• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Although I was very happy with the Blue Zinfandel Squared theme as it was out of the box there were one or two things about it that annoyed me so I spent this evening fixing them. I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised when I dove into the code, it was clear, simple and well documented! All my changes were minor, no more than a few lines of code each but they make things pretty much exactly as I want them. Anyhow, in case you care these are the tweaks I made:

• I moved the search box up to the top of the side bar
• Fixed the way the categories were shown – it wasn’t playing nice with nested categories
• Added the full date to the information at the top of posts
• Added an “edit” button to each post that only shows up when I’m logged in
• Tweaked the way lists are rendered in posts
• Tweaked the page header and footers a very small bit

And that’s it. That’s all the changes the theme needed. I really can’t give it high enough praise!

I did a review of the pre-beta preview release of NetNewsWire 3 for Allison on the NosillaCast. Check it out in Episode 85.

[tags]NosillaCast, NetNewsWire[/tags]

With the pending court cases around Europe and Steve Jobs’ recent open letter ‘Thoughts on Music’ there’s a lot of talk about DRM at the moment, so, I thought now might be a good time to have a closer look at what it’s all about. In this article I’ll start by having a look at what DRM is, what effects it has on us, the consumers, and why I feel it will never work. I’ll end by having a look at how DRM is counter-productive for the content producers and at some alternatives.

[tags]DRM, Piracy[/tags]

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I observed the eclipse from the end of the umbral phase when you could start to see some limb darkening through to the middle of totality. There were three of us to start with, myself, my better half and a mate, but since I set the telescope up in the driveway we soon had a collection of passers by having a look through the telescope and the binoculars and we wowed a few of the more interested ones with a quick glance of Saturn. One of our neighbors came round for a few looks and brought us some beers as a thank you (cheers Michael, much appreciated). All in all it was a good observing session and the things that we noticed were:

• That there was a blue tint on the edge of the umbral shadow
• That even during maximum eclipse the moon wasn’t very red, more orange
• That even during maximum eclipse we could easily make out the larger seas with the naked eye, with binoculars loads of surface features were easily visible, and with the telescope even lunar rays were easy to see.
• The top edge of the moon was always that bit less dark than the rest.

This would lead me to the conclusion that this eclipse was at point 4 on the Danjon scale, i.e. the least dark kind of lunar eclipse. The fact that the earth didn’t pass through the center of the Moon’s shadow probably played a part in this as did the fact that we’ve had no major volcanic activity recently.

All in all it was a great nights observing with no real weather problems, we had the occasional whisp of high cloud but they passed by very quickly. The most important thing was that a good night was had by all.

As anyone who knows me well probably knows I’ve been a huge fan of the website The Daily WTF for a few years now. This week Alex (the owner) caused quite a storm by re-naming the site to Worse Than Failure. Yesterday Alex posted a very good essay which explains his choice of new name and takes a very interesting look at what exactly causes the ‘perversions of information technology’ we seen on the Daily WTF each day for the past few years. If you write software you really should have a read of What Could Possibly Be Worse Than Failure?.

It’s often handy to figure out how big elements on your screen are in pixels. The freeware tool Free Ruler lets you do just that. This is another example of the kind of Mac programs I really like, those that do just one thing but do it very well. The program really couldn’t be simpler. You get a semi-transparent ruler that floats over the screen that you can move around. You actually get two rulers at 90^o to each other and you can resize both independently though they move together. There’s not really much more to say about this tool so I’ll leave you with a screen shot.

[tags]OS X, Apple, Software, Free Ruler[/tags]

I’m probably a very rare beast, a Mac user who uses Thunderbird rather than Apple Mail. The reason I use Thunderbird is because I don’t like lock-in. I’ve had my same mailboxes on Windows, Linux and Mac, so I know that as long as I use Thunderbird I can move to any OS I want at any time and keep all my mail, contacts and settings completely effortlessly. I’d just have to copy one folder. It can certainly be argued that Thunderbird is less polished looking than Mac Mail and it has a few less features but on the whole it’s a very capable client that works well.

I’ve been using the basic features for years but of late the sheer volume of mail I have to deal with at work has led me to start experimenting with ways of making my life easier. The first optimization people generally think of is message filters so I’m not going to talk about those because I think they are pretty obvious and people are used to using them. Instead I’m going to give two hopefully less obvious tips.

[tags]Mozilla, Thunderbird, Email, To Do, Organise[/tags]

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I’m sure this is blindingly obvious to most people, anyone with more than a few braincells to rub together at least! However, this fact seems to have totally escaped the President of Poland who made an ass of himself here in Ireland this week. Here’s what he had to say:

[humanity] would disappear if homosexuality was freely promoted
…
Imagine what grand changes would occur in mores if the traditional links between men and women were set aside

He is quite obviously a few beers short of a six pack. He seems to be laboring under the insane delusion that gay rights is about forcing all heterosexuals into gay marriages and ending heterosexual marriage! This is if course total and utter rubbish. No one wants to replace traditional family units, just to also allow other forms of love be expressed and recognized.

This ignorance on behalf of their president makes it clear to me that although Poland is politically in Europe, their government is mentally in the middle ages and seriously lacking in IQ. Simple human rights for gays in Poland is a real problem and a real test for the EU. Poland signed up to the EU which means they have taken on responsibilities and duties as well as getting the advantages of EU membership (mainly vast wodges of cash). When it comes to human rights Poland is failing to come even close to living up to those responsibilities. The EU will have to tackle this and doing so will test the strength of the union and the union’s commitment to living up to its ideals. We certainly have interesting times ahead of us.

By pure accident I stumbled across the full MacWorld keynote for 1997 on YouTube this evening and watched it all. This was the keynote where it was announced that Steve Jobs was re-joining Apple. It was a very interesting keynote because it didn’t actually introduce a single tangible product, instead it gave us an analysis of where Apple saw itself in 1997, and where Steve and the rest of the new board wanted it to go. Looking back now with 10 years worth of hind-sight it’s interesting to see how different the Apple we have is to the one we were promised.

Before reading on you may want to watch the 1997 keynote which is available on YouTube:

[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs[/tags]

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To those of you who don’t get the BBC Top Gear is car program that has been going for decades now which has become known for doing outrageous stunts with cars. This week they’ve just raised the bar a million miles by trying to launch a car (a Reliant Robin) into space!

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