Year: 2005

Prevent Lost WordPress Posts

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

You may recall an entry from a couple weeks ago about pretty URLs in WordPress. As it turns out, I ended up writing that entry twice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the first version, but I just accidentally closed that tab in Firefox at the time (oops). I meant to click on the right-most tab in my browser but I instead clicked on the “close tab” button right there instead. Poof!

I was a little bit annoyed but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I wrote the entry a second time and I later looked around to see if there were any utilities which might help prevent that kind of thing in the future. One that I thought to look for was some kind of “undo close tab” extension. Well, ask and ye shall receive — a guy named Dorando created an extension called Undo Close Tab (how apropos). And, if you'd normally be wary of downloading an extension from a forum post, rest assured that he has a home page for his extensions as well, though the bulk of the information on Undo Close Tab is in his forum post.

I then took aim at the second thorn in my side, that dumb close-tab button which foiled my plans earlier. After all, even though an undo-close-tab extension would have saved me from the predicament last time, I wouldn’t have even been in that scrape if it wasn’t so easy to hit that button ;). Fortunately, that’s easily done as well. This MozillaZine Knowledgebase article writes about moving the tabbar (to the bottom of the browser or elsewhere on your screen) but it also includes the steps on removing the close-tab button (regardless of whether you want to move the tab bar as well). In short, you can remove your close-tab button but shutting down your Firefox and adding these lines to userchrome.css:

/* remove the close-tab button */
.tabbrowser-tabs > stack {
display: none;
}

Your userchrome.css file goes in your Firefox profile directory but the file doesn’t exist by default. Rather, there’s an example file called “userChrome-example.css” which you can Save-As to userchrome.css and make use of that. And, that previous link on the profile directory offers some tips on where your profile directory is located; that information is fine, though you may find it just as easy to just search your drive — starting from C:\Documents and Settings\ — for “userChrome-example.css”.

I felt better after getting those Firefox bits in order, and I then came across a WordPress plugin which also looked helpful. Gregory Wild-Smith wrote a plugin called Twilight AutoSave which “uses cookies and JavaScript to save the data you are typing and allow you to restore it (or delete it) later”. With that and the Firefox goodies in place, I should have a lesser chance of losing my posts next time. Not that I’m going to tempt fate, but I do have some peace of mind about it now.

Review — Kicking and Screaming

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Kicking and Screaming; I participated in that offer.

I saw Kicking and Screaming on Tuesday night and I rather enjoyed it. In case you haven't seen the trailer — which appears to be just about everywhere these days, including as a promotional spot on my TiVo — the movie stars Will Ferrell as a reluctant soccer coach of his last-place kids’ soccer team.

It’s hard to pass up a gratis pass to a movie screening and, at the time it was offered to me, I didn’t know much about the film. Well, I knew that Will Ferrell starred in it and that it was about a kids’ soccer team. And, really, that’s all you need to know. It's a sports movie — so all the standard sports-movie clichés apply — and it’s also a father/son movie — so all those clichés apply too. Just to name a few:

  • Don’t read these if you’re really scared of spoilers
  • The coach of a father’s son’s soccer team drops out, so the father has to take over
  • The father is pretty bad at coaching, at first, but gets much better at it with practice
  • The team is a bunch of misfits in last place and, miraculously, they make it to the championship game
  • And, of course, there’s the obligatory cute-kid-with-glasses for comic relief (gee, where have I seen that before?)

Having said that, though, the movie was enjoyable from start to finish. Sure, not all the jokes were home runs (or “gooooals”, I suppose) but I had some good laughs in there. In particular — and I don’t want to ruin the punchline — the scene where Will Ferrell’s character tells his son that his son’s grandfather traded to another team has a nice twist after Ferrell’s character Phil ends up getting more worked up about the situation than his son. Oh, and apparently (if my eagle eyes don’t fail me), his son Sam uses Safari for his web browsing ;).

(Minor spoilers in this paragraph.) I’d recommend the movie to just about anyone if this genre is your bag. My only gripe, I’d say, is that the flick tended to fall back on its formula towards the end. So, Phil ends up being an effective coach but he’s just too mean and he wants to win at all cost, even to the point of benching his son who isn’t one of the better players… blah. blah. blah. His son feels discouraged and doesn’t even suit-up for the final game. Of course, Phil realizes the error of his ways, emotes an apology to his son and — how convenient — Sam’s mom happened to bring along Sam’s uniform “just in case” he decided to suit-up.

All the while, though, the filmmakers are beating us over the head with the supposed compassion of the scene through the old trick of the swelling strings. And, it wasn’t just a little bit here and there — they really poured it on and I felt like I was bobbing in a swimming pool of violins, gasping for air. Really, I could have imagined any one of these quotes spurting from the from the mouth of the director as they edited that scene:

  • “I’ll be honest… fellas, it was sounding great. But… I could’ve used a little more swelling strings.”

  • “I got a fever! And the only prescription… is more swelling strings!”

One last thing. Maybe it was me, but it seemed like there were an inordinate number of songs within the soundtrack which were also featured in iPod commercials. The song from the new rollerskating commercial (“Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz)? Yeah, that’s in there. And that older one from the commercial with the hipster and the dancing posters (“Ride” by The Vines)? That too.

