“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think I know, I’ll use regular expressions. Now they have two problems.”
— Jamie Zawinskitrollbridge
Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light has a charming way of dealing with obnoxious commenters: she disemvowels them. This seems to be far more effective than simply trying to delete their comments or ban their IP addresses. She apparently does it by hand, in BBEdit. Bryant liked the idea enough to make a plugin that automatically strips the vowels out of comments coming from a specific set of IP addresses.
I don’t have any comments to deal with at the moment, but the concept amused me, and I wanted to start tinkering with the guts of MT, so I quickly knocked together a plugin that allows you to mark individual entries for disemvoweling. While I was at it, I included another way to molest obnoxious comments.
MTRoundRobin
Simple little MT plugin, created as a generalized alternative to FlipFlop.
Given a list of keywords to be substituted into the template, each
call to
The Passing of Tom Emmett
[excerpted from John M. Browning, American Gunmaker, by John Browning and Curt Gentry. © 1964 by the Browning Co. and Curt Gentry.]
The Brownings depended on Tom Emmett for all odd jobs, either at the store or in their homes. He professed no specialized skill but would tackle any job and get it done. On this day he was up on a stepladder near the ceiling of the shop, by the line shaft, taking measurements. His job kept him near the shaft for so short a time that he did not ask to have the power shut off. Nobody paid any attention to what he was doing, except John. He remarked to Ed, “Tom shouldn’t be working up there with the power on.” Ed looked over his shoulder and said, “Oh, he’ll be through in a minute, and I need the lathe.” It happened just then, while John was looking straight at Tom.
Why I'm not a Switcher
I own two Windows machines that I rarely turn on any more. Even at work, the only thing I use Windows for is handling expense reports and accepting meeting invitations. I own two Macintoshes and an iPod (well, two, but only ’til I find a home for the old 10GB model), and I’ll almost certainly buy a dual 2GHz G5 later this year.
I spend most of my time using Macs these days, but I insist that I am not a Switcher. Why not? Because the Switch ads aren’t about technology; they’re about validation. For years, Mac users have been the whipping-boy of the mainstream computing world, and they’ve responded with a “cold, dead hands” attitude and a cultlike devotion to all things Apple. The Switch ads play up to that.
"Hey, is this thing on?"
So, after months of benign neglect and minor catastrophes, I’m updating my web sites again. We got the old munitions.com server back intact, I’ve upgraded the machine to OpenBSD 3.3, and I’ve moved this page into Movable Type. I’m even reasonably happy with the layout.
I’ve got lots of abandoned projects to resurrect, the most popular of which is of course my photo archive. I think I still get at least 20,000 hits a day from people who want it back, but the hate mail has tapered off.
Fun with iTunes Music Store
The LXG soundtrack sounded promising enough that I decided to support the iMS exclusive release of it. There was some other stuff sitting in my shopping cart, so I bought it all, synced the iPod, and drove to work.
You wouldn’t think that LXG, Dean Martin, Liz Phair, John Philip Sousa, and Ray Brown would make a good driving mix, but it worked.
Now that's a smart debugger!
Got a report today that a certain featured news article wasn’t displaying correctly on our boxes, due to some kind of Javascript error. When I read the details, I laughed out loud.
The article was titled “Sexless Marriage.”
The debug output from the box was “missing builtin member.”
How not to write a job description...
…1995 Edition. This is what happens when your senior sysadmin leaves, and there’s no one left with even a tiny grasp of what the job involves. It happened to OSU-CIS; don’t let it happen to you!
