September 2006

Although I can appreciate that it’s a really nifty feature, I am likely never going to use the built-in File Upload feature in WordPress. What has bugged me is that it’s in an IFRAME in the Write Post panel; I think it slows the page load. I was trying to get rid of it, but the best I could find was the Clutter Free plugin from Tempus Fugit. It’s a great plugin, but unfortunately it doesn’t really remove the IFRAME, it just hides it.

So. I dug around in the code and did it myself. If you aren’t the file-uploadin’ type, you only need to change a few lines to prevent the File Upload widget from appearing on your Write Post panel. Open wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and look for the line containing $uploading_iframe_ID. It’s near or around line 223. There are a few different ways you can handle removing this.

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I‘ve decided that Goodbye in Gasoline has overtaken How’s My Driving, Doug Hastings? as my favorite Less Than Jake song. It’s a tough call to make. I’ve had How’s My Driving posted here for download since early 2000. That is a seriously long time to have been awake late every night, nervously waiting for the RIAA to take me away. My site actually continues to receive an R rating (from the sort of people that rate blogs) purely because of the F word in the lyrics.

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This is an essay I wrote a loooong time ago … I must have been 13 or 14 … good old St. Paul’s Catholic Elementary School in Daytona Beach, FL …

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Los Angeles’ TimeWarner cable — previously known as Adelphia — is rotten. It is quite possibly the worst cable company in America. Two years ago they dropped the ESPN Gameplan, so there was no way for me to watch the Gators unless I hauled my butt over to Westwood to catch them at the UGA bar on the UCLA campus or drove way, way the hell down to Tony P’s in Marina Del Rey. The cable at my home was spotty — when it was alive at all — for almost all of August, and the internet connection was down more often than it was up. When they decided to drop the NFL Network at the start of football season this year, it was the straw that broke this camel’s back. I switched to satellite. DirecTV, baby. It rocks. If you are a football fan, you must switch. I’m telling you. I don’t say this lightly. I am getting every single NFL game every weekend. I can watch every college game I want. I’m getting all the premium stations — HBO, CineMAX, Showtime, etc. — plus about three times more channels than I ever got with cable. I didn’t even have to pay for the dish or the receivers or the installation! And I’m saving $80/mo! Don’t be a slave to crappy cable! Switch now!

And now for some random Sunday afternoon NFL thoughts:

• Okay. the new ref uniforms look lame. I don’t hate them, but … they just don’t seem right.
• One word about the Vikings’ cheerleaders: Whoa.
• Kudos to FOX for using the Jane’s Addiction classic “Jane Says” during a commercial comeback.
• Chicago @ Minnesota = Rex Grossman @ Brad Johnson = UF @ FSU. Awesome.
• Has FOX always had the down and distance arrows in the color of the team with possession? Very cool.
• Peter from the Family Guy just rules.
• Peyton Manning is apparently in every single commercial on television. The thing is, I can’t complain. He’s funny.
• I dig the Steve Young Samsung commercial. “Watch the safety blitz!” heh.
• I also dig the Circuit City commercial with the wife saying, “I promise to only watch football on Sunday. And Saturday. And Monday. And sometimes Thursday.”
• What is up with the crazy robots on FOX? They’ve been doing it for years, and I just don’t get it.
• NFL player jerseys must be made of some sort of 22nd century kevlar carbon titanium NASA fabric. If someone grabbed one of my shirts like that it would rip instantaneously. Those things stretch like nobody’s business. I watched seven college games yesterday (not including highlights) and saw at least five jerseys and one pair of pants shredded to pieces. Does the NCAA disallow the use of space-age garment technology?
• THE TOSS SWEEP NEVER WORKS! Why do coaches insist on calling this ridiculous play on short yardage downs? You’re throwing the ball backwards!
• There are 8 minutes left in the Cardinals / Rams game, I can’t stand Kurt Warner, the Cardinals are down by nine, and I’m rooting for them.
  Update: Bulger just fumbled the handoff at the two-minute warning. Ha!
  Update 2: And now Warner fumbled. Pathetic.
• “Football Night in America” is a tragically poor name for a highlight show. And just who is Bob Costas blackmailing to continually get on television? The guy seriously takes everything with too large a pinch of melodrama. One of the reasons we love Madden so much is because he knows — just like we do — that football is really a silly game. Sure, it’s life and death and the players are gods amongst men and it’s a multi-billion dollar industry and America’s passion … but you have to just love the absurdity of it all, like John does. Chill out, Bob. (Note: At least he’s got Collinswoth and Bettis as some sort of comic relief.)
• When Bobbo was interviewing Carson Palmer, the subtitle under the Bengals QB read “Pittsburgh”. The subtitle underneath Costas was “30 Rock”. Is this some sort of attempt to make NBC’s NY studios cool? It doesn’t work.
• I cannot wait to see the Saints and the Falcons tomorrow night.
• WTF? Bucs’ QB Chris Simms just had his spleen removed?! What the hell happened? How was this not mentioned until a half hour into the late game?!
• With about three minutes left in the game, Al said that next week’s contest at Cincy would be a real “litmus test” for the Patriots. Apparently getting crushed on your own field by a team that’s had your number five out of the last six times you’ve played isn’t a test.
• James Brown noted that Carson Palmer had a “plethora” of weapons at his disposal. Go, JB.

