Schinckel.net

I’m surprised I’ve never come across this before. There is a town in Germany, about 200km from Hanover, called Schinkel. (Note the missing ‘c’) It’s just out of Osnabrück (less than 4km), and quite near the Hotel Westerkamp, and there seems to be a significant cemetary right nearby. Oh, hang on a bit, there’s also a Schinkel in Schleswig-Holstein, about 50km North-West of Hamburg. And another one, just a short hop across the river, in Land Niedersachsen. Finally, there’s also Schinkel-über-Kiel, right up on the northern edge of Germany. Just over Kiel, incidentally. As an aside, I found the following:

What does the Schinkel name mean? German (mainly North German) and Dutch: variant of Schenkel What does the Schenkel name mean? Last Name: Schenkel German, Dutch, and Jewish (Ashkenazic): nickname for someone with long or otherwise notable legs, from Middle High German schenkel, Middle Dutch schenkel, schinkel ‘thigh’, ‘lower leg’, German Schenkel ‘thigh’.

The irony is I have short legs…

I found an old entry on Peter B’s site about making text entry areas resizable, and thought I might implement it on my site. It’s not working yet, but this is more of a reminder for me to do it…

It’s nearly time for me to reconsider my DNS Registration - I went with a $9.95 Dreamhost annual price, under the belief it was $9.95/year for life, but this was only for one year. I don’t use any of the hosting features, just DNS registration, address forwarding and mail forwarding. I’m looking for a cheap registrar who offers these things. Anyone know of any DNS Registrars that are cheap and good?

My two favourite static optical illusions. The first one just makes my eyes hurt! This second one is less painful, but wiggs you out a little none the less.

I borrowed Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X from the library the other day. I’ve read most of it, away from the computer, although I plan to reread it in front of the iMac over the next few weeks. I’ll write a review of it a bit later, but it reminded me that I still have a memory leak in iTunesRater. Also, I think I’ll rewrite iTunesRater as a Cocoa Objective-C application, rather than AppleScript Studio. Then I can just use an AppleScript message to get/send data, rather than relying on AppleScript for interface updates. That way the application may be a bit snappier. And hopefully I’ll overcome the memory leak. I was actually thinking of a refactor anyway, as there’s a whole heap of semi-duplicated code in there.

Creative Commons licenses are great - from a reader’s point of view, they’ve allowed people to publish, and me to read a whole variety of stories I might never have otherwise come across. Cory Doctorow is one example - he writes daily for Boing Boing, but has also written a whole heap of short stories, many of which I have on my Zire, and I read one every now and then. I really enjoyed Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In fact, I managed to throw the term Whuffie into a comment the other day. Anyway, I came across this tonight: a short story by Charles Stross. Loving it, so far.

I really like Camino. It’s pretty much like FireFox, but with a more Mac feel. However, with the latest feel, I’ve noticed the occasional lockup. I get the spinning beachball of death, and no response. I haven’t found out what’s causing it, whether it’s a particular site or otherwise… Update: A second issue - not sure if it’s a new one. If you have a File Selector open, and a currently loading page decides to ask for a cookie, and you have the setting of “Ask before accepting each cookie”, then you won’t be able to dismiss either object, and will have to force quit. This has caused me to rethink my idea of Asking before accepting cookies.

I’ve noticed a whole heap of blogs that use the “X hours after the fact” tagline as part of the comment. I’ve tried to implement this under Blogsome, but I’m struggling. I know I need to use the following: { comment_date } and { the_date } The problems I have encountered - Smarty doesn’t seem to like subtracting values that are dates, and I can’t seem to get them as numbers… Anyone done this?

RegularJen has a post about funny personal ads: it reminded me of this joke. (Before I start, some background. Elizabeth is a ‘satellite city’ of Adelaide, Australia; and it is known for having a high number of unemployed residents. It can easily be replaced by whatever town/city/locality you want to bag.)

The Joke: A welfare auditor noticed an anomaly in the benefits being claimed by a particular Elizabeth single mother: she was claiming child payments for 19 children. he thought he’d better go and visit her - 19 isn’t a totally unbelieveable number of children for one mother to have, but seems pretty high. So, he visits her house, and talks to her.

“I’m sorry, but I really need to see all 19 children, and proof that they are yours.”

“Yep. No worries. I’ll jeest git them in ‘ere.”

She then proceeded to stick her head out the back door, and at the top of her voice yelled out: “Waayne! Geet in here!!!” (Wayne can be said with a very thick ‘Ocker’ Australian Accent.)

A whole bunch of boys of varying ages then began filing into the house. Confused, the inspector asked “So, if they are all called Wayne, how do you tell them apart?”

“Oh, they’ve all got different surnames!”

Lists are useful in Template design - for instance, the Navigation links at the top of this blog are done with links, and CSS to position them, and remove the bullets, and so on. The code that handles it:

    #topnav 
    {
    	list-style:none;
    	font-size:0.9em;
    	margin:0 auto;	
    	padding:12px 20px 0 0;
    	text-align:right;	
    	font-family:Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
    }
    #topnav li 
    {
    	list-style:none;
    	display:inline;
    	padding:0;
    	margin:0;
    	font-weight:bold;
    }

The important bits are the list-style:none;, text-align:right; and display:inline; clauses. They remove bullets, place the text on the right, and make them appear on the same line. What I’d really like to be able to do is have the CSS put in the ‘pipe’ symbol (|) automatically. That is, all the template user needs to do is put a list item in, and it puts | between each item. This doesn’t seem to be possible with CSS, or at least, I can’t figure out how to do it.