Monthly Archive for April, 2007

A WordPress fix for broken curly quotes in Magpie RSS titles

Published
by
Brent
on April 25, 2007
in development, geeky, meta, tips and tools of my trade
. 0 Comments

Over on my FatLab Music homepage, I list the five most recent blog entries from our blog, Roll Over. WordPress makes this very simple with the wp_rss() function, available on any page in your site by including path_to_blog/wp-includes/rss.php. But I also wanted to parse an iPhoto photocast feed for some Lightbox JS magic. Since wp_rss() only pulls from your local blog, I installed a copy of Magpie RSS, the codebase WordPress uses for wp_rss(), independent of my blog install. In addition, because wp_rss() is actually a wrapper for Magpie RSS, you get a PHP error when Magpie’s rss_fetch.inc attempts to redeclare functions already declared in WordPress’s rss.php on the same page.

So now, I have achieved both my last five Roll Over posts and the Frankie Photocast — loaded (and cached!) by the stand-alone install of Magpie, not by WordPress.

Unfortunately, WordPress does this fancy quotes thing, converting straight quotes (") into curly quotes (“ and ”), among an array of other characters. Magpie RSS completely horked on the non-standard-ASCII quotes and output weird substitutions in their place. I didn’t end up finding the final cause, but I suspect either Magpie just can’t handle the extended character set (doubtful), or there was an encoding mismatch along the way (more likely).

I learned from this article that wptexturize() in wp-includes/formatting.php does the fancy quote translation, and the article goes on to show the line of code to comment out which disables this feature.

Rather than edit the WP codebase (which I see has been updated again) and have to remember which files to repatch with each update, I found the Unfancy Quote Plugin from Semilogic. Download, install, and enable and you’re good! Feeds and everything get passed thru this plugin and fancy quotes are un-curlied back to feed-friendly straight quotes.

Stop Calling It A Nor’easter

Published
by
Brent
on April 20, 2007
in rants
. 0 Comments

It must have been all over ‘e world news, because wha’ever happens in New York City happens to ‘e world. See, we got seven inches of rain in one day. Lots of flooding, pretty serious. But I had to turn off ‘e TV cuz ‘e newscasters were falling all over ‘emselves to say “nor’easter” all ‘e time.

I’m from Minnesota, so ‘is New England drawl some folks have can be a bit much sometimes (like Minn-ee-soooo-tans are ones to talk). But c’mon, “nor’easter”? Yeah, it’s a big low pressure system ‘at parks itself off ‘e Atlantic coast and churns rain from ‘e nor’east all over ‘e upper nor’east of ‘e country. But WHO says “nor’east” ever?

Unless ye tell someone to “drive nor’east a bit, ‘en turn left”, ye shouldn’t call ‘e storm a “nor’easter”.

Google news confirms ‘is horrible epidemic. Over a ‘ree day period starting April 15 2007 (’e day of ‘e Great Spring Nor’easter of 2007 as wikifolks are calling it), 6000+ references were made to Nor’easter while a measly 120 used ‘e more complicated yet sensible Northeaster. Local New York channel CW11 actually went as far as posting a screen graphic saying “APRIL NOR ‘EASTER”, as if it was neither April nor Easter, and ‘EASTER was abbreviated from something far too complicated to spell out.

Seems I’m not alone in my disdain for ‘is rampant appropriation of salty-dog-speak:

For decades, Edgar Comee, of Brunswick, Maine, waged a determined battle against use of ‘e term “nor’easter” by ‘e press, which usage he considered “a pretentious and altogether lamentable affectation” and “the odious, even loathsome, practice of landlubbers who would be seen as salty as the sea itself.” –wikipedia.com

I’m not a sailor. I doubt (m)any of ‘e newscasters are ei’er. I didn’t just get back from ‘e Sou’ By Sou’west Film Festival. No, I went to ‘e SouTH by SouTHwest.

TH is a phoneme peculiar to only a few world languages. It should be treasured, not apostrophized. All you landlubbers, c’mon now: norTHeaster, norTHeaster.

‘ank you.

Perceivable progress

Published
by
Brent
on April 14, 2007
in organization and todo
. 0 Comments

I actively use 4 macs in my day-to-day business.

I just can’t get rid of one if it’s still chugging away, so I repurpose it as a file server or an email terminal. My mac family now spans three processor generations, ergo I have varying degrees of performance as I move from machine to machine.

Naturally, I find myself not using my oldest computer (a first-gen 17″ G4 PowerBook) too often for even the most basic of computing tasks. This makes me wonder:

  • Has Apple purged G4 optimizations as Tiger has evolved? (My Dual G5 still seems to run great.)
  • Is 10.4 getting so fat that it’s bogging down my 1GHz old-skool machine?
  • Is it simply because my other three computers are at least 4x faster in MHz alone, not to mention two of them being Intel Core Duos?

