Earlier today, in an email to Brendan, I attempted some gallows humour in relation to the Victorian bushfires:
Of course this is all divine retribution for the hedonistic lifestyles of those ungodly Victorians.
And then, this.
To the cunts at Catch The Fire Ministries: please catch fire.
Long-time readers will know that I’m a big fan of the OpenWrt linux distribution for home routers.
It’s a great little linux distribution that lets you do all sorts of geeky networky things, and is damn reliable to boot. I was a bit nervous about the upgrade from the (now) ancient White Russian release, to the new Kamikaze 8.09_RC2 release, but it all went very smoothly.
If you’ve shied away from OpenWrt in the past because of it’s depencency on command-line installation, well shy no more. OpenWrt now includes an excellent web interface called LuCI, which makes admin very simple. Here it is, showing off real-time network statistics, available via a plugin module.
That big traffic surge? A Mac OS system update. As I was taking the screenshot it kicked off in the background unexpectedly.
Modules such as these are the main reason for installing a Linux distro on your router. Different routing modules, statistics and monitoring, security, QoS, application layer proxies, and many more, some with LuCI web interfaces. In short, there’s lots to explore if you’re at all a network geek (I am).
Although OpenWrt was originally written for the infamous Linksys WRT54, but now available for lots of other routers. Perhaps it is supported on the router you’re using right now!? Why not go check?
Paypal sent me an email in Feb 2006. Here’s what they said (emphasis theirs):
Dear Alastair Rankine,
Welcome to PayPal Australia!
We are pleased to confirm that as of 2 February 2006, PayPal Australia Pty Limited is now providing the PayPal Service to you.
You do not need to take any action, however we do recommend that you review the updated and localised user agreement and privacy policy at a time convenient to you.
["Tip of the Day" elided]
Sincerely,
Paypal
For the benefit of anyone else who received such an email, here’s my best attempt at translating it from PalSpeak into English.
Dear Chump,
Welcome to PayPal Australia!
We are pleased to confirm that as of 2 February 2006, your PayPal account is now vaguely associated with the country of Australia, but probably not in the way you expect.
You to not need to take any action, just prepare yourself to get fleeced when you next receive an AUD payment. Because we’ve secretly kept your “default currency” as USD, we can now charge you currency exchange fees to convert an AUD payment into USD and back again! So instead of the regular 3.4% fees, you’re now looking at upwards of 10%!
Isn’t that great — for us? Why we chose to keep your default currency as USD is a complete mystery to you, and that’s the way we like it.
If you don’t like this arrangement you can always choose to not use PayPal whenever you next sell something on eBay.
Ha ha! No, of course you can’t. That’s just our little joke.
Looking forward to fleecing you, chump.
Sincerely,
PayPal
The window of opportunity for commenting on the Obama inauguration is closing, so I’d better have my say, I suppose.
I’ve been reading and listening to some of the Bush retrospectives, and this one from the Economist is particularly good (h/t Brendan). On the one hand it’s quite gratifying to see that most of the media has finally woken up to the reality of the disaster that is the Bush presidency, I have to wonder why they didn’t start putting the boot in earlier? Like, say, any time before 2004?
It’s a risky proposition though, reading some of these retrospectives. Exposing yourself to the naked glare of the catastrophe that is the Bush presidency, is to invite madness. Each time I read about one of the epic failures of the Bush administration, I found myself thinking “wow, this is the most important thing for Obama to fix”, before reading on to discover something else which trumped it, and so on. Fix health care? Day one! Shutting down Guantanamo? No, do that first instead! Education reform? Arrgh! It’s all so important and all so fucked! By the end I wished I’d just gazed upon the visage of Cthulhu and been done with it.
So I just hope everyone just understands the scale and scope of problems that are now piled up outside the oval office. And that everyone understands the need for a lot of shoveling just to get the door open. Let’s all — myself included — hope we have the patience to wait until our man can get to work on whatever our individual #1 priorities are.
I think a lot of us found ourselves emotionally invested in Obama during the campaign, and have had an equally emotional reaction to his victory. This is fine, but reality is descending upon us and we need to remember that he is just a man. He’s going to stumble and going to act in ways against our interests or desires. (Some of us felt that way about the FISA compromise, for instance…) At time like these it may pay to look back to the Bush days and realise that, hey, at least we don’t have that fuckhead any more. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take great comfort in that fact.
Sometimes you blog because you’ve accomplished something. Sometimes you blog because you just want to salvage something from failure. Today I’m going to do both! Yes, hardware is involved.
It’s funny really, one of my main reasons for switching to a Rails-based blogging platform way back when was to become more familiar with web technologies. As it turned out I never really did much of that, but since switching back to Wordpress I’ve been tinkering away madly, and astute observers may have noticed the results on this site.
