far I’m thrilled.

Also, I fixed a broken closet door tonight. Tip: don’t cut corners with “repairs”. The previous owner of this house did and I’m having to make up for it in dishwashers and wood and time :). Not that I mind. After hours in front of a computer screen physical labor is refreshing.

Canon S3IS: 10,000+

I’ve just crossed the 10,000 picture threshold on my Canon S3IS.  I’ve used it for personal photography, portrait photography and for product photography.  I have taken many great pictures with it (some of which can be found here) and I still love it.  It is definitely a consumer level camera compared to some of the options available to the Digital SLR camera owners, but this is a fantastic camera and I highly recommend it (and its preceding S5IS available as the latest revision as of this writing) to the person looking for a great video, photography and otherwise awesome digital documentation device.  I’d show you the 10,000th picture except that its a picture for a client – so you don’t get to see it 🙂

And now onto the other things I need to do with it.

MediaDefender = Spawn of Satan

No matter how you feel about digital rights management, copyright issues or peer-to-peer networks MediaDefender, a ‘company’ out of California runs a shady business helping companies ‘preserve’ their data on peer-to-peer networks.  MediaDefender took down Revision3’s servers over the long weekend because of various problems – but read this article and judge for yourself – a company that violates laws to do business is just asking for a take down like never before.

The government needs to uphold the lows of copyright, and they need to uphold laws of proper business practices.  When companies step outside of the government to ‘uphold the law’ and those companies violate the law: the companies themselves need to be fined.  Sony and other companies have used Media Defender and I hope that the FBI (as mentioned in the linked article) takes them out of the equation and strips the company of any legal rights as they have a history of violating the law over and over and injuring completely legal companies.

More Web Developers Choose Crack Over Any Other Browser!

I have spent far too much time on ‘fixing’ a bug that only happens in Internet Explorer (AKA Internet Exploder).  Here’s a run-down on the problem:

1) Use math to figure out where something should show up on the screen

2) Test in Firefox – works!

3) Test in IE7 – Fail!

4) Remove rational math that appears to make sense and replace it with nonsense – works in IE7, fails in Firefox because Firefox isn’t as buggy

What I don’t get is that more people use Internet Explorer and its older.  Why does the new browser have to work better, smarter, faster and cleaner?  Thanks for reading my whine.

IE7 hack  post mortem: in Firefox, use math.  In IE6 & IE7 use meth.

Pardon Me, Microsoft, But Would You Mind Implementing Your Own Technology?

I have tried two days in a row now to download the Windows Mobile 5 or 6 SDK.  Tried.  I have succeeded to actually download files, larger files that take some time to download.  Except that when I download the large files and try to execute the installers it warns me.  It warns me to keep me safe from bad files containing viruses.  It warns me that all hellfire and brimstone might take place due to the dangerous files that are encased in the cryptic MSI file.  It tells me that I cannot execute the installers – which I need for work – because it has an unknown publisher.  Clicking on the publisher link on the dialog shows that it is in fact Microsoft.  The author of the warning sofware is Microsoft.  The author of the SDK is Microsoft.  Microsoft department number one, would you please talk to department number two and make sure that your stuff works nicely with itself?

Thanks!

WordPress 2.5: A Review

I’ve been using WordPress 2.5 for about three days now.  Wow.  If WordPress was arguably the best blogging software before, now its light years ahead of anything I’ve seen before.  Between the fine folks at Happy Cog working on the User Interface (UI), the quality of the performance improvements, and the fact that WordPress is so carefully thought about by Automattic, its just a fantastic release.  An amazing release.

I switched to WordPress back when it was version 1.2 from a home-rolled solution that was just getting me by.  WordPress was a big improvement to what I was using then, now its become even more impressive with the improved usability and added functionality to let users add in multi-media functionality and really take their sites from fun to a fun-fest.  If I could add anything to WordPress it would simply be the barbecue that Matt mentions periodically on his posts.

If you haven’t upgraded your installation, you should wait for the final release, backup your data, and then install the latest version.  Its worth every moment of the five second upgrade path.  Then get yourself some ‘Q’.

Irony

This is kinda geeky, but it was funny for my programmers brain. A short bit from my IM conversation with a friend, Matt:

Randy: I installed IE8 beta last night: it really screws with everything because it is set to ‘standards mode’ by default now and every website on the planet has IE hacks 🙂
Randy: It is also clunky and slow 🙂
Matt: Well that’s just great.
Matt: I’ll have to take a look later.
Matt: Maybe we can detect it and set isIE = false and isMoz=true.

iTunes Movie Rentals: Patience in Zeros and Ones

I just started a download of a kids movie for the girls to watch on our way home from Washington next Tuesday.  It is a good thing I started the download today because its going to take the next six hours over this DSL connection to download the movie.  Granted its nearly one gigabyte in size, but great googly-moogly that’s a long download time.

I’ll try it again at home once we get there and see what the download speed looks like on my slightly faster connection.  I predict that unless people plan on renting in the morning and watching in the evening this service, too, will flounder and movie rentals will still be free from other file sharing networks because the quality may be lower, but the speed will potentially be faster.  Of course I could be wrong and this will be the next big thing in digital media.

Update: after an hours time the process has climbed to an estimated eleven hours.  11, ten plus one, or longer – however you prefer it.

Hicks

My grandparents have a pond on ther farm in Northern California.  A mere thirty miles from the rocky cliffs of Mendocino.  I think that Mendocino is a Spanish word for hippies and liberals, but since I only took two first year courses in Spanish you should probably look that up.  Yes, I took the first year course twice.  Es muy bueno.  El queso es viejo y tiene molde.  Anyway, my grandparents pond supplies the water that comes out of their faucets.  The water tastes like fish swim in it.  The fish do swim in that water, so I feel good about it tasting like pond water.

The problem is that I’m on a business trip down to Grapevine, TX.  The water here tastes like fish swim in it.  After being filtered by a multi-dollar filtration system that I’m sure the city paid good money to have put in incorrectly.  The water has probably been filtered with a fish net and a pair of used pantyhose.  I know that sounds cruel, but you’ll find that they have signs that indicate that the water is ‘Superior’ by some random test that is performed by drunk people who have had their tongues cut out.  The drunk tongueless people find the water superior to the toilets that they were reversing into the last time they stepped past drunk and into vomiting mode.

The upside is that our friends the Mason’s gave us several bottles of contraband.  I believe we have several bottles of bottled water that has been filtered to the point of tasting like nothing.  Nothing is exactly what water should taste like.  It shouldn’t taste like fish, kool-aide, teriyaki or Coors.  Oh , or perier.   But God has grace so that when we defile the water with labels like ‘Coors’ or Naive ‘Evian’ the water doesn’t just turn into air through an instant evaporation process so that we’re smitten for suggesting that God’s creation wasn’t good enough.

I just wanted to let you know that I like water… I just like it to taste like water and not sushimi gone awry.

Oh, and I’m thankful for the Mason’s giving us water that you can drink and be proud of.