John McCain’s election team apparently told staff at The Phoenix Biltmore to have extra whisky on hand for their election party tonight. They’re not just planning to drown their sorrows: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents drink more whisky than the national average. Sweet photo by Bearfaced, though I almost used this picture of barrels (or this […] » about 100 words
The TechnoViking will have you scratching your head for the first 90 seconds, then ROFLing for a while. Not enough yet? Watch him dance to “It’s a Piece Of Cake To Bake A Pretty Cake.” This one claims to be the original, and though the sound is bad the video quality is much better than the others.
Thing is, now that you’ve watched it a couple times, did he stop a pickpocket or admonish a groper at the beginning?
I’ve wanted a Wikipedia API for a while. Now I might’ve stumbled into one: commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php. It doesn’t do exactly what I want, but it might yet be useful.
The image on this moleskine notebook was custom laser engraved by EngraveYourBook.com, a part of EngraveYourTech.com, where they recently announced they were suspending moleskine engraving due to atmospheric health concerns. You can’t get a notebook, but you can ogle the fancy, laser engraved MacBooks » about 100 words
GPL and CC are incompatible? FSF says so, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines agree. I’m as opposed to ruinous compromises as the next guy, and I feel the GPL fever, but I just want to use Mark James‘ excellent Silk Icons in my GPL’d WordPress plugin.
Who’d a thunk it: CSSHttpRequest is a way of doing cross-domain AJAX by using CSS’ @import method to fetch the data.
Keith Lewis bakes, paints, makes robots with machine guns, and has stitched not one but two Mario quilts (closeup, from back). They apparently make good gifts, who wouldn’t want one? » about 100 words
View it large, for all the details. Via anonymous. » about 100 words
News of BrickCon the web and the Flickr earlier this month, but MSE2006’s photos of robot competition have my attention now. But what am I looking at? What was the competition? » about 100 words
I’ve linked to Steve Sauders‘ webcasts on website performance optimization before. Here’s another. Turns out that he’s co-chairing the O’Reilly Velocity conference in June.
I’ve configured Apache for virtual hosting on more sites than I can count, but I’ve always just kind of stumbled through until now. What’s changed? The Apache 2.2 documentation is worlds better than the old 1.3 docs (even though the old docs rank highest in Google). So here they are: name-based virtual hosts, plus virtual host configuration examples (including an example mixed name and IP virtual hosting, which is what I needed), and some tips on dynamically configured mass virtual hosting.
I think this election has designers more involved than most. (Via DottieboBottie.) » about 100 words
WP 2.6 allows sites to move the wp-content directory around, so plugin developers like me can’t depend on them being in a predictable location. We can look to the WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_PLUGIN_DIR constants for answers, but a better solution is likely to use the X_url() functions. The most useful of those is likely to be plugins_url(). Even better, you can give these functions a relative path and they’ll return a fully qualified URL to the item.
Is xFruits a worthy replacement for Yahoo! Pipes?
I just submitted a trac ticket about this:
The update_post_meta() and delete_post_meta() functions don’t know how to deal with post revision IDs. add_post_meta() does, it uses the following block of code to make sure the passed $post_id is a real post, not a revision:
| ``` if ( $the_post = wp_is_post_revision($post_id) ) $post_id = $the_post; ``` |
This is important because the global $post_id when a post is being saved is for the revision, not the real post. If you pass that to these functions, update_post_meta() and delete_post_meta() will try to update or delete the records related to the revision. When update_post_meta() fails to find any records for the post_id you submitted, it calls add_post_meta(). Each attempt at updating the meta will actually create a new row in the table.
For now I’m checking with wp_is_post_revision() before making any calls to the post_meta functions.
Updated: Mark Jaquith committed the patch less than two hours after I submitted it! I love WP.
This PSA should help you understand the upcoming switch to digital television. (via)
I sink into a strange, giant blue marshmallow and sigh contentedly. I balked at this new furniture. I balk at anything that I don’t actually pick out. I didn’t pick this out, Casey acquired it on his own. Our home is small and I am very picky about what goes into it. This was a […] » about 600 words
The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast last week featured Libraries vs. IT Departments. (Via.)
I think Richard M. Stallman would agree with xkcd: DRM is evil. It’s bad for both customers and content creators — even Hilary Rosen and Steve Jobs have their doubts about it. » about 100 words
You can get a carved wood replica Macintosh 128 or faux-wood vinyl wrap for your Mac Mini, but ASUS is demoing a series of bamboo-covered computers and Fujitsu is showing their Cedar concept. And then Miniot has a series of wooden cases for your iPhone and iPod touch. » about 100 words
Contexture Design‘s iPod classic and nano cases made of reclaimed 45 RPM vinyl or audio cassettes are just fine. Too bad they’re all sold out. » about 100 words
Edward “to clarify add detail” Tufte, who criticizes the PowerPointing of America, earlier this year posted a video on the iPhone’s UI design. He loves the photo viewer (except the grid-lines between images are too big), he loves the web browser (except the navigation bar takes up too much space), he calls the weather app an […] » about 200 words
When Phoebe Ayers isn’t hanging out at ROFLcon she’s probably doing something related to Wikipedia, so I’m looking forward to reading How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. Extra points: Phoebe and her co-authors somehow convinced their publisher to release the entire work under the GFDL, the same license Wikipedia […] » about 100 words
Scott Carver has his hand in a number of projects — The Penny Jam is especially outstanding — but his Instant Rimshot is one of those silly infectious sites that’s you can’t help but share.
I received the following message from Clickatell, the SMS gateway provider I use to programmatically send text messages to cell phones: Please be advised that US carrier Verizon Wireless has announced that they will be charging an additional 3c per SMS for all application originated mobile terminated messaging beginning November 1, 2008. This increase will […] » about 400 words