Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

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About Dougal Campbell

Dougal is a web developer, and a "Developer Emeritus" for the WordPress platform. When he's not coding PHP, Perl, CSS, JavaScript, or whatnot, he spends time with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat in their Atlanta area home.

Les Orchard switches to WordPress

Sep132005

Les Orchard has switched his 0xDECAFBAD blog over to WordPress. In between bouts of actually being busy, I’ve been yak shaving around the idea of executing this overhaul–making lists, researching sites I like, installing WordPress on my laptop. Finally, after a bit of a weekend sprint during which I mangled the default theme a bit to my liking and installed a few plugins, I figured that I’d just throw the switch tonight and deal with … Continue reading →

Adding the Red Cross

Sep092005

If you’re visiting this site directly (not just reading a feed), and have javascript enabled, then you should be seeing the nifty Red Cross donation banner in the upper-right corner of the page. Brian Alvey explains how to add it to your own site. All I had to do was to upload the image to my own server, paste a bit of javascript into my template’s footer.php, and adjust the image tag to use the … Continue reading →

Tivo

Sep082005

Tivo Series2 40GB DVR — $50 after rebate! A couple of days ago, I read about a $150 rebate from Tivo. This brings the price of a unit down to the “impulse buy” level. I’m thinking about getting us a 40GB unit. I figure that if we decide that we need more space later, we can just hack a larger hard drive into it. And actually, that may not even be necessary, as I’ve just … Continue reading →

Slashdot finally to get CSS makeover

Sep062005

It’s about time. After almost 8 years, Slashdot’s HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS… I can’t bring up the Slashcode site right now (they slashdotted themselves!), but I’m betting that they’ll see a pretty substantial bandwidth savings when all is said and done.

Katrina aftermath

Sep062005

I talked to my mom this morning, and she said that all of our Mississippi relatives are accounted for. One family lost their house and is staying with other relatives, and one of my great aunts fell and broke her hip, and is in the hospital. Other than that, everyone is fine.

Katrina

Sep022005

I have a lot of family in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Fortunately, my closest relatives — my mother, father, step-father, grandmother, plus some aunts, uncles, and first cousins — were not in the most heavily affected areas. Granny was visiting one of my aunts in New York. Her flight home was canceled twice, so she returned on Wednesday instead of Monday, but at least she has a home to return to. My mom … Continue reading →

blo.gs back to normal?

Aug292005

I noticed earlier this morning that the blo.gs updates appear to be functioning (more or less) normally again. I haven’t heard anything from my contact at Yahoo!, so I don’t know if they found a better way to filter the information from feed updates, or if they simply dropped feed updates from their ping sources. It still seems to be seeing some spurious false-positives, but it’s much better than before.

USB to Printer input?

Aug242005

We have some software that requires a hardware dongle, which connects to a standard printer port (25-pin DIN, female). Dongles are annoying enough, normally. But now we would like to occassionaly run this software on our new laptop. No, problem, just move the dongle over, right? Nope. The new laptop doesn’t have a printer port. Just USB and Firewire. We found a USB/Printer adaptor, but it converts to a Centronics connector, not a 25-pin DIN, … Continue reading →

Klingon Fairy Tales

Aug232005

Here’s an awesome list of titles for Klingon Fairy Tales. Some of my favorites: “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It” “The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates” “Mary Had a Little Lamb. It Was Delicious” Additions I’d make: “Brer Fox Finally Gets Brer Rabbit by Blasting the Entire Briar Patch Off the … Continue reading →