Author Archives: David

If Aragorn had been a project leader…

… his speech at the black gate of Mordor might have gone something like this …

Hold your code! Hold your code.

Sons of iSeries, of AS400, my brothers, I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

A day may come when the logic of programmers fails,
when we forsake our debuggers
and break all links of procedures,
but it is not this day.

A nano-second of microsoft and shattered firewalls,
when the age of midrange comes crashing down,
but it is not this day.

This day we program!

For all that you hold dear on this good system,
I bid you stand, programmers of the net!!

Yeah, I’m weird like that.

Watch what you say on AIM

In todays climate of privacy mania, I find it quite interesting that AOL would change their terms of service to eliminate any possiblity of a right to privacy when using their AIM chat service …

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

(empahsis mine)

I tend to chat a lot on the AIM network (using GAIM, and there’s no way I want to explicitly give AOL the right to the contents of my chats. Not that I discuss anything earth shattering, but some conversations are on the more private side.

An option, of course, would be to use the GAIM encryption plugin.

Thrashing Through Cyberspace via Mike Wills.

New and used Ahi Tuna?

Oh man, this had me on the floor laughing …

I was kicking through my blog posts just checking out what ad’s Google’s AdSense program would serve and this ad showed up…

I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know what it would link to … but I clicked on it anyway. As it happens, it took me to eBay … no used tuna though 🙂

Correctly numbered outlines

For the longest time I was looking for a way to make nested ordered lists in HTML show up correctly.

Usually, when you do an ordered list, you get something like this …

  1. Item 1
    1. Item 1.1
    2. Item 1.2
      1. Item 1.2.1
      2. Item 1.2.2

… which really annoyed me, because you couldn’t have meaningful identifiers on the nested lists.

A few days ago I found a bit of CSS that would correct this…

<style>
<!--
OL        { list-style-type: decimal  }  /* 1 2 3 4 5 etc. */
OL OL     { list-style-type: lower-alpha}      /* a b c d e etc. */
OL OL OL  { list-style-type: lower-roman }  /* i ii iii iv v etc. */-->
-->
</style>

Now the same list will show up with the first level list using numbers, the 2nd level list using lowercase alpha, and the 3rd level lower case roman numbers.

Something like this…

  1. Item 1
    1. Item 1.1
    2. Item 1.2
      1. Item 1.2.1
      2. Item 1.2.2

Which is pretty cool, imho.

Blogtimes

If you check the bottom of this page, you SHOULD be able to see a graphical representation of recent posting.

Not very exciting, but could be interesting.

Ok, sometimes I am so dumb

Ryan told me that my blogs (both this one and IMHO) were not displaying properly when viewed with Internet Explorer. Every time they visited a page, IE wanted to download the page instead of displaying it.

I had just made some tweaks to the web server, so I figured I had screwed something up.

I searched and searched, but couldn’t figure out what I had broken.

I decided the best way to figure out the problem would be to sniff the line with an ethernet sniffer program to see what was actually being sent down the wire.

When I did, I noticed the http ‘content-type’ header was blank.

Turns out the WordPress configuration option that contains the content-type value was empty. I had neglected to run the upgrade script on the WordPress database when I finished the upgrade to version 1.5!

Oopsie.

After I ran the upgrade script, the pages displayed fine in IE.

Bill Gates to be Knighted

Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates will be awarded an honorary knighthood by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth Wednesday for his outstanding contribution to enterprise.

Reuters.com

This is very disturbing. And I usually hold the british in high regard. This turn of events lowers them a notch or two (Sorry Martin).

geekyramblings.org

I registered the ‘geekyramblings.org’ domain today … no major reason. It was available, it was cheap, so I grabbed it.

For now it simply redirects you to david.fallingrock.net … not sure if I’ll do anything else with it.