Hand Coding

Once again, the American Dialect Society has released its words of the year for 2003. Each year, the Society votes on words invented that year (or which gained prominence that year) and announce winners in various categories.

Given the war on Iraq, many of the words centered around that theme:

embed: verb, to place a journalist with troops or a political campaign. Noun, a journalist who is so placed.

pre-emptive self-defense: noun, an attack before a possible attack.

weapons of mass deception: plural noun, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for war.

Most of those aren’t much of a surprise. However, several of them were rather amusing to me. For starters, ass-hat made the list for some reason, though it seems like I had heard that on South Park for some time now.

One of my favorites, though, is probably torture lite, a term so euphemistic that only the military could have come up with that one. Then again, pre-emptive self-defense also just rubs me the wrong way as a term seemingly designated for rationalization.

Dennis Miller is returning to tv… on CNBC. I was a bit baffled that a financial-news channel such as CNBC would pick him up, but it appears that they’re doing this for the halo-effect — to boost ratings for that timeslot with the idea of bringing viewers to their other shows as well:

CNBC won’t care what Miller does as long as his eponymous 9 p.m. show brings the network a modicum of visibility in primetime, where its audience has fallen off the radar screen. The cable network's long-term plan is to follow Miller with John McEnroe — probably in about three months — after an 8 p.m. newscast. […]

Since I don’t have HBO, I’ve never seen his regular show there. But, I’ve seen clips from his SNL days and he seems like an amusing guy. So, I’m not really sure what to expect of the show, but I’ll give it a try. “Dennis Miller” airs weeknights at 9/8c and midnight/11c.

I went to the Inwood Theater last night to see Lost In Translation. It’s been out for a while (since September, it would appear) and I was pleasantly surprised that it was still showing. I’ve heard so many good things about it and, until last night, I had figured that I had missed my chance to see it in theaters.

Lost in Translation scored 88 at Metacritic, but that only tells part of it. Of the 43 critics listed, 17 of them gave it a perfect “100” (and 9 more scored it between 90 and 100). More importantly to me, all of the critics I trust rated it highly (Salon, Film Threat’s Stina Chyn and Film Threat’s Rick Kisonak).

The film doesn’t have much of a plot to it (Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s characters mostly hang out in Tokyo), but that doesn’t detract from the film. It that sense, it can be a bit like a Seinfeld episode (in a good way), but the film seemed to remind me more of Amélie — each scene worked on its own, but I couldn’t wait for the next one.

In any case, I also noticed on the Inwood’s marquee that they're showing The Muppets Take Manhattan at midnight on Friday and Saturday this weekend. I enjoy the Muppets and I think I’ll go see that. One IMDB reviewer calls TMTM “The Best of the Muppet Films”. And, while it is a good film, I think The Great Muppet Caper may still be my personal favorite.

I’ve been busy with work (which is a good thing, I suppose), and so I haven’t been able to write many entries recently. I’m working as contractor for rd2 (yeah, they always seem to write it in lowercase). The name “rd2” outlines their development process, “Research, Design, Develop”, and the company was started by a friend of mine who worked at Hybrid with me.

The company is relatively small, and I enjoy that type of environment. I’m doing front-end coding for them and I’m able to work from home most days as well. It looks like a decent company and I’m pleased with how it’s working out so far.

The New York Times reports that Atkins Nutritionals is now recommending that people on their diet limit saturated fat to 20% of their calories. They’re trying to play this off as a clarification, but it sounds like a revision to me :-/.

Responding to years of criticism from scientists that the Atkins version of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat regimen might lead to heart disease and other health problems, the director of research and education for Atkins Nutritionals, Colette Heimowitz, is telling health professionals in seminars around the country that only 20 percent of a dieter’s calories should come from saturated fat. Atkins Nutritionals was set up by Dr. Robert C. Atkins to sell Atkins products and promote the diet. […]

Revision or otherwise, I view this as a positive move as many had dismissed the diet due to its lack of restrictions on saturated fat. For those already on the diet (which doesn’t include me), I was curious about how much saturated fat that would allow in a day…

Supposing a caloric intake of 1500 Calories, 20% would be 300 Calories from saturated fat. And, with 9 Calories/gram, 300 Calories would be about 33g saturated fat. So, to keep within 33g, you could eat:

