greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Etymology for fun and… fun.

    I’m something of an armchair etymologist. No, that’s not the guy who’s into bugs. Anyway. Today’s Dictionary.com Word of the Day isn’t actually a word but is instead a phrase. I’ve misused this particular term often enough that seeing the proper definition caught my eye, and upon further investigation I read the following:

    deus ex machina \DAY-uhs-eks-MAH-kuh-nuh; -nah; -MAK-uh-nuh\, noun:
    1. In ancient Greek and Roman drama, a god introduced by means of a crane to unravel and resolve the plot.
    2. Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an apparently insoluble difficulty.

    The emphasis in Definition Number One is mine, and highlights what I found most amusing. “Deus ex machina” translates to “god from machine,” and it turns out that it’s a more literal meaning than I originally expected. This is the sort of stuff that puts a smile on my face. I love learning where things came from, especially when it includes colorful, fanciful details such as ancient wire-fu antics.

    Of course, because I’m a weirdo, the first joke that popped into my head goes something like, “If it was an old-looking goddess, could you say it was a crone on a crane?”

    (As an aside, does it creep anyone else out that my search for “Gil Grissom” on Google turned up at least one slashfic link on the first page of results? Ewww.)

  • Quoth the webmaster, “Nevermore.”

    Today we mark the end of an era. That would be the “Monaural Jerk Era,” the peak of which saw five websites I manage (or have helped manage) running that particular content-management system. Ashalen left the platform long ago. I moved to WordPress at the beginning of the year, then I migrated Wendi’s site. I turned The Lab into a wiki from a blog, and now Lil’s blog has joined me in WordPress bliss. (Mari runs WordPress as well, but she converted from Movable Type instead; Kylanath remains a big fan of MT, which I don’t begrudge her one bit. Whatever makes you happy, hon’!)

    Getting “Note of the Day” truly blissful, however, took a fair number of hours and no few headaches. The only good-looking purple-schemed template I could find was a conversion to WordPress of a theme from an entirely different platform, and whoever did the conversion gave me some of the sloppiest website code I’ve ever seen. Glaring errors, screwed up line encodings and horrific indentation cost me at least an hour all on their own, nevermind the actual design challenges I faced in making the thing work the way I wanted it to.

    And then I loaded the site in Internet Explorer only to run smack-dab into the so-called “float drop” problem, the details of which I won’t bore you with, but I can tell you that I fixed it by editing one particular entry that included a bunch of fixed-width tables.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get away from my computer for a while and put some food in me. Spending all afternoon coding (and fending off whiny salespeople) on an empty stomach is not my preferred mode of operation…

  • What’s In A (Company) Name, Anyway?

    It’s been the kind of workday in which it takes me until three hours later than usual to check my security logs. Among the constant attempts to hack into my Linux-based webservers, this line struck me as terribly amusing:

    unknown (ip-68-178-170-212.ip.secureserver.net): 1 Time(s)

    You know… maybe a business inclined to register the domain “secureserver.net” should also be inclined to keep a closer eye on, you know, the security of their servers. I’m just sayin’.

  • Google & dMarc: Top Ten List

    I quote here an email seen on the Entercom engineering remailer, courtesy of one Chris Tarr, Director of Engineering for our Milwaukee stations:

    For those who didn’t hear, Google purchased dMarc, purveyors of Scott Studios and Maestro.

    From the home office in Newport Beach, California, here’s the TOP TEN THINGS THAT WILL CHANGE NOW THAT GOOGLE HAS PURCHASED DMARC…

    10. The logo on the front of the computer mysteriously changes for every holiday.
    9. Jocks who need a quick fill song now have a button on the screen marked “I’m feeling lucky.”
    8. When you try to put in a liner, the computer says “Did you mean…” and picks one spelled the right way.
    7. Altavista and Zabasearch just bought every “Mister Microphone” in the country.
    6. A song search for any song by the “Barenaked Ladies” also brings up six pages of porn sites.
    5. “VT-32” now trading as “VT-46.87” after inexplicably exuberant run-up in the minutes after the sale was announced.
    4. Hundreds of stations now offer prestigious email addresses to listeners on “dmail” server.
    3. Jocks now spend hours mindlessly surfing the music library.
    2. Next corporate buyout result: “MTV-bay.”

    And the number one thing that will change now that Google has purchased dMarc…

    1. Revenooooooooogle Suite!!

  • The Breaking Winds Of Change

    In the interests of usability, the search form no longer shows gray text in a gray box on a gray background when you type into it.

    You’re welcome.

    In other news, the RSS/RDF/whatever feed now consists of the entry summaries rather than the full text. This more-or-less emulates what the previous system used to do. If you don’t like it, now would be a good time to say so. (My possible solution to an uprising might involve providing multiple feeds. I’m not sure yet.)

    While I’m on that subject, I suppose now is a rather late date to point out that the feed URL has changed, so if you use a feed reader to keep tabs on me, you’ll want to re-add the subscription to this site. We apologize for the inconvenience.

  • Striking A Balance Betwixt Old And New

    I accomplished my first post-switch goal today. Most of the old content and linkage resides where it should once more, and the theme generally matches what came before. I think it looks cleaner and snazzier now. Of course I would, though, wouldn’t I?

    As I indicated yesterday, however, a considerable motivation for making the platform change was the ability to do fun and interesting new things with the website without actually becoming a programmer. To this end I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins which you can see and enjoy on the new Status page. I found the myStatus plugin while looking for examples of how WP’s standalone Pages feature works, and that led me to the incredibly-cool plugin modestly named “The Execution of All Things” as well as to a succession of last.fm plugins, one of which tried to break my site (fortunately EZ-Scrobbler works like a charm).

    I need to bring over the old Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater material, the NaNoWriMo ’02 excerpts (in later years I simply posted them in the main journal’s Art category) and decide what to do with my old “bio” page, but otherwise I’m done. Whew. Heck, I even cranked out some new rotator images to liven things up at the top of the page.

    So here’s the new site, as finished as it’s likely to get, ready for me to play with, ready for you to enjoy. It looks a lot like the old site, but behind the facade lies code that makes me happy.

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