Interesting Templating Functions

Every now and then, I have cause to go through the Blogsome source code, and each time I come across what seem like interesting functions. Today, I noticed:

  • get_category_parents
  • get_category_children
  • get_linksbyname
  • get_autotoggle
  • get_lastpostdate, get_lastpostmodified
  • get_currentuserinfo
  • query_posts
  • get_cat_ID

Some of these I don’t yet know what they do, but at least three are very interesting for doing stuff I’ve been working on for a while.

Google Calendar

I’m going to start playing around with Google Calendars. My Touch Football admin team have been using Google Docs (was Writely) for collaborative documentation, and I need to reorganise my life. gCalendars look cool, and I might be able to sync with PalmOS. Hopefully both ways, although even just one way might do.

First bad thing about hosted Gmail

I’m not sure if this is a ‘feature’ of general Gmail, or only the _Gmail for Hosted Domains _variety. I had the need to send an executable file, and I had zipped it up, as there were also support files in the directory. I attempted to send it, and Gmail complained:

Sorry, ArchiveName.zip contains an executable file. Schinckel.net policy prevents sending these files, as they provide a security risk.

I had to rename it to .zip.jpg, and then resend it. I’m not an idiot. I know when a file I am sending is relatively clean (as clean as can be expected), and I am prepared to take the risk. I manage the domain, and I have never checked any box about preventing .exe files. Aargh!

The problem with stupid employees

I’ve worked in fast food. Granted, it was a long time ago, and I was only a delivery driver, but it vexes me how often orders are mucked up by these (generally) young people. What hope does our society have when the youth can’t listen properly and remember for thirty seconds what food I want. We went to KFC at Mitcham tonight, on the way home from a Training & Development session. Jaq was driving, so she ordered, and it went a little like this:

Jaq: Can I have a Zinger Bacon and Cheese Twister, in a large combo; and a second twister with cheese and no tomato please.
Stupid Drivethru Operator: Okay, so that’s one Bacon and Cheese Twister in a large combo, and a twister with cheese and no tomato.
Jaq: No, the first one was a Zinger Twiser.
SDO: Sorry, we don’t do Zinger Twisters.
Me (yelling from passenger seat): Yeah you do, I have them all of the time.
SOD: Silence.
Jaq (to me): So that’s it then? Do I drive thru?

[We decide to drive to the window. As the previous car pulls away, a hand holding a large chips comes out of the window - obviously they forgot to pack the order properly.]

New Drivethru Operator: We don’t have them as a menu item, but we can make one up for you.
Jaq: Ok, thanks.
NDO: So, that’s a Bacon and Cheese Zinger Twister combo. What drink did you want?
Jaq: There was another twister too, with cheese and no tomato.
NDO: Ok. What drink did you want then?
Jaq: Sunkist.

[Time passes. Drink is brought out. It’s a small one.]

Jaq: Um, we ordered a large meal. Were you the girl I spoke to before? Because she read that bit of the order back to me.
NDO: No. Sorry.

[NDO takes drink, and brings back a large bottle.]

NDO: There you go, and there is your meal.

[Bag is handed to us. As we begin to drive off, I notice there is a small chips in the bag. We stop. I then realise there are two small chips.]

Jaq: Excuse me, we ordered a large meal and got two small chips.
NDO: Yeah, we have run out of large chips containers.

[We drive home.]

When we arrived home, it got even worse. Initially, we thought they’d stuffed up Jaq’s order badly, by giving her tomatoes, and no cheese. But it turned out that they had just made my Zinger Twister sans Bacon and Cheese. So, I’m counting about 5 errors in our order, plus at least one in the order of the car before us. That’s pretty pathetic, KFC.

My pet hate of the day...

I’m an intolerant person, at times. I despise lazy spellers, inappropriate punctuation, and meaningless drivel (unless I wrote it). So, imagine my consternation when I perused a missive on a Whirlpool forum:

my-subi writes… > billee, > just whimmed you, pls check your inbox, ta. no probs, going there now.