Of course I have no real idea what I am doing. Despite having zero knowledge of PHP or JavaScript, for some reason I feel no reluctance towards sitting down at a keyboard and bashing away until I produce either Macbeth or a better website. The entire site is stored in a Bazaar repository, and that makes reverting bad changes especially easy, and I’ll attempt to blog further about that sometime.
For now let me just point out a seemingly small change to the site. The dates of the posts and comments are now displayed in a more human-friendly manner such as “3 days ago” or “20 minutes later”. This was a feature of Typo that I liked enough to port to my Mephisto theme, and which (I thought) would be fairly simple to get into Wordpress.
It wasn’t. Read on for the war story.
In the world of the manufactured consumer item, there has long been a tradition of techniques which convey an impression of underlying quality to the prospective purchaser. For example, it is never going to hurt sales if you display the words “Made in Germany” prominently on your item’s packaging. And I’ve heard that disproportionate engineering resources are typically expended on a car’s doors, in order to get just the right “clunk” to impress potential customers on the showroom floor.
Welcome to the new girtby.net site design. If you’re in an aggregator, please feel free to head on over to a browser and admire the countless hours of work that I’ve put into … stealing someone else’s site design.
For a while now I have been in awe of Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction blog, with its amazing and minimal black-and-white design. Since first discovering it I had intended to shamelessly copy it, if ever I decided to redesign my own blog.
The original plan was to follow Matt’s recommendation and customise the Sandbox wordpress theme into some reasonable facsimile of Khoi Vinh’s site, without being too noticeably similar. While casting around for other sites to steal CSS from, I came across a wordpress theme which looked to provide most of what I wanted, so I used that instead of Sandbox. Thanks to Derek Powazek for his DePo Clean theme.
My version of the theme has departed slightly (or perhaps radically, depending on your point of view) from the original. Instead of a 5-column fixed layout, I’ve gone with a mostly-fluid layout. Maybe it’s the coder in me, but it just feels wrong hard-coding magic pixel numbers into the stylesheet…
The fluid layout may turn out to be a mistake, and indeed I’m already concerned about the mismatch between the columns in the footer and those in the body. By the time you read this I may have already changed my mind, and reverted to a fixed-width layout.
One addition I am moderately proud of is the linkroll at the bottom, which is sourced directly from delicious via javascript and styled to match the theme of the site.
For the most part everything has come together nicely but I’m afraid I would be lost without the assistance of the awesome CSSEdit, which as you can see, enables a dilettante designer like me to butcher the creations of others with ease.
I have some further creative additions to the site planned, not to mention some actual content, as well. Happy 2009, folks.
This weekend I passed my proficiency test and will soon be awarded a surf lifesaving Bronze Medallion.
This means I am not only qualified to wear a red and yellow fashion statement, but also to go on patrol and rescue you when you get stung by bluebottles or caught in the rip or any of the other hazards of Australian beaches. No need to thank me, it’s all part of the job.
In order to become a surf lifesaver you have to be able to perform basic first aid and CPR, rescue people from the water using boards and rescue tubes, and have extensive beach and surf lifesaving knowledge.
Most importantly, you have to be able to swim in the surf. This was the hard part for me, because I am a pretty terrible swimmer. To pass the exam, you have to do a 200m run on the sand, followed by a 200m swim (out to sea and back again), followed by another 200m run; all in eight minutes. Needless to say, I trained quite a bit for this part.
Overall, it was quite a challenge and hugely satisfying to have passed the test.
I highly recommend getting involved in a community volunteer organisation such as a surf club. It’s a fantastic way to meet new people, and my fellow bronzies were such a great bunch. Much respect and appreciation to our instructors, whose dedication and commitment to our success was limitless. Everyone at Bronte Surf Club should be proud of them.
See you on the beach – and don’t forget to swim between the flags.
So given that the world (still) lacks a decent common export format for blog software, you might wonder how I managed to move the collection of assorted nonsense that is girtby.net from Mephisto to Wordpress.
Actually, there’s a real chance you might not wonder this. But let’s press on anyway for the sake of Google and future generations.
All the hard work was actually done by Daniel Dave Murphy over at schwuk.com who published the script and a bzr branch. Jason Morrison added MySQL support and published a diff.
I’ve made some changes of my own and published the results. You can get either:
So what sort of changes did I have to make?
Well, Dave’s script extracted the rendered HTML into the Wordpress database. This is OK but it means you can’t go back and edit old posts in their source form (in my case, Markdown format). So to use my version of the script you need to set up your content filters in Wordpress to match those in Mephisto.
There are a couple of other minor changes, specifically handling NULL as well as empty content (for whatever reason I had some of these fields in my Mephisto database), and a minor formatting problem which prevented the “Read More” links from working properly.
Anyway that’s my version of the script, and now that that’s out of the way I can get back to procrastinating about doing anything with CSS.
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