• Breakfast Sausage Links — about 5 (6g saturated fat each).
• Breakfast Sausage Patties — about 6 (5g saturated fat each).
• Bratwurst Links — about 3 (9g saturated fat each).
• Pepperoni Pizza — about 6 pieces. (5g saturated fat per slice)
• All-the-Meats Pizza — about 4 pieces. (7g saturated fat per slice)

But, don’t let the numbers fool you — those calculations are for an entire day’s worth of fat. For instance, if you were to have three bratwurst, that would leave virtually no fat for the rest of the day. But, you can mix-and-match to evenly distribute your saturated fat allowance (which works out to about 10-11g saturated fat per meal).

And, if you’re on Atkins, you can stay under your limits by eating other sources of protein such as chicken or fish. Just checking my freezer downstairs, I see that trimmed boneless/skinless chicken breast has less than 1g saturated fat per serving. Likewise, canned tuna also has less than 1g saturated fat. Mayo has about 1.5g/TBsp, so a tuna salad could work also.

Free trade seems to be moving forward, but the government hedges its bets — under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers can get benefits if their jobs have been moved overseas. Unless you’re a programmer:

Under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers whose jobs have moved overseas can be eligible for a battery of extra assistance, including income support, job training, tax credits for health insurance, and job search and relocation allowances. Some older workers can even receive a temporary income subsidy, a form of “wage insurance,” which helps cushion the financial blow when a new job pays much less than the old one. For instance, if you go from writing code for computers at $50 an hour to selling them retail at a computer superstore for $10 an hour.

But Fusco and his fellow IBM employees who petitioned for the benefits were repeatedly denied. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration determined that programmers like Fusco do not qualify, because of the nature of what they’d produced on their old jobs: software. The government cited commerce and trade rules that classify software as a “service” and “not a tangible commodity,” rather than an “article” as the trade act stipulates. […]

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, I have sympathy for workers whose jobs were offshored, but wouldn’t they be eligibile for unemployment benefits anyhow? That aside, I do find it a bit odd that programming is considered a service rather than a product — I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion :-/.

Well, we've just about seen it all now — low-carb beer, low-carb bread, low-carb cookies and now low-carb chips. Frito-Lay announced in a press release that they’ll be introducing low-carb Doritos and low-carb Tostitos in May. Known as Doritos Edge and Tostitos Edge, they’ll have 6g net carbs and 10g protein per bag (product packaging photo, nutrition label photo).

To create the new products, the company will use soy proteins and fiber to convert to a lower carbohydrate chip […]. This move will result in a 60 percent reduction of carbohydrates in both products.

Of all low-carb products, I think the introduction of low-carb bread made the most sense to me — after all, most people eat bread every day. But chips? Is there really a market for people who want to eat healthier yet eat chips on an everyday basis?

I do wonder how these chips will taste, though. Much like their low-fat counterparts, low-carb foods never seem to taste as good as the full-fat/high-carb versions. I suppose we’ll find out in May.

I first heard about A&E’s new reality show Airline from, of all places, NPR’s Marketplace (RealAudio article). Airline is a reality show based around Southwest Airlines:

A camera crew has spent the last six months at Los Angeles International Airport filming the work of Southwest Airlines employees. Is this an employee training video? No, it’s the latest in reality TV. The weekly half-hour show called “Airline” is devoted to the drama that goes on behind the scenes at a big-time carrier. […]

Interestingly enough, even though Southwest granted A&E permission for the initial filming, the producers still had the final say on which segments made it into the show. And, Southwest wasn’t paid for this, though they hope that the show will act as positive advertising for the brand.

They seem to be airing two 1/2 hour episodes back-to-back each week and I recorded last week’s episodes on TiVo just to see what it was like. And I rather enjoy the show — there were no spiteful fights or gossip (unlike some reality shows) but it was surprisingly interesting. And, the Southwest employees generally acted like real people rather than zombie marketdroids.

Airline airs Mondays on A&E at 10/9c and 10:30/9:30c.

I posted some Thanksgiving photos on Friday and I was trying to figure out how to add footers to my Gallery pages to signfy my Creative Commons licensing — under the license I chose, you can “copy, distribute, display, and perform” the photographs as long as you give me credit (commercial use requires separate permission).

