my sediments exactly

That title makes no sense, but it seems fitting. I decided enough of the old, multi-year archives of my ramblings. With the New Year just around the corner and Christmas just a day away, time to move on. No, I am not leaving the blogosphere or the Internet (no way). I am just taking off the old field jacket, in favor of a new one. Yes, I will leave these archives up indefinitely, but will turn comments off. Enough spam is enough. So, move forward with me to my new blog, driven by MovableType Open Source 4.1...

Gneiss, Tuff and a Little Wacke

...and enjoy my continuing search for whatever it is I am searching for :-)

I can think of a few groups, organizations, etc. to which this animation is a fitting way to describe my feelings towards them. Does the shoe fit? ;-) (via Begonia)

Just found a nifty sidebar widget that makes getting to my live scanner stream simple, including an imbedded WMP for those who cannot install software at work (you are welcome, Dan!). The screenshot of the widget, aptly named SHOUTcast Sidebar Widget, looked super and filled every need that I had. I was troubled, though, to see a very recent post on the WordPress forums of someone having a problem getting it to work. I thought probably a WP install that falls outside the norm and that mine will work just fine. Well, it did not. The widget title showed up fine, but that was it. So, I opened the code up. Warning - I am not (repeat, not) a PHP expert. Perl yes, PHP, no. So, I did what any good programmer would do (other than RTFM) and sprinkled a few echo statements in the main script to see what it was (and was not) finding. It read my Shoutcast status page just fine, as well as parsed the results properly, but when it arrived at fetching the skeleton page, nothing was retrieved. I looked at the filename and it was correct. What was wrong were two things, one my fault, one the code:

1. In the README file, it says to extract all the files into wp-content/plugins/sc_widget. Problem is that the installation zip file has them in a directory called shoutcast-sidebar-widget. Most widget and plugin installations for WP do not change directory names in mid-installation, most are just drag 'em over. I will take the hit (did not RTFM), but left the directory name as is and changed the code.
2. Looking at the filenames in the script and the skeleton page, all the fully qualified references were to /wp-content/plugins/sc_widget/sc_running.htm, which works just dandy if your WP installation is at the root of the server. Removing the leading slash makes the script and resulting, edited skeleton file work just dandy in any level of the server. There are 6 occurrences in the two files, sc_widget.php and sc_running.htm. Easy enough edit.

I made those changes and it works like a champ, as you can see in the sidebar! I plan on sending the changes to the author next with a nice thank you for writing the original code!

Now that I have mod_rewrite installed and I attempted and succeeded on the main web site, I am adding prettier permalinks on the blog as well. Please stand by. :-) Update: Work complete! Now wasn't that easy!

I sure hope not :-) Well, I felt defeated the other day when I lost all my Blinklist bookmarks because I wanted to make some mass changes and figured that the Blinklist XML backup format would be the best to work with to do it. Go figure. They have a wonderful site and it is so useful and easy to use with its nifty Ajax widgets. You would think that their own backup format could be imported back into the system. No, leave it to me to find an undocumented feature and lose all of my 2400+ bookmarks! Well, I did not lose them totally. I still had the Blinklist XML format file. For restores/imports, Blinklist also accepts several other formats, including JavaScript Object Notation or JSON. So, what could it take? Flip a few tags, change a few names? I started by reading an article on O'Reilly's XML web site about converting between XML and JSON. The article gives a very straightforward set of examples of how the structures vary and rules binding the conversion. I did find a few modules out on CPAN that did conversions, but most were small code fragments that would have required more work than I had time to tie together. I took a look at the Blinklist XML file. The XML was well-formed and appeared to be a straight one-to-one conversion to JSON with a few minor tag/ID name changes. So, I put together 70 lines of perl code and converted the Blinklist XML file into a new JSON file. I tried it first on the dozen links I already added to my new (temporary I hope) Blinklist, exporting in both XML and JSON formats, creating my own JSON version, comparing the two, and then importing both to check for differences. None found! So why I am asking if I may have caused some heartburn for Blinklist is that... well... no response from the helm, Mr. Scott :-( Just in case my Blinklist is locked during import and the reason I am not seeing it, I went to the root page of the web site and... well... nothing there either :-( Mike, if you are scurrying aroun, trying to get the servers back on the air, my apologies if it was my little ol' fault. I find that doubtful, but best to cover all the bases. Soon, I hope to report that my full Blinklist is back in business! Update! SUCCESS! My old Blinklist is back online!

