March 2005
Ars Technica: Wordpress stuns supporters with...
Wordpress fans discover that their favorite blogging software is hosting hidden content on the project’s website to raise money. Enthusiasts and developers must now grapple with the ethical and moral complications attached to such a funding method URI: Wordpress stuns supporters with unexpected fund raising practices
By Clint Ecker, of course :)
Wordpress generates funding using dubious methods
This is a bit disturbing. Matt openly admits to it, and says he’d discontinue the practice if we didn’t like it. I don’t think we like it.
Cincinnati Harold is now the Cincinnati Dealer
The hilarious local satire site, The Cincinnati Harold has been told they have to change their name by the Cincinnati Herald (No I wont be linking to them!). So effective today, the website is called The Cincinnati Dealer
Everything is exactly the same. Funny as ever, but with a slightly different domain name :)
Phew! I sure am glad they changed it too, I was constantly checking what I...
$bling$
I got the results of my yearly review today and I’m pleased to announce that my employer is very pleased with my performance and I got a pretty nice raise :)
Best quick breakfast ever: Toaster Scrambles
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Pillsbury Toaster Scrambles are crafted by the hands of Zeus himself. Flaky and toasted, these little packets of deliciousness are made from the finest materials known to man:
Cheese flavored sauce
Bits of REALTM eggs
and crunchy bacon!
Flaky crust
I eat two of them every morning and I am the finest specimen of man you’ll ever...
God gets his revenge on Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell back in hospital
It was Falwell’s second admission this year to Lynchburg General Hospital. He was treated for pneumonia for 13 days in late February and early March. For a time, he was on a ventilator.
Poor Jerry Falwell.
Enquirer: Gun sighting shuts down airport
Ooops! I sure hope this crap doesn’t happen when we’re there this weekend :-P
X-ray images of the bag showed what appeared to be a gun, but the bag somehow ended up back in the passenger’s possession before security officials at Terminal 3 were able to corral it,…The passenger and the bag were never found. URI: Gun sighting shuts airport
Drudge Radio Live
You guys probably wouldn’t know this unless you read The Drudge Report but I guess he’s got a new syndicated radio show. You can tell how popular they think his going to be by its slot, 10pm to 1am on Sunday nights (only AM stations!)
Anyways, as probably expected, Drudge is all over the place. He’s seemingly incongruous with himself. I’m not sure what sort of audience he’s gunning...
Python for series 60 phones
Here’s a neat recap of the presentation given at Pycon about writing python application for series 60 phones — like my Nokia 6600. Its still something I want to get into but, I think its a bit tough on a Mac (although I think I saw a tutorial once that showed you how to setup a remote python shell over bluetooth).
After the introduction, Jukka took over with some of the more technical bits....
Del.icio.us inbox, where art thou?
I got hooked on the del.icio.us inbox when I first started using del.icio.us and now its been broken for a month or longer? Anyone else having this problem?
Local police at hospice in Florida fend off local...
We’ve come perilously close to the executive branch and the judicial branch of our government staging a “show-down” in front of the hospice where Terri Schiavo is dying: Florida officials’ attempt, fail to seize Schiavo
blah. Just read this article that my Friend Jon wrote up for ArsTechnica
eM2 Mac Mini case Review at HTmini.com
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I just wanted to point everyone to a review I did on HTmini of the Tom
Bihn eM2 mini carrying case. It was a fun review and I got a free bag out of it :)
The eM2 bag has two thin plastic rings on each handle for presumably attaching a clip-on strap so you can throw your mini over your shoulder. I found them to be a little thinner and more flexible than I...
Independent Eye launch party tonight & tomorrow
In case you somehow haven’t heard yet, the Independent Eye is back and for the past 2 months I’ve been helping the people running the site. I actually did the design of the site and wrote some of the code that aggregates the blog posts down the sidebar on the right.
Speaking of that code, its based around the Magpie RSS parsing package. We then process and cache comment counts and links to...
Rapper 50 Cent is sad because no one's shot up his...
I think I ran across this on del.icio.us and it made me laugh:
He tells BLENDER magazine, “I have two (bulletproof vehicles), one in New York, one in LA, and it was about 100 grand each, “I’m actually disappointed though: Nobody’s shot me. I spent a lot of money on that shit!” 50 CENT DISAPPOINTED HIS BULLETPROOF CARS HAVEN’T BEEN SHOT AT
Micropatronage pays off
A few months ago I donated $30 to [Jason Kottke’s experiment]. The cool thing is that if you donated $30 or more, you got entered to win a lot of cool prizes.
I got notified by Jason today that I’d been drawn as a winner (big suprise, eh?) and I got to rank 4 or 5 things from the big list that I might like (so I wouldn’t get something I didn’t want or already had).
There’s some cool books...
Brain dump - March 23, 2005
A brief introduction to prototyping with Surface Mount Technology
Discover Circuits – a collection of more than 9000 circuits or schematics. Categorized and cross-referenced, I wish I would’ve known about this back at Purdue!