Writing some HTML & CSS wouldn’t be hard, but I wasn’t sure which Gallery files I needed to modify. After some searching, I soon found EclecticPixels’ Gallery customization tutorials (the Gallery forums can also be handy for this kind of thing). And the part that applied to me was the second part on headers and footers. But, you only want to add a header or footer, then you may find the steps here easier (for one thing, EclecticPixels’ tutorials create extra nested tables, which isn’t necessary).

I’ve only tested these directions with Gallery 1.4.1, but they should work for Gallery versions from 1.4.1 to 1.9x (Gallery 2.x may be completely different).

1. If it’s a Creative Commons license that you’re adding, you’ll need to go through their license selection wizard if you haven’t already. That will then take you to a “Mark Content” page which has some pre-built HTML code which you can either use as-is or as a starting point.

2. In any case, the Gallery files you’ll need to modify are in the “html_wrap” directory which branches off your main Gallery directory. You’ll need to grab “wrapper.footer.default” if you’re adding a footer (or “wrapper.header.default” if you’re adding a header). If you’re downloading these from your web host, remember to set your ftp client to ASCII mode.

3. Before making any changes to the file(s), save them without the “.default” extension (as “wrapper.footer” and “wrapper.header”, respectively) to ensure that the original files stay intact (the customized files need to have these new filenames anyway). And, if you’re only adding a footer, you don’t need to bother with wrapper.header.* (and vice-versa if you’re only adding a header).

4. Open up the file in a text editor and, if your editor has syntax highlighting, you can set it to PHP highlighting mode (this will make the file easier to read, but there’s no consequence if your editor doesn’t have syntax highlighting for PHP files). Then, scroll to the bottom of the file and add any HTML code that you want in your footers. (Here’s my finished wrapper.footer for an example.)

5. If you need to add any CSS to accompany your HTML, you can add that to the bottom of your Gallery skin’s CSS file (which can be found at http://yourdomain/path/to/gallery/skins/skin-name/css/embedded_style.css). And, for an easy back-up path in case your changes are overwritten when you next upgrade Gallery, you may want to make a note of your CSS changes in a separate file as well.

6. That’s it :). Just upload your new wrapper.footer (and/or wrapper.header) into “html_wrap” and the updated embedded_style.css (if you even changed that) on top of your old CSS.

(You can see my new footer on any of my Gallery pages.)

Yeah, I realize that it’s well past Christmas, but my Thanksgiving pictures are now online — I posted 18 of the 23 pictures that I shot over those four days. And, if you create a Gallery account, you’ll be able to vote on images (Excellent, Good, Average, and so on). For whatever reason, the Register link appears on the Gallery main page but not on any of the subalbum pages.

I’ve had them processed and ready for several weeks, but my hosting provider had reconfigured a couple PHP options under my feet and broke my Gallery in the process; it took a few persistent e-mails to get them to change the options back, but it should be fine now. (I’ll post more about that later.)

In any case, we visited my brother in Menlo Park for Thanksgiving this year and we also went into San Franciso for some touristy bits on Friday (see also a QuickTime montage that my brother created). As usual, we cooked & smoked our turkey on the grill over several hours (mmm, smoked turkey!).

And, here’re a couple quick notes on the photos, just as with my photos from Greece:

• You’ll see that each filename ends with “_smaller”. This is because I resized each image to 1024x768 before uploading it. I did this out of disk space concerns; for instance, the full-size Menlo Park pictures are 13.6 MB but 2.7 MB in their smaller form. Besides, it can be tough to get your head around a 2560x1920 image ;0.

• Though I resized the images for upload purposes, I’ve kept the full-size versions of each image as well (which are all 5 MPixels). So if you want a full-size copy of any image, just let me know.

• And, all images are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. In short, I give everyone the right to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. In return, you must give me credit if you use an image and commercial use is not allowed unless I separately give permission. But, be a chum and go to the link yourself — the page linked is a “Commons Deed” and has no legalese :).

And if anyone is savvy with customizing Gallery, I’d like to add the Creative Commons icon and some explanation text to each of my Gallery pages. I’m sure this is a fairly straightforward template change, but I’m not sure which files need to be modified.