As I have done on many previous occasions, I have asked for an invite today to get on Pownce, yet another social networking tool. I find it curious how the invitation systems work or don't. Sometimes, the invite comes, geez, almost before I click the submit button. Sometimes, they never come (like Orkut, which I finally signed up for today). Now mind, I am not a sign up for every new thing that requires an invite type person, although I do like to be an early trier (and adopter if I like it). I am though the kind of person who, if they really (really) likes something, I will use it, hype it, and share it with everyone I know. Conversely, if it sucks, I will let the world know that as well. So, I hope the good folks at Pownce see this and, if their product is up to it, will send me an invite. Oh, for those who are not dramatically inclined, the title reference is to Samuel Beckett's play in which the characters wait for someone who never arrives.

Ok, I admit it. I do love to find fun, silly, little devices to toss up here. And this one is in the ultimate silly category. While reading the About entry on a blog, I just had to chuckle. I figured what the hell, let's see how I can approximate me on this site. The web site is called Meez and it has a super easy interface that walks you through the process which yields an exportable animated GIF file. They used a lot of imagination in this process, so much so that I could actually get pretty close to how I appear and what I am doing right now. So, what are you waiting for? I know you can't wait to try it yourself! Using that link will gain you 5 extra coinz, the currency used to get extra special additions to your Meez. I admit it - I get 5 as well. And, yes, I know they are aiming at the younger crowd, but us more mature people can have fun, too, right? (via Grilled Cheese)

Nevermind what I was searching for in Google, but I came across this post that is too funny. Believe it or not, that little house, located in Toronto, that is wedged on what looks to be a driveway, is for sale! The price is what is amazing: $179,900 Canadian ($176,563 in US dollars). Talk about the high cost of housing. It really does look like a cute little house (emphasis on little), the perfect starter home. I read through the realtor's specifications. It even comes with two parking spaces. Funny, the parking spaces are probably larger than the house! Sad, that much money would buy you nothing in this area. Well, then again, maybe two parking spaces! (via  Toronto Mike)

I was over at the Yahoo Developers web site today to grab an application key for a new web site. I noticed that the featured video on the front page was about a new plug-in for Wordpress. It is used while you are writing a new post (or editing an old one) and what it does is scans the content for possible items of interest from Yahoo. Things like maps, graphics, photos and such. So, what the hell, being a tech toy whore, I decided to load it up and see what it yields from the wealth of Yahoo Maps, Search, Flickr, and whatever other goodies they have stored. So I will pause in writing and see the three shortcuts it found already! (pause) So far, it basically found the links you see in the post above, as well as putting a Flickr badge at the bottom of the post, using those three terms as the keyword search. Now, let us add West Chester, Pennsylvania and the West Whiteland Fire Company to the mix and see what else show up. (pause) So, I removed the links to the three obvious web sites and added in automatically a map of the borough. It did not find the fire company's web site Curious as to how precise the search is, possibly only related to map locations or Flickr-finds. Now going to enable everything and see how it looks in reality! Update: Well, after publishing the web page and bringing it up in both Firefox and IE, I was singularly unimpressed with what happened when you moused over a link. It came up with some skeletal-looking windows and was not until you actually clicked the link that a Yahoo box came up with several search results. While it is a cute way to find related maps and pictures on Flickr for your post, I find that its usability for the general (read: non-geek) reader is lacking greatly.

I have to admit I almost thought a comment that was caught by Akismet really wasn't spam. It was on my post on Sherri Shepherd's interpretation of history where I made a reference to Art Linkletter's House Party. The incoming message said they had found it via Google and it had a link to a web site with a similar last name (leave it at that). Funny, Google had not caught up with my feed when the first comment was left. Nor the second. Nor the third or the fourth. Tiny variations on a theme they all were, but methinks they were to drive up a web site rank. Not on my dime ;-)