Don’t ever change

Okay, a few changes here.

  • Removed the javascript that would automatically open links in new windows.
  • Removed BlogSnob ad box.
  • Removed the Blogdex metalinker links.
  • Removed the Google search term highlighting.
  • Rewrote the HTML for the menus in the sidebar to be more semantically meaningful.
  • Revalidated the XHTML and CSS.
  • Added an RSS 2.0 feed (in addition to the 0.91 version).
  • Added link to my FOAF file.
  • Fixed MIME types served for RSS and FOAF files.
  • Added a few new links to my blogroll.
  • Replaced box-model hacks in my CSS with the Simplified Box Model Hack.

As a bonus side-effect of some of the CSS cleanup, this page looks a little more reasonable in Netscape 4 now.

TODO: More HTML tweaking to make the blog entries more semantically meaningful. Cleanup of CSS. More CSS themes. Add trackback and/or pingback and/or other cross-site linkage.

Geek Syndrome

I found a link to this article on Geek Syndrome, AKA “Asperger’s Syndrome”, AKA “high-functioning autism”. The article includes a test to measure your “AQ”, with scores of around 16 being “normal”, and scores above 34 being “extreme”. My score was 31. Even discounting that there were a few questions I was wishy-washy on, that’s still, um, interesting…. [via Reflective Surface]

Inspiration

Mark Pilgrim is back from his hiatus, with lots of cool goodies to get the brain juices flowing. He never fails to bring something cool to my attention. His New Door project sent me off on a blog exploration trek that netted me several sites that will almost certainly become regular reading for me. And his efforts to improve his site’s standards compliance are interesting, as well. I’ve been meaning to clean the cobwebs out of this site for quite a while now. A lot of my markup is 1) not semantic, 2) redundant, or 3) crappy.

In related news, I’ll probably upgrade my RSS feed from 0.91 to 2.0. I’ve been wondering whether to upgrade to RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 for a while now. The migration to 2.0 is easier, and I’m not really sure that I care for the format of 1.0.The redundancy of the <items><rdf:Seq>…</rdf:Seq></items> section, along with moving the <item> elements outside of the <channel> just seems dumb to me. It turns a nice simple format into a programmatic hassle. IMHO, of course.

I’m a Nielsen

My wife recently got a call from Nielsen Media Research. You know, the “Nielsen Family” people. That’s right, we’re now a Nielsen Family. For one week, we’ll be keeping “TV Diaries” of what we watched. With four adults and two kids covering three generations in our household, we should be able to give them a good spread of data.

I’m sure we’ll be making the Disney Channel and Food Network people happy. Not to mention Pat and Vanna, Monk, Jessica, Poirot, and the crews of the Enterprise, in all of its various incarnations.

With Great Power

I guess the movie industry’s motto should be, “with great power comes no responsibility.” Comic book legend Stan Lee says that Marvel owes him big bucks due to a contract that grants Lee 10% of all profits from the comic book characters he created. Marvel claims that, ‘the company has seen no “profits” as defined by their contract.’

Ummm….. Yeah. Right. The Spider-Man movie grossed over $400 million domestically, over $700 million since the release of the home video, but there are no profits? Puh-leez. We’re not mushrooms, stop feeding us this crap.

Software Development

At work, I think I’m about to get excited about Eclipse, a sort of uber-IDE that can use plug-ins for handling all sorts of different programming languages, platforms, environments, etc. It’s an Open Source project with lots of Big Names behind it. Very cool, in a mega-geek kind of way.

At home, I’ve gotten a little excited looking at some weblog software called b2. I had previously been looking at pMachine, which actually seems slightly more polished. But something about b2 just feels better to me. Still…. Neither of these systems (or the one I use now) is written quite how I would have done it.

I’ve been semi-seriously thinking for a while now about writing my own blogging system. On the one hand, there are already a ton of solutions available, so it almost seems like a waste of time to write Yet Another Blog System. But I just feel like none of the ones that I’ve seen are quite what I want. What do I want?

  • Security. My blog system (Let’s call it “dBlog”) would be written with security in mind from the get-go. Much of the blogware (phpNuke, PostNuke, MyPHPBlog, Thatware, etc) was written without security in the forefront, and have suffered security holes as a result. (b2 and pMachine both seem to be pretty securely written, and b2 in particular uses some good techniques)
  • Modularity. dBlog would be extremely modular. It would be strongly template driven. It would separate content from presentation at multiple levels. Core functions would be object oriented and would encapsulate data until the last minute, when it would be passed to presentation functions appropriate to the task at hand. Every effort would be made to generate valid XHTML, with CSS controlling the final rendering in the browser. (b2 and pMachine are both pretty good at this, but I’d go a step farther)
  • Connectivity: dBlog would incorporate methods to interact with other systems via RSS/RDF output and import, and via TrackBack and PingBack to other blogs. It would support the Blogger and metaWeblog APIs. (b2 already does this).
  • Configurability: dBlog would present a rich API to the web developer, making it simple for others to modify to suit their needs. A great deal of the system would be configurable on the fly via a web-based administration interface. (pMachine already does this pretty well)

Many of these things are already done well by either b2 or pMachine. The main place where they fall short is in the Modularity area. They are both fairly modular, but not to the level that I’m envisioning. pMachine comes pretty close in places, but it could be refactored quite a bit. Again, the key difference I’m thinking of is that dBlog would keep all data encapsulated in objects, then pass those objects to appropriate functions to generate output, whether that be as HTML, RSS, or perhaps even PDF. The display functions would never do database queries.

Will dBlog ever be written? Who knows…. I keep hoping that somebody else will write it first. But eventually I might break down and do it myself.

BMG Rolls Out Protected CDs in Europe

Music giant BMG is apparently poised to implement copy protection in all of its European CDs. I bet that a lot of Europeans can expect to have problems with it, despite BMGs claims that the CDs are Red Book compliant.

I’m not in Europe, but I already have a couple of CDs that give me trouble, despite the fact that (to my knowledge) they do not contain copy protection. The CDs in question are Barnaked Ladies’ “Maroon” and Rush’s “Vapor Trails” (and I think there was a third one that gave me trouble, but I can’t think of what it was at the moment). I was able to rip both of those CDs to MP3s with no trouble. But they refuse to play in my car player — a 10-disk model from Sony, which you’d think would be able to play pretty much anything out there.