Josh’s Commonplace

Renee French is a favorite illustrator, and I like this poor fellow she recently posted at her sketch blog.

Meanwhile Caerwyn Jones was making pretty things resembling Plan 9’s acme UI.

These were my fish. We photographed them yesterday morning to mark their growth at mid-summer. We even documented how they’d let me tickle them with a finger as they fed.

LtoR: big medium Eric, black Eric, medium Eric aka Lucky, small Eric

All but one were butchered by raccoons last night, and their home completely destroyed.

That’s what I’d have called it, but wordpress/extend/themes appears to finally be in real business.

Friends of the project added Simplish to the directory today, in a new 1.3.3 version that fixes a couple problems and improves support for image captions in WordPress 2.6.

…in its officially-packaged release (June 10). Congrats to Noel (eight6) and Automattic on Monotone’s warm reception. Demos of the theme are at monotonedemo.wordpress.com, or our testing area.

Update 3: As monotone author Noel Jackson notes in comment below, automattic’s svn rev 1038 fixes anything above; you can checkout and run the code from Automattic, patchless. Noel runs eight6.com, a cool detroit design studio that produced monotone for the WordPress.com/Automattic folks, and which I mention now because I didn’t before.

Update 2: Better yet, pics back in feeds in the latest SVN code from Automattic. Just svn update to r 1029 for the functions.php changes.

Update: Once I had monotone working under MU here, I spent a few seconds with google and found that D’arcy Norman had gotten monotonous yesterday - his post has a patch to functions.php to bring back images in RSS feeds under the theme, and his newly-themed photoblog has nicer pictures than mine.

WordPress.com released their monotone theme for use on wordpress.com blogs last week. It has a tidy concept that resembles Brianna’s experimental Moods work a few years ago at her web site. Intended for photoblogging, monotone dynamically coordinates the page color scheme with the content, sampling the colors in uploaded images to frame each one in appropriate tones.

In action: http://labs.utopian.net/blogs/tonepoem/

I’ll be moving some of my photos to a new blog using this theme in a bit. Before I do, here’s the rundown on how to run the theme outside of WordPress.com on your own self-hosted WordPress, or your MU blog community.

1. Since monotone hasn’t been officially packaged and released yet, check out the code from Automattic’s subversion repositories:

# svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone

2. Make a simple change to header.php to make the archive and about page links work correctly. (You don’t need to bother if your WordPress lives at your document root, or if you’d rather just edit static links into your single blog’s header; but running MU, I needed it.) You can apply this patch, or just manually change lines 38 and 39 as indicated therein, so that the resulting header.php looks like this one. The patch adds a call to bloginfo('url') to the page link code, rather than assuming the blog is at /. It works only with “pretty URL” permalinks (the default for MU).

Taking good photographs is much harder than that 5-minute process.

Examples of bad email subject lines:

• News
• Hey
• Hey! <- not just bad, exclamatorily awful
• Today
•           <- See how little sense that one makes?
• Computer

Examples of good email subject lines:

• Grandma Injured in Fall
• Puppy Shipment Notice
• Utopian.net Invoice: PHP Programming example.com
• Utopian.net Invoice: Hosting Subscription <- notice the clever use of a series!
• Summary Notice to Cease and Desist Libelous Publication

You get the idea. It’s not like this hasn’t been covered at length. It’s in the RFC, from 1983:

The Subject line … should be suggestive enough of the contents of the article to enable a reader to make a decision whether to read the article based on the subject alone. -RFC 850, Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages

WordPress 2.5 features a new built-in gallery function that’s a boon especially to entry-level photobloggers (like me). Anyway, we tested it out for about a month internally then deployed 2.5 to choice blogs on the utopian.net circle and found that… galleries weren’t working.

Some tracing with help from the much-more PHP-astute Brianna found trouble around the dark wizardry of PHP’s magic_quotes_gpc (a feature so ill-advised it is no longer extant in PHP 6). So we turned it off at labs, and pending testing may abandon it elsewhere.

If you can’t turn it off (if you are a utopian.net shared hosting customer in the next 2-3 days, for instance) you can try out a patch to wp-includes/media.php:355. Once you apply that, you’ll need to patch wp-includes/post.php:475 as well. Then the built-in galleries will work with a magic_quotes On PHP environment.

