Tag: Change

The Internet President

As a “web guy,” I now have even more reason to like Barack Obama as a soon-to-be-president than I did already. His website was no small part of his extremely effective and well-organized campaign, and I am pleased to see that he plans to continue to use the Internet as a core component of his approach to governing once he takes office. To wit: Change.gov, the official site of the “Obama-Biden Transition Project.”

As I’ve been saying for the past couple weeks, in a to-the-point if less-than-genteel way, he’s got his shit together. And as they say in Australia, “good on him.” 2009 is going to be an interesting year.

Intellivizune

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more that things change, the more they stay the same.

—Rush, “Circumstances”
Hemispheres (1978)

Today Microsoft announced the new Zune line, intended to compete with the iPod nano. Immediately when I saw it, the elongated form factor and weirdish looking “Zune pad” control device brought to mind another questionably designed technological also-ran from yesteryear.

P.S. Yes, I know Neil Peart did not invent the phrase “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” But I can’t hear it without thinking of that song.

WordPress is great, but the documentation leaves a little to be desired…

Alas, the woes of using open source software rear their heads. WordPress abounds with undocumented, or at least very poorly documented, features.

My dilemma: the default function for displaying a list of page links (used on this site to populate the Points of Interest panel in the sidebar) sorts links alphabetically, and there isn’t any obvious way to make it sort by the database’s menu_order field, which logically, to me at least, should be the default especially given that this is how they’re sorted in the admin tool.

Finding little help in the documentation or by my usual means (Google), I decided it couldn’t be done without modification. In my previous installation of WordPress I actually modified the core code itself to change the sort order, but when I upgraded to version 2.1.1 today, it overwrote that change. This time I decided to try the plug-in approach, so my changes would actually stick through version changes, and so I could get familiar with the powerful but arcane plug-in system WordPress uses for extensibility.

After poking around futilely trying to get my plug-in to work (to the point where it was sorting all of my blog posts the way I wanted the pages to be, but not the page list), I stumbled upon a relevant post in the WordPress forums, where a snide jab at “theme designers” (which seemed to be such a broad swipe that it included me) happened to mention an input parameter in the function that calls the page list!

Silly me… the system has built right in a very simple way to sort the list by whatever field you want, and all you have to do is pass in the right parameters in your theme files. The change couldn’t have been simpler… but learning that it was possible certainly could have!

Top 5 Albums of 2005

OK, I realize that we are now precisely (give or take the days various Caesars stole from February) halfway through 2006, but I still haven’t gotten around to compiling my list of the top 5 albums of 2005. I think I actually did start one back in December but I couldn’t narrow it down, or I couldn’t be bothered to care to finish it or… something.

5. Beck: Guero: A lot of the same critics who praised 2002’s Sea Change for its growth came back to declare Guero a grand return to form over what they now called dark and depressing. Get over it! I actually liked Sea Change better, but anything from Beck is good.
4. Porcupine Tree: Deadwing: Speaking of anything from being good, here we have Porcupine Tree, without a doubt the most undeservingly underheard band around today. This album is so good I can’t even write a coherent sentence about it.
3. Foo Fighters: In Your Honor: Great album. At first I thought the idea of splitting all of the acoustic/mellow tracks onto one CD and all of the rockers onto another was a risky idea, but it actually works out great. The pair complement each other well, and are perfectly suitable soundtracks for diametrically-opposed moods.
2. Coldplay: X&Y: A lot of people I know hate Coldplay, and I just don’t get it. Perhaps they’re overrated now, and it’s just that I started to get into them before they got really big, but I think their music is full of great melodies and atmospheres.
1. Coheed and Cambria: Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness: OK, this one had to win simply for the fact that these guys had the cojones to give their album such a title. C’mon guys, it’s not 1974! Unabashed prog rock seems to be making a comeback, but unlike the slightly more successful Mars Volta, these guys don’t pad each track out with aimless noodling filler (and I usually like bloat-prog).