In the course of working with a project today, I came across some useful information. First, the use of command-line parameters in Perl. All you really have to do is add a space between the program name and the first, and then the first and the second, and so on.
The chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, has been in and out of the hospital. Recently. I'm all for the right of older people to work. I think it's good. But when you can't go to work because you're back being treated for cancer again, perhaps you ought to forget about the public being interested in your personal business (as Rehnquist refers to his health) and spend a little time getting healthy, and allowing someone else to take over.
Sandra Day O'Connor recently retired and apparently she wasn't even sick - her husband was! So she decides to retire, to help her husband. Meanwhile, someone who may very well be even worse off than her husband continues not only to sit on the court - but to be the ultimate authority of the same.
Maybe lifetime terms were a good idea when a lifetime was much shorter, and once you got sick you couldn't expect to live long. But when someone can struggle for weeks, months, even years, maybe they ought to take the time to concentrate not on their authority, but on their life.
I hate it when people change their links and don't provide any way to get from the old one to the new one. It's even worse when organizations do it. And the absolute worst culprit of all is the government. They have all sorts of data, and loads of it is at least marginally interesting to someone. Take the Mecklenburg Board of Elections. I had a number of links to past results and informational pages, and they all just died. Actually, they may have been dead for a while. But I just noticed it.
I understand some elections are two years old. So what? Keep 'em out there. That way people can look them up later. Informational pages shouldn't change that much - provide redirects to the new locations, or at the very least to the home page. Come on people.
Update: Have this problem? Try the free Alexa Amazon Associate Site Report. It's limited to 50 broken links per report, and 1 report per day, but hopefully it won't take you long to get through it. I had to run three days straight at first, now I barely break double-digits, and that's mostly when someone removes their archives. Cut it out!
I came across the Blogmapping service the other day. This is a neat use of the Google Maps API, allowing you to search for blogs be geographical location. I like it better than GeoURL, simply because of the visual nature of the application. You can even add your own sites.
The Boston Subway Map is the nicest application of the API I've seen yet. It's not that it's fancy - it isn't. It just provides a great service, very well done, that loads quickly and is quite usable. The problem with some services is that they load very slowly, making them less useful. I don't know what everyone is doing in Boston, but Joe Hughes also has a great addition to your toolkit with a mashup for planning trips. The MBTA Nearby Stops Experiment will plot the nearest stations to the center of the map, and the pop-up info will even include upcoming trains at that location. Very cool.
Which brings us to the New York City Subway Map offered by onNYTurf.com. Very nicely done, but something about the page makes it load really slowly, unlike the Boston map above. There are other NYC subway maps out there - MonkeyHomes.com has a nice one - but this one is a better use of the API, with colored paths and the like.
Finally, if you want to add that special touch to each and every page you visit, take a look at the Greasmap script for Greasemonkey. It adds a little map to each page where it finds location information. Very nice.
So I'm looking for something like the Tritton TRI-NSS160. That link is to the product at Tiger Direct. The price is $199, with a $20 rebate. Not bad. But the shipping and tax combines to push the price over $225. Meanwhile, the same product at Global costs the same, but there is no tax, so it's only $210.
Why is this interesting? Because it seems to me that both TigerDirect and Global are the same company. Maybe this is common knowledge, but I didn't know about it. The layout, the script names and locations and even the SKU numbers are the same. But because Global (apparently) doesn't have a presence in North Carolina, there is no sales tax.
In any case, NewEgg has it too, and their delivered price is just $199. So do I take this price, knowing that I hate rebates and that it probably isn't worth the hassle to potentially save an extra $10? Or do I go for the Global drive and the lowest ultimate price?
I'm leaning towards NewEgg at the moment. But I don't know just yet.
Neil has apparently turned the corner with his second upgrade of the 3.2 beta. The first didn't go quite so well. This is a conversation that pops up all over the place when this sort of thing comes up. Invariably there are problems and everyone is scrambling to get back to where they were. With Movable Type, I don't understand.
For the third time in three or four days, I received a reasonably well-thought-out comment, which wasn't heavy-handed in any way, but it was talking (on and on) about something that only peripherally approached the content of the entry. The first two were certainly spam. They were nearly identical. The third wasn't so much - it was more of a rant, which is fine - but if you're going to rant, at least have the courtesy to rant on the same topic as the entry. Thanks for your cooperation.
The Culinary Festival Events for Charlotte Shout have been announced. They'll take place on September 22-24, 2005. The list of attendees is reasonably impressive. Nell Newman, daughter of Paul Newman, will be there, among a number of others, which is cool. Our newest puppy loves their peanut butter treats. Maybe we can score some free samples.
What I don't get is that this is billed as a "Four Day Event". Huh.
As I was doing my fiddling today, I think I overloaded Firefox. It had 48 tabs on-screen, and there were others that I couldn't see. Using CTRL-TAB to switch between them became impossible. Even viewing them (while selected) didn't work - tabs at the end of the list weren't on-screen, so you couldn't see which tab was the current one! Thankfully CTRL-W works well to close a tab. Still, I'm down to a more mundane 12 now (really), and I have to manually select tabs. It's like the whole index is just wacked. I'll restart it in a bit.
Today I was finishing up with the task of installing a server at a customer. This SBS 2003 server had previously been a domain controller (in fact, the first domain controller) in a domain. Now, it's a domain controller in a completely different domain.
First, I had to demote it. That wasn't difficult. Next, I had to join it to the new domain. Again, not difficult. But then things just started to go a bit wacky. I've now done most of the reloading of the server, which in itself isn't a big deal, but it was all done remotely, which made it a bit more challenging.
Now that I've played with the Movable Type 3.2 Beta for a bit, I have a thought. That thought is that it seems to me as if Six Apart is going for the ease-of-use crowd (in other words, people who haven't used it and for who it needs to be easy). This, in and of itself, isn't really a Bad Thing™.
Just back from Radio Shack, where I picked up an iGo EverywherePower charger. It came with the DualPower accessory, and a free tip. Not bad, as the price of the WallPower unit, the DualPower piece and the tip I need would have been just $5 less. I also grabbed a tip for Denise's phone, so I can do my part to help make sure that it is charged as well. So far it seems to be working great.