This is all good old-fashioned backslashin’ fun, if you’re curious. I wasn’t, so much. In this case the code is trying to write back to the browser and magic_quotes wants to eat the characters, despite their being less offensive in this context. MySQL errors were generated. Software was recalcitrant.

But here at Labs/blogs, we updated tonight to the latest subversion revision of the WordPress-µ code, and as shown in my photos page, the galleries are working multi-user style.

Another Russ entirely, MIT and Plan 9 guy Russ Cox, has a blog new since January. His latest sees Plan 9 services supporting legacy systems with great backups on SHA1 hashes in the form of venti(8), an archival storage server with which Cox is intimately familiar.

I’ve never actually called my father that - growing up where and as I did, you either try to be a redneck or try not to be, and I tended toward the latter - but I liked the contrapuntal with my last title.

From the vaults of YouTube and some ESPN archive, my father, Russ Wood, drives the #57 Oldsmobile on the 36º banks of Bristol Motor Speedway in 1995, in the NASCAR All Pro Series PowerAde 250:

He started 16th of 33 and finished 22nd, but with an intact race car and holding ground in the points championship. 1995 was Russ’s second complete season with this national tour — something like double-A baseball in the racing world. 1996 would be the last one, as he returned to regional competition and driver development with my younger brother and the next generation of drivers in my family.

I wasn’t on top of the cart for this race. In fact, it’s the only one of about 75 All Pro Series starts my father made that I watched from the stands. I was discovering the idiotic pleasures of wasting time like a teenager, and this was the first race where I shirked pit duties for a reason other than school.

Dr. Jerry Punch has the call from the booth, a familiar voice you can hear on ESPN race coverage still. Punch always chatted with Russ or someone else in our small-time team back then, every TV race I can remember. Of course, maybe it had something to do with Dad telling him I was the adopted illegitimate son of his main rival in the tight ‘94 rookie-of-the-year battle, Ron Barfield. Trying to take a page from the book of politics and beat him with a scandal. Or something.

We often have new hosting customers who arrive with a domain name already registered. Too often, they’ve registered that name with godaddy.com. I don’t blame the customers (the first time) — you can’t escape GoDaddy’s ubiquitous, bargain-bin, god-awful gaudy advertising.

GoDaddy is the worst company I have ever worked with, in any industry, at any time, on any issue, in my entire career. Seriously — Microsoft will treat you straighter, and Enron had stronger ethics. From answering technical support requests with sales pitches, to ignoring their customers for months, to a variety of censorship and misleading terms of service, GoDaddy should go directly to jail.

Tonight a customer’s new domain name, parked at GoDaddy awaiting new nameservers, was used by GoDaddy to advertise for several of their porn-providing partners:

If your parents or children aren’t around, jump to that second URL — I dare ya. Fine, they advertise all over their parked sites, with all their javascript obfuscation and the like. Do they have to advertise full-tilt gag-porn? Do they have permission to place pornographic advertising on domains nominally owned by their customers?

I’m not raising a legal issue, nor am I opposed to pornography. No, what I think of GoDaddy is, to my mind, much more damning: GoDaddy is unimaginably tacky (if you couldn’t tell from their design ethic).

Note: These opinions are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Utopian.net.

Google static maps, Paros:

Plan 9 - get an ISO and run Plan 9 on several hardware platforms (as usual, x86 is the initial path of least resistance), or in a virtual machine.

Inferno - itself a VM with software-protected processes that runs atop both common operating systems and on hardware, even hardware without an MMU. Inferno revolves around Limbo, a type-safe language in which the system and applications for it are implemented.

Acme-SAC - Caerwyn’s “acme stand-alone complex” is Inferno repackaged with acme(1) as user interface. If you’re like roughly 100% of people running a common operating system, this is probably the easiest way to see some nifty Plan 9/Inferno action. While acme provides the entire interface, a complete Inferno environment is available. Acme-SAC currently runs atop Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Plan9port - Russ Cox’s 9 environment - not emulated - for Linux-Unix systems (I like someone else’s term, lunix). P9p includes a bunch of Plan 9 programs ported to run on lunix, as well as libraries and development tool front-ends to create software based on ported Plan 9 facilities.

Libixp - a 9P client/server library for POSIX-ish systems, for linking into your lunix programs. (9P is the unifying Plan 9 file protocol, called Styx in Inferno contexts. See here and here.)

Web9 (including PHP9P, PHP bindings to libixp, above) - making 9P available for web application development.

This is no exhaustive list; there are a number of 9P implementations.