Jackson Browne, Van Halen, Mike Meyers, and Heart have all asked McCain to stop using their material. Perhaps this will motivate Republicans to support sane copyright laws and Creative Commons licenses. Or not.
The Daily Show doing what they do best:
Was planning on watching the RNC, but my stomach's not up to it. I think just reading the transcript later would be wise. #
“Murdoch is strongly, if not firmly, in the Obama camp. How that plays out on Fox is another question,” Wolff said yesterday. “He actually has relatively little ability to affect what’s on Fox, assuming he doesn’t want to fire Roger Ailes, which I don’t think he does. But I do think he would prefer him to be a little less unreconstructed.”
The opinion-led US news network became intrinsically linked with the Bush administration and its key pundits have enthusiastically backed John McCain.
In the article, to be published on Friday, Wolff says Murdoch, partly due to the influence of his third wife Wendi, is “becoming a liberal - sort of”.
“Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed - he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about [Fox pundit] Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up - because the money is the money; success trumps all - in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”
A day at the zoo. No, i'm not going to St. Paul. I mean the actual MN Zoo. #
“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a `community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”
I thought Republicans were the ones who praised non-governmental action over official state action?
Gonna have to watch last night's Daily Show on hulu later. Apparently half our department was there. #
Congratulations, Google. You've made me curious enough about Chrome that I'm actually using Windows (in Parallels, by choice!) this morning. #
CushyCMS from Duncan Riley on Vimeo.
This is so cool, and it solves a real problem for websites: making it really, really easy for people to update the content. The alternative up until now was to use a wiki or blog, but for basic editing of a simple website by non-technical users…that really doesn’t work so well.
Posthaste WP Plugin
When reworking the theme for this blog, I decided I wanted to add the Twitter-style quick post box from the Prologue theme to my theme. Instead of adding it directly to my theme though, I decided to try to write it as a plugin. Lo and behold, I succeeded:
I don’t know why—it’s not that much work to use the WP admin backend—but this seems to make blogging seem much more inviting to me. I basically just took the relevant code from the Prologue theme, modified it a bit (adding a “Title:” field, for example) and found the correct WP hooks to put it in Plugin form.
I’m actually thinking about releasing it as a real plugin. When I mentioned this to my friend James, he recommended the name “Posthaste.” James is much better at naming things than me, so I took his recommendation.
If this sounds interesting to you, you can download it and try it out. If it seems useful to other people & actually works well enough, I may submit it to the WP plugin directory. I tested it with a handful of the most popular themes on the WordPress Theme Directory and it seemed to work with them all.
A few notes:
- If you leave the “Title:” field blank, it takes the first 40 characters of the post content & makes that the title.
- It posts to your default category…unless
- If you have a category named ‘asides’, it will put posts with empty titles in the ‘asides’ category. You can then style them as asides, which is what I do on this blog.
- If you want to change any of this behavior, there’s no options page or anything: you’ve got to edit the php file.
- It only has the most basic CSS applied. To customize it, you can add custom CSS to the ‘styles/local.css‘ file.
- Your theme needs to use wp_head() for it to work. If you’re using a new theme at all, it probably does.
- There’s an ongoing problem with Prologue in WP 2.6. I fixed it, I think, by changing the auth_redirect() code. If you know more than me about these matters, and my “fixing it” this way was a bad idea, please let me know. (This was supposedly fixed in Prologue 1.4.1, but I’m still having the same problem.)
unix as literature
"The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with
text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX
played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense,
literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots,
liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn't
seem so mysterious, and pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world
increasingly dominated by image culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX
remains rooted in the culture of the word."
Getting Real About Palin | Talking Points Memo
"There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired him. She first denied Monegan's claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened."
Via @eszter: weather updates via twitter: http://accuweather.com/twitter. Very handy! #
IE8 is The Homer
The Tech Report reviews IE8 and finds the promised standards-compliant rendering engine underwhelming:
Look at Safari and Firefox, the two most popular browsers after IE. What do they have in common? Both deliver reliable browsing experiences with great rendering accuracy, great standards compliance, and a minimal amount of fluff.
[...]
Rather than make a great rendering engine first and slowly add new browser features on top of that, the IE team seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of time and effort on new functionality. What’s worse, those features add a kind of visual noise that makes IE8 feel like an incoherent mashup of buttons, menu items, and icons. If it had an automotive equivalent, it’d probably be “The Homer” from the Simpsons:
That is a perfect analogy for what IE7 feels like to me. (Haven’t used the IE8 Beta yet.) Actually, it pretty much works for Windows generally, too.
Survey: IT staff would steal secrets if laid off, 1/3 “snoop around” already
"According to identity management firm Cyber-Ark's annual 'Trust, Security & Passwords' survey, a whopping 88% of IT administrators would steal CEO passwords, customer database, research and development plans, financial reports, M&A plans and the company's list of privileged passwords if they were suddenly laid off. The survey also found that one third of IT staff admitted to snooping around the network, looking at highly confidential information, such as salary details and people's personal emails." (via slashdot)
Sexist response to selection of Palin | Media Matters
"On CNN, John Roberts raised the question of whether as vice president, Palin would be able to devote the time necessary to care for her baby with Down syndrome, and on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd suggested that Sen. Joe Biden bears the burden of having to adjust his behavior in a vice-presidential debate because of Palin's sex."
The 2nd floor balcony in the new Carlson building, esp. with the weather today, is wonderful. The Socsci building needs a balcony. Riiight. #
U of M folks: the U's rolling out a new wifi network but so far has not advertised the instructions very well: http://tinyurl.com/um-wpa2 #
Damn, I was so wanting to see Biden tear Pawlenty apart in the VP debate. #
WP Batch Categories Plugin | Roblog
"This WordPress plugin lets you batch edit your posts: assign multiple posts to a category or delete multiple posts from a category in one fell swoop." Used this to clean up my categories, which were a total mess. This capability really should be built-in to WP.
Good way to start an argument: Is "Greatest Country in the World!" like "Greatest Dad in the World!" or is it an empirical claim? #
Featured Firefox Extension: Ubiquity Prototype Offers a Natural Language Web Command Line
"Firefox only: Mozilla Labs unveils the first prototype of a natural language web service connector called Ubiquity, a Firefox extension that adds a command panel to any web page. Ubiquity will look familiar to Quicksilver, Launchy, or Enso users: you invoke Ubiquity with a key combination and the text field drops down command suggestions as you type."
