sometimes a blog by Dan Greene
Well, the long wait for Movable Type 3.0 appears to be nearing an end, or at least light can be seen at the end of the tunnel. Six Apart announced today that beta testing will begin next next week. I filled out the beta testing form maybe I’ll get in at some point.
Once interesting question the survey asks is whether or not you use the MT-Blacklist plugin. I suppose this has something to do with the new TypeKey service.
I like libraries. I also like cats. So how is it that I had no idea that library cats existed? I wonder how many reference questions they answer?
As I noted back in January, my greeneweb.com email address receives a lot of spam and I was using a spam filtering add-on for Outlook Express to combat it. But this seemed to me like mopping up the water but never fixing the problem. The previous host of greeneweb had recently implemented some spam fighting measures but now wants to charge extra for them. The disk space quotas were also a bit on the low side, 25 megabytes for my plan, so a decided to look around for other hosts.
I had gotten my girlfriend an account with bloghosts, so I decided to go back and take a look at their anti-spam features. They use the Spamhaus Block List and Exploits Block List to block spam and other unsavory email and include SpamAssassin with all their accounts. And they offer 4 times the disk space and many other features over the previous host. So greeneweb.com is now at bloghosts and the spam I receive is down to a trickle.
Well I played a video game for the first time in months today. Nascar Thunder 2003 on the Xbox to be exact. I did better than I thought I would. My left hand is fine, but after a few minutes my right hand really hurt. Guess I’ll have to keep playing games to build up strength.
A friend of mine, Brandon Kaetzel, has been accepted into the Paulist Fathers. The future Father Kaetzel, like me, has had many adventures at doctors’ offices. So in honor of Brandon here is a Penny Arcade comic from July 11, 2003.
I just installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking today. While my typing speed was pretty good, considering that I was typing with three fingers, I decided to try Dragon to see if things could go any faster. So far, I’m not impressed. While it seems to be doing a pretty good job, it makes errors often enough make things frustrating. I guess I’ll have to do a lot of training to get good accuracy rates.
I came across a nice article at Digital Web Magazine that introduces PHP and tells you how to do simple, useful things. You won’t be able to write a complex script with this info, but it’s good for adding things like menus or copyright statements to every page of your site.
While looking for this quote from the Rachel Weisz character in The Mummy (1999):
“I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O’Connell, but I am proud of what I am…I, am a librarian!”
I found a quotes page compiled by University at Buffalo, State University of New York, School of Informatics professor Dr. John W. Ellison.
Movable Type has always had a problem, at least when using Internet Explorer 6 as your web browser, which most people are. Comments have this habit of being invisible when you first view them, only to reappear when highlighted with the mouse or the page is reloaded. Turns out this is an easily fixed CSS bug. Details on how to fix this problem are over at King of Fools.
Update: Sadly that fix doesn’t seem to work all the time. However stripping the CSS out of the comment form does seem to work. Instructions on how to do this are again from King of Fools.
In addition to fixing the comments I have also added a custom icon to the site. So instead of seeing the default icon next to librarymonk.com, you will now see a blue “LM”. Instructions on how to do this are at Web Page Design for Designers. I used a freeware icon editor called GoldIcon to create the Library Monk icon.
The Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s alternative newspaper, has a nice article / editorial on Knoxville’s proposed new library. The library appears to have widespread public support and numerous building sites to choose from. Added to this is the desire to have a library on par will the Nashville Public Library, a lofty goal indeed. Much planning remains to be done, and library director Larry Frank says all he knows for sure is that “there will be a new main library”.
I recently started running SETI@home again, first on my Pentium 4 3 GHz and then on my G4 800 MHz iMac. The SETI@ home website says that the the program uses about 16 MB of RAM while running and that above 64 MB will not affect how quickly data is processed. Since my iMac has 768 MB of RAM and my PC has 1024 MB of RAM memory, that isn’t an issue.
However, the SETI@home web site says that running the program in graphical mode can cause it to be slower. Here my PC clearly has the advantage, it has a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card with 128 MB of RAM. The iMac has a NVIDIA GeForce2 MX video card with 32 MB. However, Apple has always maintained that Macs and faster than PCs, even with the megahertz speed gap. But in the time it took my PC to process 10 data blocks from SETI, roughly 48 hours, the iMac had only processed 4 data blocks. So at least in terms of data processing power, a Pentium 4 beats a G4 no contest. I wonder how a Pentium 4 versus G5 SETI@home contest would go?
I’ll admit my test might have been a little unfair. But when Apple claims, “Even the single-processor 1.6GHz Power Mac G5 was 21% faster than the 3.2GHz Pentium 4-based system”, I would expect the systems to be a little more even.