So Much for Autocross

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I regularly go autocrossing with the Lone Star Chapter of the BMW Car Club of America. In case you haven’t heard of it, autocrossing is a timed driving event; the club sets up a course of orange cones early one Saturday each month at Mineral Wells airport and each participant drives around it as fast as he/she can. It’s a lot of fun and I look forward to it each season (they hold about 8-9 autocrosses a year during the warmer months).

The first one this year was in March which I ended up missing since I was in Austin that weekend for SXSW. And, I couldn’t make the April one either for some reason. So, today — May 7th — was supposed to me my first autocross of 2005. I had everything lined up and I was ready to go. Sunscreen? Check. Bugspray? Check. Protein bars? Check. Cooler with Fruit2-0? Check.

The usual sequence is that I’d meet up with some other drivers at the McDonald’s at MacArthur & 635 at 6:30am on the morning of the autocross. And, from there, we caravan to the event. It’s not always the same bunch of guys that meets there but there has always been at least a few people that would drive down together. So, this morning, I had my alarm clock set for 5am and I was out the door by 6am. I drove to the meeting place and waited a few minutes, and then a few minutes more. No one showed up — I guess everyone decided to eschew the caravan this time.

Since I had always driven with the caravan, I never learned how to get there. And, while the group would normally head off around 7am, I waited until 7:15 in case anyone showed up. At this point, I was kinda stuck — there was no one else to follow and I didn’t know how to get there on my own. Figuring that I might be able to drive home, print directions, and still make it in time, I headed back to my apartment. I got there by around 7:45 and checked MapQuest which gave me directions but confirmed that it was about a 1 hr 40 minute drive to get there. Considering that Mineral Wells is roughly 100 miles west of Dallas, I wasn't terribly surprised. But, as the registration cut-off time was 9am, I soon realized that I couldn’t make it :(.

That really bummed me out since I was thinking about this first autocross since the beginning of the year and I was looking forward to it all week. My coworkers were even joking with me about it as I left the office yesterday — “Drive carefully!”, Leia said with a smile as I walked out, to which I cheerfully replied “I’ll be sure not to!”. Well, so much for that idea. It’s about 9am now so I guess I’ll go back to bed for a few more hours sleep and figure out the rest of my day after that. Blargh.

Photos from Jenny’s Wedding

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Well, it's been a couple weeks since Jenny's wedding and I’m ready to post some photos. (Oh, and I’ve also signed up for Flickr. Nifty, eh? Well, more to the point, Bryan was generous to give me a Flickr Pro account. What a nice guy!)

I was only there four days and I took just 18 photos; I’ve posted 10 online. If nothing else, I was reminded once more that my camera really likes daylight and doesn't take kindly to underlit indoor shots. Still, I can’t complain too much — the indoor shots were at ISO 800 and they turned out less badly than I thought they would ;).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1280-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

PS It’s semantic geekiness time. I was thinking about including one of the photos inline within this post but I just couldn’t decide on what CSS class to give it. I initially considered “img.photo” but what if I included an inline image in a later post that wasn’t a photo but rather screenshot or something? My current favorite, in fact, may be “img.inline-image” but, then again, they wouldn’t really be inline in the CSS “display” sense (as I had planned on floating them in one direction, at least for now). Maybe “img.image-inside-post” or “img.featured-image”?

Process Throttling for Windows

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

While I was looking over Beta News the other day, I came across a handy freeware utility called Process Tamer. It implements an idea which I've had for a few years but didn't have the programming skills to implement ;). Essentially, it runs in the tray and keeps watch on the currently running process (your web browser, your word processor, and so on) and if any of them starts becoming greedy and eating up all your CPU cycles, Process Tamer puts the hammer down and lowers that app’s priority until it gets back under control.

“There are many times when a process will hog your cpu, such as when converting audio/video files, or working with compressed archives. Because these processes completely consume the cpu, your system becomes sluggish to respond and using the computer for other tasks becomes impossible while these processes are running.” “Process Tamer solves this problem by identifying such these degenerate conditions and temporarily reducing the priority of the offending processes in order to allow your system to respond to other requests. Stop being a victim to an overloaded cpu — let Process Tamer keep your system responsive no matter what you're doing. […] ”

If all this talk of “processes” and “scheduling” is Greek to you, I’ll try to go over the general idea. As you’re likely aware, modern operating systems can multi-task which allows them to run multiple programs at the same time (such as viewing a web page while your e-mail client runs in the background). But, at the micro-level, your CPU can only pay attention to one application (“process”) at a time. So, it cycles through each application, doing a few calculations for one of them, switching to the next one, doing a few more calculations, and so on.

And, each process can also have a priority assigned to it which means that higher priority processes are given a preference if there’s a mad grab for CPU cycles. One example of priorities is your mouse cursor which, if I recall correctly, has nearly infinite priority — that is, even under heavy load, your mouse cursor is always supposed to remain responsive. So, what happens if two applications have the same priority but one of them becomes greedy? Well, the meek app just loses out.

And that’s where Process Tamer comes in. Say you're ripping some CDs and the ripping application is hogging the CPU, making your e-mail client sluggish; well, Process Tamer notices that and temporarily lowers the ripper’s priority, leveling the playing field for the other applications.