Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Re-election Day

Nov062002

Here in Alabama, the race for the Governor’s office is running neck-and-neck. Democratic incumbant Don Siegelman claimed victory last night after an AP report showed him ahead by a few thousand votes, with 97% of the returns counted. Representatives for Republican rival Bob Riley called some of the districts to verify vote counts and found discrepancies that didn’t match up with the AP numbers. They said that Riley was ahead, and Riley claimed victory.

For now, it looks like Riley will become Alabama’s new Governor. But with such a close and controversial race, Siegelman is almost certain to contest the results. We’ll see….

More validation than you can shake a stick at

Oct312002

I spent a few minutes digging through my HTML and my blogging software source, and this page now validates:

Valid XHTML 1.0!


Valid CSS!

It still looks like poo in Netscape 4, but if you’re using an 8 year old browser, you should probably expect most modern pages to look like poo. Upgrade, you freaks! For those of you who complain about the size of the download — about 11MB for the Windows version of Mozilla — there’s a version of Mozilla called Phoenix, which is a slightly more reasonable size, around 7MB. That’s only a 30 minute download with a moderately good modem connection.

Back to Daylight Wasting Time

Oct252002

This weekend, we in the United States “fall back”, as Daylight Saving Time comes to an end. Personally, I agree with Rick & Bubba — we should just leave the clocks alone.

Oh sure, you might argue that we “gain an hour”, and that it will feel like we’re getting an extra hour of sleep in the morning. But that’s a red-herring, and you know it.

Tampering with time is dangerous. Just ask any Star Trek crewmember.

Spooky!

Oct252002

I’ve spent some spare minutes here and there over the last several days working on a new theme for the site. Try out my Halloween Theme.

Theme switching requires Javascript and at least a moderately modern browser. Even Netscape 4 users can get some of the effects (though it messes up the menus on the left for some reason).

One of these days I’m going to clean up my HTML and do some more interesting theme variations….

Widespread Distribution of Thought

Oct252002

Excellent comments on copyright law over on Brent’s site. And that’s only one issue that probably has our Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.

The current state of Copyright, Patent, and Trademark law in the United States is really pretty shameful. It seems as though big money interests have bought and paid for the right to “own” any kind of intellectual property in perpetuam, and to control where and when the average citizen may have the privilege to access it. And I’m not just talking about the music and movie/television industries, either. Think about the fact that biotech and pharmecutical firms have patents on gene sequences — Many people are travelling to Ontario, which is ignoring a patent on a test for breast cancer. And don’t get me started on software patents…..

Valid RSS Button

Oct232002

You can now vote for your favorite RSS link button. Vote for mine! Vote for mine! I submitted two (one optimized for dark backgrounds, one for light backgrounds). So if you do vote for mine, choose the one for light backgrounds (the one in the lower left — the other one looks like it’s got a black magic marker smear under the checkmark), just to keep the votes consolidated. I’m going to ask mark to remove the other one, to reduce confusion.

[Update:] Ack. Stupid me. It might not be in the lower-left for anybody else. The images wrap depending on the width of your browser window. Anyhow, it’s the one like in the post below.

RSS Validation

Oct222002

Validated RSS

Another link for Mark…. After his post on RSS validation, I checked my feed and found that it wasn’t valid (improper formats for my language and pubdate elements). Fixed.

I’ve also put in fixes to the pubdate such that it will reflect the timestamp of the latest article posted here, rather than always using the current time (and thus negating any caching strategies used by the clients checking the feed).