How to Hack MySQL Paging Functionality into Microsoft SQL Server

Web developers using PHP and MySQL have a crucial piece of functionality that classic ASP developers working with Microsoft SQL Server don’t. It’s pagination. Using MySQL’s LIMIT and OFFSET commands you can very easily add pagination to recordsets that you want to display on web pages. If you’ve spent any amount of time searching for a way to do this with ASP and SQL Server, you know that the code is pretty hard to find. You’re lucky if you find it at all. The few tutorials on the ‘net tend to be overly complicated and pretty bad hacks, usually involving convoluted and resource-intensive subqueries on top of subqueries. This solution is certainly not the best, and it, too, is a resource hog, but it’s the only one I’ve got, so I’m sharing.
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re you tired of city-living? Why not chuck it all and move to
The Shire of Bend, Oregon? In this community they’re building Middle Earth-style cottages instead of the cookie-cutter houses seen in most new developments. Where most suburban landscapes have sewer systems and ditches, here Hobbit holes abound! The whole place looks like Disney — the real Walt, not the insulting mall Disney of today — decided to build a Tolkien village. The web site is pretty incredible; if the real thing is anything like the php version, I think they’ll sell a gaggle of homes.
I like The Swordsmen Cottage (pictured here) the best. There’s even a little Old English “town square” and an outdoor amphitheater that “has been created to facilitate events of merriment, gaiety, and pleasure for all the inhabitants of The Shire.” How cool is that?

I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.

The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.

The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.

The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.

Happy WordPress modding!

Generally I am not the kind of guy that gets into breath mints. I’m more of a DoubleMint man. I chew gum like mad. But I saw these Vojo Energy mints while I was in line at Gelson’s and the packaging hooked me. They taste great and as a bonus have a little guarana caffeine burst in them. Also cool: There’s a little mirror on the inside of the box, presumably so you can check to see if there’s any food stuck in your teeth. Their official website is a poorly-designed piece of craptacular Flash, but you can get them at Amazon. They’re $3.50 or so for a box, and they only last like a minute, but for that you get about 80 little 1/2-calorie minutes of joy.

Jon is one of my developers at work. He recently started a WordPress blog called Rusty Razor Blade. I’m guessing that most of what he’ll be posting is going to be fairly technical stuff about MySQL, LAMP, AJAX, and JSON. So far his first really interesting post is a MySQL Triggers Tutorial. It’s actually a bit better than the help page on mysql.com, and if you know what a trigger is in Microsoft SQL and have always wanted the same functionality in MySQL, you should give it a read.

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. It’s The Matrix, starring Kermit the Frog as Neo.

After I shot a (pathetic) 51 at Penmar yesterday, I scooted to Nagao to grab dinner. On the way home, with five steaming cups of miso and several orders of sushi riding shotgun, I popped into the Brentwood Blockbuster because my girlfriend wanted to watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin. My BB account expired sometime around 1998 so I had to buy a copy. The not-very-helpful Blockbusterista said that there were four used copies in the store, but he had no idea where they were, things weren’t alphabetized well, it wasn’t his “usual” store, and he could only sell me a new one for $21.99. Yeah, right.

After spending a good twenty minutes browsing through stacks of dozens of copies of The Adventures of Pluto Nash and the assorted random not-very-good movies that always seem to be all that any BB ever has, I left empty-handed.

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I happen to be one of the (apparently very few) people in this country that has not only read the Constitution of the United States, but also understands it and — by gosh! — thinks it’s a pretty good way to run a country. So I tend to get really, really upset when presented with a “law” that I know is not a law.

At fozbaca.org I found a link to an excellent article written by a U.S. citizen about how to fly without any identification. You do realize that there is no “law” that says you must present ID to get on a plane, right? According to this article, the airlines just want to make sure you’re not using someone else’s frequent flyer miles. They blame it on the government because, well, just about everyone is a sucker.

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Now is a very good time to go and read what I wrote five years ago.

And when you’re done with that, go watch Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on 9/11. [link via letsgetnuts]

Akron beat the Wolfpack. Tennessee almost drops one to Air Force. FSU has to rally to beat Troy. Spurrier is held scoreless. Texas’ offense plays like a wounded quail. I don’t even know where to begin. One thing is certain: The best team in the country didn’t take the field this weekend. I know Ohio State. I’ve watched Ohio State. Ohio State is no USC. And FSU does not deserve to be in the top ten right now. Come on. Troy?

Here’s how I’d have ‘em ranked after just watching UT fold like a cheap suit. The Week 2 AP and USA/Today rankings are noted.

1. USC [AP 3, USA 3]
2. Auburn [4, 4]
3. Florida [7, 7]
4. Ohio State [1, 1]
5. LSU [8, 8]
6. Notre Dame [4, 5]
7. West Virginia [6, 5]
8. Georgia [12, 11]
9. Michigan [10, 13]
10. Texas [2, 2]