Moving Sucks

I’ve moved house in the last week, to somewhere a little further out from the city and work, but close to 40% cheaper.

I’ve had the toilet blocked, possums in the roof and noisy neighbours to deal with so far.

I’ve still got a lot to do before I feel comfortable here, lots of organizing, hanging of blinds and curtains (heck, I’ve still got to make the curtains), lots of cleaning to do, and fifty little things that I’m used to having setup.

My home PC didn’t like the trip too well, and only just started working again.

Starsky & Hutch

First of all, I’ve never seen the TV show.

It did have it’s moments (donut offering to a dead cop being one of them) but to me it felt pretty flat.

two out of ten.

absolute plugin

I’ve installed the absolute plugin to fix the problems I’ve had with relative links, relative links to targets outside the blog now get prepended with the proper base URL, and not the path to the entry; links are the same whether they are viewed from the top index or from their fully pathed entry.

D1 Parser

The folks at D1 make commercial myth boxes, they’ve got program data up that I wrote a tv_grab_d1 script for use with myth.

I’m gonna wash that XSLT right outa my hair..

No more <PRE>

Another little annoyance of my blog has been the fact that the entries don’t get wrapped as expected, you’d get this annoying horizontal scrollbar and be forced to scroll right to read the entry. Turns out it was the PRE element screwing things up; I’ve replaced them with CODE and BR elements.

Thanks to Greg for pointing out the culprit.

Iron Chef meets the Blogosphere meets the U.S. Presidential race

Iron Chef + Blogosphere + U.S. Presidential race =
Iron Blog

From eclectika

Blogging in style

So as the nominal webmaster for Humbug I’m meant to be updating the style of Planet Humbug so that it looks hip, and stuff. At the moment I’m really liking SLUG’s layout.

It’s much easier to tinker with my own blog than Humbug’s, so here is the first attempt. The first thing of note is that heinous blog crime, the graphic title. Secondly, it’s irritated me for some time that a story’s lead in is the date rather than the title, so with a little bit of template and Perl tweaking, I’ve moved the date down next to the permalink. Next I’d like to separate the articles a bit without breaking up the flow too much, as well as reduce the clutter of the sidebar.

For Planet Humbug, I’d also like to have a short bio of each contributor, nothing verbose, just listing what everyone does in the OSS world. I’d also like to display just the first paragraph or so of each entry.

This has nothing to do with keeping up with the Joneses.

Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson

Too bloody long, it’s taken me nearly six months to get through, I don’t know how anyone with a life does it. Although modern man may look forward to a century of life, I’d rather not have to spend it reading tomes like this. How about an Edwardian cycle Neal?

I did not really enjoy any of Jack Shaftoe’s adventures. Eliza’s stuff was definitely interesting, if somewhat unbelievable. Daniel Waterhouse’s adventures rang the most true and interesting for me.

I’m going to have trouble eating sausages after this book.

TV cable splitter

Finally got around to buying a two dollar cable splitter so it’s not necessary to do any cable switching; there doesn’t seem to be any interference between PC and TV.

tv_grab_dvb

One of the data streams that can be pumped out in parallel to the TV signal is an electronic program guide (epg). tv_grab_dvb parses this information and outputs an XMLTV format file for use with myth.

The program worked just fine, but it seems that the Queensland broadcasters only transmit a program guide that’s a few hours ahead, rather than a seven guide day that Sydney siders get.