Other things I need to write about:
Designing GUI interfaces with TkInter and Python
The meeting I attended last night with the people I’ve been working on...
PyMusique works once again
Good ol Jon Lech Johansen has gotten around the lockout of PyMusique and versions of iTunes older than 4.7 by reverse engineering the encryption in version 4.7 of iTunes.
Link to Jon’s Announcement
Purdue email - the last vestiges are ripped from...
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I still remember when I registered my career account in the summer of 1999 via Telnet in my Grandmother’s basement on this hot shit called a “Cable Modem” :)
Fourtunately I was never one of those weirdos you saw in the computer labs checking their email via Pine. You knew who you were dealing with when you ran into one of those people.
...
Scooped
Wow! I scooped the Centerstage project on their own announcement
;)
Somebody please make me an iPhoto server
I wish I could share out my iPhoto albums without opening the whole iPhoto app. Hey smart people out there, figure out how to write an “iPhoto Server” that keeps me from having to wait while iPhoto figure out what to do with 7000 pictures :P
To me it sounds like it could be pretty simple. Parse the iPhoto XML file, advertise via Rendezvous Bonjour and figure out how iPhoto sends the files to...
Apple does exactly what I said they'd do with...
Well I posted in the comments on my post about PyMusique — an application that bypassed the stage of the iTMS where the DRM gets applied — that I thought Apple would simply lock out people not using the newest version of iTunes (I said they’d release a new point release with some special handshaking).
Looks like Apple was able to lock out PyMusique (and version of iTunes older than 4.7) by...
Camino Website: frabulous!
I may not use their browser but their new website sure is purdy:
CaminoBrowser.org
Catblogging
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The humorous side of being completely braindead
These articles are written tongue-in-cheek and show just how horribly laughable this whole circus surrounding the Shiavo case has become:
Other 293 Million Americans Waiting for Congress to Pass Bills for Them
The success of Congress’s record-breakingly speedy passage of a bill specifically crafted for the parents and brother of persistently-vegetative Terry Shiavo induced a furor this...
Tktable for Tkinter and Python
Honestly, I’m still having trouble figuring out how to make the Tktable component for Tkinter work like a spreadsheet in the Tkinter application I’m developing, but I found some interesting information that might make what I had to go through to get to this point easier for someone else in my shoes. I might just end up dynamically creating Entry components, but I’d rather get this working.
...
GRAH
PURDUE! WHERE IS MY W2??????? YOU CLAIMED TO HAVE SENT IT TWICE! GIVE IT TO MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
What in the world is going on here?
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I’ll admit I haven’t been following the news super-close lately, but I’m aware of most of the bigger stories going around. Perhaps you’ve heard about how Republicans are trying to keep Terry Schiavo alive.
She became severely brain damaged 15 years ago and her husband and her family have been fighting over whether or not she should have her feeding...
What I've been working on
The Independent Eye website is nearing completion. I’ve gotten all of the old content from The Xray imported into Wordpress and I’ve been tweaking the WP theme on the site all day to make it as nice as possible.
The search stuff still isn’t working but It’ll be done either tonight or tomorrow. The site looks pretty respectable in all modern browsers (Moz/FF/Safari) and looks alright in...
Nifty Corners: Rounded elements without images
Nifty Corners
The technique works even on floated, absolute positioned or percentage-width elements. It fails on element with fixed height, or with padding. Both of the problem could be easily solved with an extra wrapper around the content.
Known bugs are: text-indent won’t work on the element that has been rounded in Opera, and IE (both Mac & version 6 PC) would mess up on...
Ego Status Update
I like to visit search engines and put in my name to see how I rank compared to the other Clint’s and Ecker’s in the world. I quite simply destroy any other “Clint Ecker’ in the world, so I’m trying to expand my scope a bit :) Here’s the results
Where I stand when you search for “Clint”:
Google
4th
Yahoo!
5th
Ask...
Google code and PyMusique
Two neat things I saw during my morning scan of the Internet:
Google Code
One thing we really wanted to put up on Google Code was a way of bringing recognition to those people and groups who have created programs that use our APIs or the code we have released.
Basically just a bunch of open source “glue-code” type tools that make life happy at Google that they wanted to release...
St. Patricks day at the Claddagh in Newport
Me and Jacqui headed on over to the Claddagh on Newport last night to hang out with a bunch of people from Ars Technica — more specificially Arsclan who are in town for their yearly mega-Lanparty called “Jesus Respawns” (its an Easter joke.. heh… nevermind)
We’ve met some of them before, in Chicago, Indianapolis, and elsewhere. Last night there were approximatly 20 or 30 people at the Claddagh...
Good TkInter References
Good TKinter references for GUI development in Python are few and far between. I found a few good ones, so here they are:
Effbot: An introduction to Tkinter Pythonware: An introduction to Tkinter
The first is merely a cleaned up and updated version of the first, but the second site is more complete in the raw material it covers so both a worthwhile. I realise that Tkinter might not be the...
