Archive for July, 2006

I’m back

I’m back. The wedding was incredible. The honeymoon was fantastic. Pictures will follow.

Let me record some thoughts from the last week:

  1. Sleeping in a hammock on the beach with a Pina Colada is the best relaxation technique ever.
  2. If Reggie Bush had waited even another day to sign with the Saints, he would have sacrificed more with New Orleanians than any amount of money could replace.
  3. Ann Coulter is the most hateful bitch ever. I won’t use “the C word” on this blog, but dammit, she deserves it! She spews negativity. She has set up this idea of “the liberal” and attacked it, despite the fact that it really doesn’t exist, and used her vile toxicity to sell books. …Of which she’s done a damn good job. When she called liberals “godless,” but then refused to “make it personal” or name even a single person who fit into that category, she made a fool of herself. That’s like saying “Christianity is a religion of sinners,” but then when asked about individual Christians, saying “I’m not making this personal, this is about Christianity in general.” God she sucks.
  4. The fact that there are people out there who are sympathetic to Lebanon right now – a state that actively supports a terrorist organization – is sick and sad. It illustrates that the “war on terror” is complete bullshit. Any American who believes this is a hypocrite and any foreigner who believes it is spitting in the face of America. You may not like how Israel is going about it, but it’s certainly no worse than we’ve done in Iraq, and THAT was unprovoked.

    Here’s a great Martin Luther King quote: “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

  5. The Yankees have GOT to invest in some prospects, for fear of condemning themselves to an eternity of all-star-size contracts for aging success stories. And they need some pitching depth. But you’re still my boy, Moose.
  6. It takes about 3 days to get used to a wedding ring.

Last post

This is my last post before the wedding. I’m officially off the osnews-crew list until I get back, I’m done with everything online, I’m setting up my “out of office” stuff. But before I go, here’s a list of fun links.

First up, what happened to Hostess Chocodiles? Chocodiles were essentially chocolate covered white-cake Twinkies. They used to be on sale everywhere when I was a kid, but now I can’t find them. Enter freshchocodiles.com, who will gladly ship you a 10-box for a measley $9. I’m all over this when I get back.

There’s a script I want to check out called Links Thumbnails, which does the Yahoo!-like website thumbnail when you hover over a link. Look for that here soon.

Well, that’s all for now. See you all in a week and a half.

This is it

It looks like I won’t be doing any more work on firsttube.com before the wedding. I’ve got too much to do. In fact, I’m not sure why I’m even posting, I ought to just say “see ya” until I get back. But instead, I’ll probably post one or two more times.

It’s INSANE how much stuff has to be done last minute. All these pre-wedding meetings and dinners and stuff the family wants me to set up. It’s silly, really, but necessary I guess.

Anyway, we’re getting really close.

In other news, I bought a Bluetooth mouse for my MBP. It will help me clean up the desk. Also, we bought a new Canon Powershot yesterday to take on the honeymoon. Unlike my old Kodak Easyshare, it mounts in OS X and lets me see the photos before I download them. Plus, it’s gorgeous.

Mmm…. Macbook stand

I really want this stand for my MBP. It’s great, it angles up the keyboard, it will make the screen angle differently, and it appears to have nice grippy things on the bottom so as not to scratch up my desk. After the wedding, I may get one.

Four Days and Counting

Four days til the wedding. This week is, understandably, insane. We have a boatload of stuff left to do – mostly cleaning and stuff that couldn’t be done til the last second like the placecards and seating chart. So tonight I take the PDFs down to be printed and pray there are no more changes.

We went to a wedding this weekend, and it was nice. It was a little “dress rehearsal” so we could see some things we want/wanted to do.

Beatles Memorabilia Rediscovered!

Yahoo News is carrying an article about a dude who was found in possession of over 500 Beatles tapes believed missing. According to the article, the tapes include “cover versions of songs such as Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart.” These tapes are from sometime between 1969 and 1973, which in my eyes, is the heyday of Beatles creativity.

Beatles

Can you imagine — new Beatles songs from the golden era? This is the kind of thing that amazes me. Had these songs been released in 1969, they’d be masterpieces today. Instead, like “Free as a Bird,” people will hear them and think “ih… they’re ok.”

Nothing by one band will ever match the run from 66 (Revolver) through 1970 (Let It Be). In between you’ve got Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album (or “The Beatles” for you purists), Yellow Submarine, and the magnificent Abbey Road. I would LOVE to hear some previously unheard stuff from that era.

Screenshots

The backend rewrite is nearly complete. The only section left is the Users section, however, since the blog is not really set up security wise for user rights yet, I’m not going to be finishing it for 0.4. I will apply the new backend styles, however.

Anyway, here are some screenshots of the new backend. Click each one to see a larger version:

smallaxe-admin-0.4.jpg smallaxe-new-0.4.jpg

smallaxe-topics-0.4.jpg smallaxe-uploads-0.4.jpg

World Cup Headbutting Madness

This is lifted DIRECTLY from the Register. All credit goes to them, I’m reprinting it here only because it’s funny as hell.

Update 08/08/06: I’ve moved the images to the body of this post to speed up load time. They are all weighty animated gif files.
More >

New Backend, Part II

I have been busy at work, so I haven’t been able to sneak away to really knock this stuff out. The topics manager is now complete, and it’s been AJAXified, but only partly. There are some things that are simply not well suited for AJAX. It’s interesting, because as slick and fast and powerful as it is, javascripting is actually a much more meticulous process than PHP. It’s much less forgiving and the errors are much less descriptive.

I have also removed a lot of the password prompts. Every single admin page load, including the AJAX requests, require your cookie for authentication, and even the cookie is just random data. I’m fairly certain we haven’t sacrificed much in the way of security by only forcing the login once. Even Gmail doesn’t ask for a password with every session.

That said, the backend is now mostly complete. I do need to add one more feature, which is image uploads, a portion sorely lacking. This has been needed for some time, as when I need an image, I need to FTP it up, which is lame. So I will incorporate image uploads shortly, and then break for the wedding and honeymoon. Then I’ll come back and release Small Axe 0.4 and get cooking on the next batch of features!

New Backend

The first parts of the new backend are written and in place! I’m very excited to get rid of some of the legacy code that powered this blog. As I replace the old crufty code, I’m taking out all of the tables, all of the old HTML, many of the CSS classes have been replaced with more powerful styles.

When I get back from the honeymoon, I’ll be packaging a new release of Small Axe, which will be, by far, the best one so far.