Naturally it’s going to be at least the last two. (TODO: I should do some performance testing see if each subsequent 10.4.x update causes any measurable degradation in performance.)

But to shamelessly make this a life lesson (feels like church: “And in the same way, God…”), I realized that I work better when I can feel myself making progress. If it takes what is probably only 5 seconds extra to check my email, I won’t do it. Every little second delay adds up, and I feel like I’m going nowhere. I’ll go to another system to accomplish the same task, but I can *feel* it working.

I’m not sure that feeling my progress counts as “motivation”, but it eliminates a huge mental obstacle that makes working just that much harder some days. It really doesn’t matter how far down a deep and dark tunnel the finish line for a project is, as long as I can tell I’ll eventually get there.

Now work that in to a software package.

motivation

Published
by
Ben
on April 12, 2007
in development, geeky and organization
. 0 Comments

Things that motivate me: (ie how do i get work done)

  • externally imposed deadlines if someone else needs something done, and i have agreed to do it, then i have no trouble in getting right to it.
  • boredom this is a weak motivator, but will sometimes result in work being acomplished
  • money this is along the same lines as the external deadline, usually when money is involved, there is also a deadline, but not always. However, the monetary value implies a responsibility, and so i have no trouble getting the work done
  • lists once i commit a task to paper, i find it will nag at the back of my mind until i address it. the problem is getting the tasks into a list.
  • spite doesn’t last long, but i have a fairly well developed spite muscle, and it will often result in some intense motivation. Self-motivation often falls into this category.

So the question is: how do i motivate myself when none of the above are present. (like, say when i am working on furthering my own agenda, build my own business) Well, that is the question. I read a book once, about artists (not that i think i am an artist). And there was a quote that i am going to paraphrase because i dont remember the exact words, nor the exact book, but it was something like: “Artists create art when the fear of creating is overcome by the fear of not creating”.

Anyhow, since i am trying to write a software package that will motivate me to get work done, i have been thinking recently a great deal about motivation. Any bit of software that is supposed to help is really an extension of the ‘lists’ motivator above. Any deadlines that might be implied by an organiziation sceme imposed by software are really external deadlines that you are simply listing out. I think that one of the reasons personal organization software is not very effective is because it encapsulates a weak motivator.

in my opinion, the strongest motivator in my list is the external deadline. If one of my clients call me and says they need their software fixed/patched because of some reason, whether it is an emergency or simply an idle request, i am powerfully motivated to complete that task.

So how, then, do we build a software package that instills in us the same powerful motivation? that is the question…

the tools of my trade

Published
by
Ben
on April 2, 2007
in geeky, reviews and tools of my trade
. 0 Comments

adding onto brent’s tools of the trade entry below, i thought i would do one of my own. Of course for me, i could do three or four very different ‘trades’ depending on my mood. wait is this tools of my independent film making trade? or tools of my feature film aerial camera trade? or tools of my small software trade? (maybe photography?) anyway… i think i already listed a whole slew of stuff for the indie film makers with my handy list entry below. So today, i am going to talk about one of the most important toosl of my trade(s): my chair.

I love my chair. I have an Aeron from Herman Miller. (i have had 2 of these chairs now, the first i bought nearly 6 years ago. It worked flawlessly for me up until i moved to Australia, at which point it failed me greatly by weighing too much and being too big to mail overseas for a decent price, so i bought another one upon my arrival) Some might fall out of their (non-aeron) chairs when they learn that my chair, my measly office chair cost me nearly 1500AU$. (these are usually the same people who own a $2000 barbecue, or a $5000 television) Anyhow, the Aeron is a great chair. If you spend any amount of time in the sitting position, you should seriously consider getting one of these chairs. My back has never been better since I started sitting in a good chair. (everything else matters too, you have to have the desk at the right height and a good keyboard/mouse setup etc.. but the chair is so very important) I am constantly amazed at people who will spend $30,000 on a car, which they might spend at most 2 hours a day sitting in (unless you live in LA) yet will scoff at spending $1500 on a chair that you spend 8 or more hours a day sitting in. This is especially important if you work for yourself, and work from home. It is a tax writeoff, and you will save money in chiro

So my conclusion: if you spend more than 2 hours a day sitting in front of a desk, you should think about spending some money on a chair that doesn’t mess up your back. I really recommend the Aeron. Go and sit in one at a Herman Miller store. Spend some time with it, make sure you have the right size chair, and make sure you adjust all the adjustments. I swear, you will never go back to a crappy chair again.