Chris Barna's Weblog Politics, Culture, Occasional Musings on Life.

Sorry for not updating lately. I embarked on a quest to find a better weblogging tool / content management system, but failed horribly. The only one that actually looked decent was Expression Engine, but it costs money and I could just as easily code my own for free. As a matter of fact, I tried to write my own. That failed horribly, just as the search for one did.

So I am stuck with this… A new template that is in the works. I’ve been working on it for the last week. “Archive” and “Search” templates are in the works now, along with some more work with the styles. So anyways, I’ll catch up later, if ever.

It seems that Apple has filed for a patent, for a pretty interesting feature, possibly for “Tiger”. The way I understand it is that, you have a window. That window goes unchanged for a certain amount of time and it becomes semi-transparent. If you leave it that way for even longer, it becomes more translucent. Once it gets to a certain point, a click on that area of the screen is considered an action on the windows underlying the translucent one. Pretty cool, but I can’t seem to find a practical use for it. Maybe somebody could help me?

Update: Sorry about the link, I have no idea how that got in there, thanks ecto .

Now that Movable Type has gone into 3.0D (at the time of this publishing), they have also updated their terms of service, as anybody who has updated should know. Also, you may have noticed the following statement under the sidebar box titled “Movable Type Free” on http://secure.sixapart.com :

No more than one author and three weblogs

I’m sorry to say it but these eight words will lead to the downfall of Movable Type. Many developers, authors, and just plain old bloggers have long enjoyed this great, once free product. Currently, I only have one blog running, but I have been planning to turn my root directory into a Movable Type powered system.

Many bloggers have switched to Drupal, blogger, WordPress, or even their own home grown content management system. I really admire what Mark Pilgrim did ford WordPress. It won’t matter for the developers in the long run, but the purpose was a very admirable one. Instead of paying the ~$535 it would cost for him to buy all his Movable Type licenses, he donated it, which is bound to piss of at least one person at Six Apart, and it has let a lot of people know about the fine product.

Then comes to the problem, since everybody is writing their own blogging system, why don’t they collaborate and take back the blogging community. We could keep it free, and even release it under an open source license.

Currently, I’m semi-working on a CMS in PHP with the basic features, I still haven’t thought of a design for the admin panel. I will hopefully release the source code under an open source license and everybody will be able to work on it.

What the heck? What are we coming to? This post is an outrage! I feel that Michael Powell may go wherever the heck he wishes to go to switch phone carriers. No average person would care, and frankly I don’t think abnormal people should care about that sort of thing either. The article was about how many people have switched carriers, the point was not that the FCC Chairman went to Circuit City.

Yay, I’m going camping this weekend, how could it get any better. I mean, the thing is like a competition, except worse, one event you have to “Build a raft” and navigate across a “swamp” with it, could it get any more retarded. I may be a little biased because I have done this competition many times before, and I think it sucks. Well, I’ll have to make the best out of it, so I’ll try to have fun.

Wow, Movable Type was in beta for a whole, 2-3 weeks before the “Developer” edition was released. Now I have nothing to say that I’m better than everybody else. To make it worse, you have to be 18 to enter the plugin contest. I think I’ll go sob in a corner until June 18. The upside of this is, there will be a lot more support for movable type 3. I won’t have to specifically find one person to help me, there will be a lot of sites that have the same problems that I have had (hopefully).

I think I’ll develop a plugin despite the fact that I get nothing out of it. Hey, it would be pretty interesting. Not quite sure what I would do it on, but I have a lot of time at school to figure out.

I still haven’t edited the style, I was planning to do it last night, but I got home to find out that I deleted an iTunes Music Store gift certificate off my linux box, and then reformatted the linux box, not realizing I deleted it until I got home last night, to my iBook. I was so pissed and I couldn’t do anything, except play games.

Yeah, I installed Debian, I guess it took me long enough, but I didn’t do it all straight in a row. I still have tons of stuff to upgrade and reconfigure. It’s kind of annoying really,the ’stable’ packages are way out of date, but nobody will admit it. Right now I’m working on upgrading to the ‘testing’ packages. Thanks Justin for helping with my “newbie” questions.

Well, I’m back from Disneyland. I’m pretty happy, and tired. Happy because it is the “Happiest Place on Earth”, and tired because, hell, I’ve been walking around for 6 hours. I got out early though, we left around 2:30, and the park is open until like 10 or 11PM. I got to go on all the rides I wanted to go on, and even some more that I didn’t expect to go on. Surprisingly, there weren’t very many people there. The lines weren’t nearly as long as I expected them to be, probably then longest wait I had was for the Matterhorn, and that was only about 15 minutes. Nothing was really happening for Mother’s Day though, they basically gave out flowers and everybody said “Happy Mother’s Day.”

