Just in case you were curious what the OS X Tiger Dashboard picture for “freezing rain” was:

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I’ve been having an issue for the last week or two, where articles that I post to the site with ecto (or, more likely, anything that uses the XMLRPC interface) have a correct timestamp, but are going into the “future posts” section.

On further investigation, it turned out that the post_date_gmt was wrong, by a factor that was exactly the same as my TZ offset (i.e., the post was scheduled to go up 6 hours in the future).  I narrowed it down to either a timezone problem on my system, or a problem with wordpress itself.  A lot of digging later, I’ve got the solution.

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Mario Kart DS has this nifty feature where you can “locate” your friends online for internet-based multiplayer. It’s pretty neat, but Nintendo pretty much requires you to distrubute your friend codes by word-of-mouth; there’s no central repository for friend codes on their site, and they’ve even specifically banned the discussion of trading these codes on their forums. So it’s the old-fashioned way for now, until some enterprising individual decides to make up a site for sharing codes.

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So mere hours after hearing that Wordpress 2.0 (beta) was available, I’m up and running with it.  Looks nice, although none of the changes really show up on the “public” side.  The admin area is now skinned in a slightly more appealing way.  Upgrade was pretty much painless.  Maybe some time soon I’ll see the changelog so I can figure out exactly what changed.

Update: It appears ecto can’t post successfully to WP2 yet. I’m sure it’ll be updated soon, but for now I guess I’ll just post updates the “old-fashioned” way via the admin page.

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Top 20 geek novels – the results! from Guardian Unlimited: Technology:

I think this list is pretty accurate; of the 20 books listed, the only ones I haven’t read are Brave New World, Watchmen, Consider Phlebas, and Trouble With Lichen.  Considering that there were only 132 respondents in the poll, that’s well within my margin of error.

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Not all webcomics, mind.  Just some of the older ones on my list.

User Friendly:

I’m pretty sure UF is the first webcomic that I read on a regular basis.  It’s on my old static bookmarks page, which I haven’t used in a very long time.  But recently, even with the new AJ/Miranda thing, it’s just getting old.  Yeah, I get it.  Microsoft is bad, Linux is good.  Can we get some more inventive plots?

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How to use “Safe Sleep” in OS X: This is the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a while; software-suspend for my iBook G4.  I always hated having to carry around a brick in order to swap batteries on my iBook; it was either that, or be prepared to save everything, shut all the way down to “power off”, swap batteries, and start up again.  Since the latter involves remembering all of the programs you’re using, and starting them back up again, and also remembering what you were doing before you waited 4 minutes for your system to shut down and start up again, I pretty much avoided that plan.  Which required me to carry around a brick: plug the brick into the wall (and the laptop, of course), pull the discharged battery, plug in the new battery, unplug the brick and stow it. This new development means I can just close my laptop, wait for the flashing light, and swap the batteries.  I do see a few seconds extra while waiting for the “sleeping” light to start pulsing (obviously while the contents of memory are written do disc), and a corresponding wait to restore from sleep (when the sleepfile is read into memory).  But that’s a price I’m willing to pay if it means I can have 8 or 9 hours of battery life without having to carry around that brick.

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Given recent decisions, I now feel that I will never have any desire to go to Kansas, and I sure as hell don’t want to raise a family there.

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Holy crap this guy is good with the ol’ yo-yo.

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I finally got a chance to see this movie; I neglected to see it in the theater when it was playing.  But I obtained a copy of the DVD earlier this week, and watched it Thursday evening (CSI was a rerun).

It’s pretty good.  There are some plot points that I don’t quite agree with, mainly the ending, but I did like the fact that it was a lot darker than the previous version (in 1971).  I read the book a couple of times when I was a kid, and I remember it being much less “happy bouncy” than the movie (that is, the 1971 version.  I definitely wasn’t a kid earlier this year when the new one came out).  I did enjoy the “parade of freaks” near the end of the movie, showing the eventual fates of the other four children; that passage in the book really stood out in my memory, and I like the fact that Burton was able to include it in the film. All that said, the “Wonka’s memory” stuff, with the flashbacks and personal history, was pretty much crap.  I’m sure some pretext was necessary in order to give the movie an underlying plot that would appeal to modern audiences, but come on…  his father was a dentist who never loved him, and that’s why he turned out so weird?  Snore.  And the whole “Charlie loves his family” thing?  I mean sure, family values are important and all, but I’m pretty certain that wasn’t brought up in the book.  Charlie definitely didn’t say “no” to Wonka’s offer.

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