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 Monday, July 15, 2002
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Beware editing item templates in Radio
Once again I was editing the itemTemplate in Radio, and I managed to make some error in the HTML that caused Radio to start crashing as soon as it loaded. Luckily, I had backed up my whole Radio directory before working on it, so I was able to recover fairly easily, but it speaks to a certain fragility of the system. Moral: Make backups before doing anything tricky with Radio. Heck, before doing anything besides posting.
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What are they up to now?
What is the Bush administration up to now? According to a US government website, http://www.citizencorps.gov/, they are setting up Operation TIPS:
Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. Operation TIPS, a project of the U.S. Department of Justice, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities that will be selected. Operation TIPS, involving 1 million workers in the pilot stage, will be a national reporting system that allows these workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize unusual events, to report suspicious activity.
On one hand, this makes a lot of sense. Why not have one Federal Government contact point that people can report "suspicious" activity to? On the other hand, it is very reminiscent of the Communist bloc "Neighborhood Watch" committees, where 10% of the population was set to spy on the other 90%. And, to quote Declan McCullagh of Politechbot, "Why is it that the most revealing news reports about the USA are coming nowadays form the UK, Aussie, and other non-USA media?" This one was first reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, of all places.
Well, I am volunteering, and I encourage you all to do the same. Although be warned when you do - Mozilla asserts that the FEMA certificate on the site is not valid - perhaps somebody else is intercepting the offers to volunteer?
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Gallery Rocks
Like so many other people, I got a digital camera this year, and have re-discovered the joys of photography. I love the instant feedback, and the fact that there is no penalty for making a mistake. Plus I have a beautiful child, and I love taking pictures of him.
In the last year I have taken hundreds of pictures, and I have been trying to figure out how to display them. I spent hours trying dozens of desktop Windows applications, and none of them produced what I wanted -- clean simple html for several pages of thumbnails, with each thumbnail linked to medium and then a large sized version of the picture. Then I found Gallery, a php server side application. It does exactly what I wanted. I installed it, uploaded the pictures, used the "captionator" to add captions to the thumbnails, and voila - a beautiful gallery. A great application, if you have an account on a server that supports PHP. The only downside to Gallery is that the documentation is currently almost non-existent. If it doesn't work, you are hosed. Plus it advertises all kinds of cool customization features that I will end up trying, but as far as I can tell they aren't documented anywhere. With that caveat, highly recommended.
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Mozilla rocks
For years I used Netscape Navigator because that is what I had started with, and because I avoid using Microsoft products whenever there is a decent alternative (see www.thebishop.net for reasons, if they aren't obvious. When I started doing a lot of web work professionally and personally, I got so frustrated with Netscape's bugs that I switched over to IE and Opera.
Well, I recently downloaded Mozilla, and after a week of playing with it, I have to say that it rocks and it is ready for prime time. I have a lot of customizations of IE (i.e. IE spell, Google toolbar, surfsave, etc) that will be hard to part with, but today I made Mozilla my default browser. I am looking forward to seeing what improvements people make on it, and what plug-ins they develop.
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© Copyright 2002 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
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