HTmini Redesign
I redesigned HTmini.com tonight. I think it looks great. Does anyone think it looks familiar? :)
I had put together a bunch of mockups for the new design but I couldn’t come up with anything I thought looked good and worked well enough. On my way home today I just told myself, “Why mess with perfection?” I consider the markup for Phaedo.cx to be pretty darn good. Its served me well and...
AP: Parents of Truant Students Miss Meeting
And people wonder why their kids are having problems. They can’t even set halfway decent examples for their children:
Prosecutors summoned parents of repeatedly truant children to attend a meeting about the law concerning excessive absences, but 241 of the adults didn’t show up.
Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols mailed letters about the Tuesday evening meeting to 582...
Google X
Very cool
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MSN's Slate interns know good stuff when they read...
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As seen here
Dreamhost hosting: blantant whoring ahead
Just wanted to remind everyone how cool Dreamhost is ;) Its no secret that some people don’t find DreamHost adequate, but I’ve referred a lot of people to DH and 90% of them have been happy with the price, features and service.
I don’t know how many of you knew this but when you’re signing up for DreamHost you can plug in my name or phaedo.cx as your referrer and it’ll credit some money...
Google mobile search: friend or foe?
This weekend Google quietly launched a page explaining all of their mobile search features at mobile.google.com. Anyone who has gone to www.google.com on their cell phone or portable device in recent times might have noticed that you were being shown a different user-interface than when you were using a normal browser. That’s because google has been forwarding mobile devices to a WML gateway...
[cats] In the dark of night...
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Tracy Morgan at the Funny Bone
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Continuing our tradition of going to Newport to watch hilarious comedians who’ve had prime-time sitcoms, me and Jacqui (and Will Smith! no… not THE Will Smith) are going to the Funny Bone at Newport on the Levee to see Tracy Morgan perform stand-up tonight.
Tracy was quite probably my favorite SNL’r, second onlt to Will Ferrell so I’m...
Sync Two Directories in Python
I wrote this to keep two directories in sync. Requires the getargs.py module to parse the command line paramters and takes input in the following format:
python sync.py -l /path/to/localdir/ -r /path/to/remotedir/ -e key1 key2 key3 -m 1024
-l --localdir PATH Path to the source directory
-r --remotedir PATH Path to the destination directory
-e --exclude...
A picture for Collin Grady
From a fresh install of Warty :)
My Desktop
I thought my desktop was looking especially suave tonight so I screen captured it. My menubar contains: Weatherpop, iScrobbler, Salling Clicker, Gmailstatus, slimbattery, internet connection, remote desktop, script menu, bluetooth, airport, and MenuCalendarClock.
My Dock from the top: Finder, Launchbar 4, Skype, Imagewell, Evocam, AdiumX, Mail.app, NetNewsWire, iTunes, Preview.app, Firefox,...
CSI: Miami — Andrea the corpse
Well it turns out that Jeff was partially correct when he guessed that Andrea Silvers would be playing a corpse on this weeks episode of CSI:Miami. She was a corpse at the beginning and played a few lines during the “flashback” part of the show.
Getting punched:
More pics after the link:
Firing the guy who kills her:
Getting poked in the eye while dead:
Not being...
Google Desktop Search, finally!
It appears that Google Desktop Search has made it out of beta and now supports real applications like Firefox, Thunderbird. I thought it could already do this, but Neil says it now indexes PDFs, music, video and image files.
Neil also points out, and I agree with him, that the coolest part is that Google has introduced plugin support. So now people can write plugins for applications like...
OK, Computer
We got this acer from Jacqui’s parents when we were there a week ago. I got a better PC (mobo,ram,cpu,case,ubuntu support)-wise so I gutted this acer for its PCI nic, 40GB HD, DVD drive and CD-RW drive and threw the rest away.
But look at that massive ball of dust and …. something down there. UGH!
So now I’ve got two PC’s doing work for me. One’s doing BT and DC stuff (WinXP +...
Netscape 8 - Kill yourself
I just about spit up my coke when I saw a picture of Netscpae 8’s new user-interface. So I’m putting it behind this here link so no one will come to my blog and throwup and never come back.
Check out Blake Ross’s take on Netscape 8 which details how extremely messed up this browser is:
In nearly every other Windows application in the world (get used to hearing this expression over the next...
Friday random 10 mp3s
I keep seeing this on Lauren’s blog and I even did it once
I am bored so here I am gonna do it again ;) Just load up your mp3 application, ipod, whatever and put it on shuffle and record the first 10 songs that pop out :)
Can’t Stop It – Bad Religion
This Could be Love – Alkaline Trio
Forgive and Forget – The get up kids
Memory – Sugarcult
Powder – Yellowcard
She’s a Rebel –...
At work late again
My little early work day in Sidney, OH went alright. Spent the whole day riding around in the back of a truck pinging random hosts on the internet to prove our GPRS was working fine.
I then proceeded to stay up that night until about 1:30am which totally killed me this morning. I came to work, did my thing until about 4:30pm and came home. Unfourtnately I’m currently BACK at work running...