Month: January 2005

First Mac

Posted on by david

With it being the 21st anniversary of the Macintosh (take yours out for a drink – it’s legal now) and after seeing the original announcement video, I’ve got a question: What was your first Mac?

Mine was a Mac SE (System Expandable) with dual floppies and 1 MB of RAM.

Primary machine timeline: Mac SE >> Mac SE30 >> Mac IIcx >> Mac IIx >> PowerBook 5300 >> PowerBook 1400 >> PowerMac G3 (B&W) >> PowerBook G3 (Pismo) >> PowerBook G4 (Titanium) >> PowerBook G4 (17″ Aluminum)

Obviously, there’s been lots of others (secondary desktop machines and servers) but these were my primary work machines.

Snow gear porn

Posted on by david

Getting all hot and sweaty over macho snow gear, Gizmodo posted this yesterday:

tread_snowblow.jpg

As luck would have it, Halifax just got blasted by another blizzard and my brother-in-law sent us pictures (Thanks James! And yes, the Mac mini is a good replacement for your PC :-)). Here’s one of the tank snow-blower in action:

snow_blow.jpg

It does make the 10-15 cm we are expecting tonight feel kinda wimpy though.

Nofollow followup

Posted on by david

Well, folks plenty smarter than me are beginning to wade in on the rel=”nofollow” debate with a greater depth of insight than: Hmm, something new to install. Cool!

It turns out that wide spread use of rel=”nofollow” may have unintended consequences that are not particularly good. Not good at all. Pretty bad in fact. Horribly world crushingly soul destroyingly bad actually. Well, not really that bad. But pretty bad anyway.

But, not knowing one way or the other, I’m gonna utilize the fence sitters salvation. That being the wait and see approach. I hope those smart people get their act together soon though. This fence is uncomfortable.

nofollow, php, and Jaguar

Posted on by david

Google, Yahoo and MSN have the blogsphere abuzz with the news that they will ignore links containing rel=”nofollow” when calculating page ranks. The hope is that (when used on links in blog comments) this will diminish the incentive for comment spam. I’m not terribly optimistic, but it is worth a shot.

New WordPress plugin – old PHP

Clint Ecker dissected the MovableType plugin and re-implemented it as a WordPress plugin. I downloaded it, activated it and received this error:

Warning: Wrong parameter count for preg_grep() in /srv/www/siriux.net/html-data/wp-content/plugins/wpNofollow.php on line 29<br />
Warning: Bad arguments to join() in /srv/www/siriux.net/html-data/wp-content/plugins/wpNofollow.php on line 30

It turns out that the plugin requires PHP 4.2 or greater, unfortunately the box that hosts this blog is running Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2.x) and it’s version of PHP is hopelessly obsolete. I’ve been meaning to update but haven’t quite got around to it, this seemed like as good a time as any.

Upgrading is easy! 😐

I found clear instructions for upgrading PHP to 4.3 here. I grabbed the PHP 4.3.10 archive from php.net and commenced with the install. Sadly, make died on the Zend/zend_strtod.c file. A little searching showed that PHP 4.3.10 cannot be built on OS X, instead I had to grab the latest stable snapshot from the CVS.

Still needs tweaking…

I’ve tested the WordPress plugin, and it seems to work, but it will only recognize URL’s in the body of the comment (without hacking the wp-comment file) and only if the link is fully formated: <a href=”www.url.domain”>like this<a> and it ignores unadorned links: http://www.url.domain or www.url.domain. Though, I’m sure the last issue will be addressed soon.

Update:

Clint posts: “Hey I just found out the solution, I think I can lower the priority of the filter so that it gets applied last. A priority of 10 should accomplish that.”

So, change the last two lines in wpNofollow.php to:

add_filter('comment_text', 'nofollowfy', 10);
add_filter('comment_excerpt', 'nofollowfy',10);