I had never been on Splash Mountain before, it was kind of strange. You have this really happy ride, “Zip-a-dee Doo Da.” Then, boom, there is a huge waterfall that you go falling down. I don’t get it! It was an awesome ride though, well worth it.

I had also never been on Tom Sawyer’s Island, or rather, I had not been on it in many years. What a cool place? I mean, it’s an island with tons of little caves and “forts” that you could explore. I spent a good 20-30 minutes just exploring it and still found new caves or places to climb up. I know this sounds a little immature but what am I supposed to do at Disneyland. The one thing I have to complain about is the bell. It’s not a good idea to give a bunch of small children access to a string that rings a very loud bell.

There was also a new ride, about Winnie the Pooh. It was one of the better story rides, but this is coming from a person who can’t get over the little bear.

I also went through the usual routine, Matterhorn, Mr. Toad, Indiana Jones, Jungle Cruise, et al. The imagineering place was really cool, all the games and my Mom road a Segway. Oh yeah, and there was a cool show with Abe Lincoln. It was so realistic, I can’t even explain it. Just the average trip to Disneyland, I’d say, but it was Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day all!

Well, it’s Mothers Day weekend, again. Everybody loves mothers, and in the spirit of that, I’m going to Disneyland with my family. I’m going up to stay with my aunt and uncle tonight (they only live 30 minutes away), and then we’ll get up early tomorrow, drive, and expect to get there around the time it opens. It’s cool, I’m also going to go again on June 2nd (a Thursday). I’m skipping school that day to go up there with the band, we’ll play music along with cartoons and the rest of the day is free.

As of now, I don’t have a real Mother’s Day present for my mom. I don’t have any money, except for lunch money, and I’m usually pretty hungry by lunch because I don’t normally eat breakfast.

I have recently had this slight obsession with http://www.technorati.com, and as of late, I have realized that nobody links to me. Sure, I get a couple things from other people that use technorati, when I link to them, but that’s it. I don’t think its that people don’t read my blog (even though it may be that), it’s just, people don’t read my blog very often, and when they do, it’s not like the blog as a whole, it’s just a few posts. So, to solve my problem, I have created the “Recent Links” on the sidebar, it links anybody that has linked me. Actually, this won’t solve anything, it’ll just make more links, but at least I can track who posts about me, and where they are, but hey, if you link me, you get linked back, it’s a win-win sittuation.

Idling in IRC. Decided to try one of these little “Q&A” things that you see so much on blogs. I got this one from Sean Bonner. Read more

I got my email for Movable Type 3 beta today. It’s a pretty nice improvement, with all the UI changes and stuff. I haven’t messed with it much, I intend to add typekey to the commenting. I’m also thinking about just tweaking the default template’s style, and keeping the original template. I like it, well, I will once I change it.

Update: As far as I know, TypeKey doesn’t work, yet, with my blog. If you figure out otherwise, please feel free to tell me. I will try to fix it later.

Okay, so if you’re like me, you probably have gmail. You may have tried Firefox 0.8 on Linux only to find that you can’t read your mail. Ahh, what will you do? Well, not a problem. You probably installed Firefox via yum or apt-get and for some reason gmail doesn’t work with it. The answer is simple, install Firefox from mozilla.org. If you follow these instructions, it’ll be so easy.

1. Surf on over to mozilla.org and figure out what the latest version of Mozilla Firebird is. In my case it’s 0.8 and the link is http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
2. In command line, enter wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz, or just download it from your browser
3. When it’s done, enter tar -xzvf firefox-0.8-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz.
4. Switch to root and mv firefox/ /usr/lib
5. ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

This should fix all your problems. I did it a few days ago, but I may have some typos in the howto. Please feel free to comment with any problems you have.

I was watching “Jimmy Neutron” with my little brother this morning and I noticed something very strange. It was the one where Jimmy creates the candy that makes everybody worship him and beg him for it. In the beginning, Jimmy is testing his friend’s memory. There are two scenes of him in a small room with a microphone. Between him and the microphone was a small hammer and sickle on a red background. I know it wasn’t a mistake because it is in both scenes.

What does this say about children’s cartoon makers? Maybe it’s just a bunch of nerds having fun, but why would they put it in a kid’s television show. It’s just like fluoridation. I wasn’t alive during the communism scares but I’ve seen “Dr. Strangelove”, and I know what it was, and I bet they’re trying to do the same thing.

Yeah, you know I was just kidding for the last paragraph, but it is still really strange that somebody would do something like that.

Update: Could it be because of May Day?