Now, there’s two things wrong with this picture. The first is that billee would have been notified of the whim (WHirlpool Instant Message) upon logging in, so there is no need to post a message like this. I can let it slide, as it’s possible that billee might be checking the forums without actually logging in. However, there is no need to reply that (s)he is “going there now.” It’s probably going to take longer to type in that message and press _Send _than it is to click on the link that takes you to the whimbox (I just made that word up!) What a crazy waste of bandwidth. Writing a message saying that you have been sent a private message, and then replying that you are about to read the private message. Almost as crazy and pointless as some guy blogging about how annoying it is when people do stupid, pointless things.

Back from Perth

Well, I’ve been in Perth for the last week, for this year’s School Sport Australia National Touch Football Championships. I’m a bit tired to do a proper write-up of what went on, and how we went, but I may do it later. In short, we beat Victoria twice, 4-1 each time, and lost to every other team. The girls played okay, but I still felt they played a bit below their best. I was pretty disappointed with a couple of the games, but generally had a pretty good time.

Show more of first post

I’ve had a good idea for a way to simplify the front page of a blog: have the newest post displayed in it’s full glory, but have other posts only have an excerpt. Actually, what I might do is make it so that is uses JavaScript, and only the post headers of other posts are shown, but clicking on the title displays the whole text…

Let Your Soul Be Your PilotSting & The PoliceThe Very Best Of Sting & The Police

iTunes Berkeley

University of California (Berkeley) now has a whole lot of lectures available as downloadable audio. You can get Podcasts of them, or get them via the [iTunes Music Store, Berkeley edition][1]. I’m not getting them as Podcasts, since the ones on iTunesU are already pre-tagged, and the courses I’m getting are not currently running, so I don’t need to automatically get new ones. The only tagging fault I’ve found is that they are missing: Remember playback position Skip when shuffling Which I think are important for this type of thing. I’ve also noticed some Podcast/downloads via iTunes can be paused and resumed, unfortunately, these ones can’t. Finally, a neat point is that it automatically creates a new Playlist, and a new Playlist Folder.

[Snow][2] • [Alex Lloyd][3] • [Black The Sun][4] ★★★

[1]: javascript:openWindow(‘https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/berkeley.edu’,’_blank’,400,250,0); [2]: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=Snow&artistTerm=Alex+Lloyd [3]: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=Alex+Lloyd [4]: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?albumTerm=Black+The+Sun&artistTerm=Alex+Lloyd

Don't Archive Compressed Files

I recently had cause to download something via bit-torrent: it’s immaterial if the something was legal or not, but I did notice, sometime after starting the 710Mb download, that the torrent had a series of files inside of it:

filename.nfo filename.part01.rar filename.part02.rar … filename.part51.rar filename.sfv

Thankfully, The Unarchiver.app was able to decompress this multi-part RAR archive. However, the file that was created, filename.ext, was 700.2Mb. That’s right, the compressed version of the file was larger than the original. There really is no need to do something silly like compress MP3, AAC, AVI or other already compressed media files. If the compression scheme that was used to create the file from uncompressed data (i.e., WAV audio file, .DV movie) is worth it’s salt, it will already be much smaller than the same file compressed using RAR, ZIP or whatever. Files that are compressed are reduced using an algorithm that looks for patterns in the data, and replaces duplicates with an alternative. Data that has already been compressed will be effectively random, as any duplicate patterns will already have been removed. Thus, you are wasting CPU time in compressing the files further, and in fact, in many cases, will end up with files that are larger. This is due to the inherent overheads in compressed archives. So, whoever created that .torrent, you wasted a bit of my time, and everyone who has read this since…

Make It Easy On YourselfThe Walker BrothersThe Love Songs Of Burt Bacharach ★★

Credit where it's due, not everywhere.

I converted this theme, Connections, to the Blogsome format. I also put a credit to myself (and another to the original theme author) into the template file. I noticed today a whole heap of new links to me via technorati. It turns out that lots of people have put this theme into their blogs, and left the credit as it is down the bottom:

Blogsome conversion and all content © Matt Schinckel, unless otherwise indicated.

I’ve changed that, so it now says:

Blogsome conversion © Matt Schinckel, content © {authors} unless otherwise indicated.

I’d love people to update their template - it makes me feel bad, taking all that credit for the content. In my template it has a bit more code, that automatically puts all of the blog’s authors in as links. The more automation the better, I always say. Also, if you use Connections, you don’t need to keep the chinese characters, they say “Tiger Paint” (or something similar). You can put whatever you want in there.