geek

Some unpublicized LJ features

Posted on by grahams

A few people on my friends list have been using these new features, but I don’t think that many people know about them… There are a few LJ specific HTML tags that have been quietly introduced into the system:

  • <lj user=”username”> is a shortcut that gives you a little userinfo icon that links to the specified user and a link to the users journal, like this: grahams
  • <lj-cut> allows you to hide part of your journal behind a “Read More” link. The tag, and all text following it will be replaced by a “Read More” link… Clicking on the link will reveal the hidden text.
  • lj://user/username is a quick URL that gets rewritten on the server to http://www.livejournal.com/users/username.
  • And of course, there are the semi new-fangled poll tags.

Just figured some of y’all might like to know that… By the way, it does piss me off that these standalone tags don’t conform to the XML standard, but I can’t do anything about it.. :)

Hehehe

Posted on by grahams

I heard that in order to confuse the napster-kiddies who stole the song before the album came out, instead of singing the lyric to their first single “I’ve got my hash-pipe”, Weezer instead sang “I’ve got my half-pipe”. I like the song better that way. :)

I like how applying a security patch to IE (which I don’t even use) requires me to reboot my god damned computer.

Interesting Weekend

Posted on by grahams

I get 12 free dialup hours through bluelight.com, which lets me check my email over weekends until the DSL comes through. So here I write…

When I got home from work on Friday, there was this cat kinda chilling in the stairwell, which was extrodinarily peculiar, because it was behind the second (locked) door to the building. I assumed it belonged to someone in the building, and thought nothing of it. When I saw it there a few hours later, I started worrying. I posted a note on the door, and asked around.

Friday night I had my first real get together-type-thing here at the new apartment, and Steve Bower, Adam, Molly, Rory, and Frances came over for food, drink, and B.S. It was cool, cuz I hadn’t seen Steve in about a year. Saturday morning the cat was still around, so Molly and Adam took it to make sure it was fed. It turns out that the girl in apartment 2 left for the weekend, and the cat must have scooted out past her when she was leaving. All is well now, but I think Molly was getting attached to the idea of owning the cat. :(

Saturday, I went out to Harvard Square to meet up with Jon Whitney and see Fellini’s Satyricon at the Brattle, which I had seen a long time ago, but didn’t really remember. It was allegedly a new print with the original un-edited subtitles, but the print seemed a bit beat up for a new one (tape, scratches, etc). The movie is definately out there, and it left me a little screwy for the rest of the night. After the movie I met some more of Jon’s friends, which was cool. I wasn’t feeling very well though, so I left early. I made it home in time to catch Walken n’ Weezer on SNL, both of which were great. The new Weezer album is growing on me more with each listen…

The Sopranos season finished tonight, and in retrospect I am very happy with this season. It was the darkest season of the three, but I think all in all it was better than the 2nd season, while perhaps a bit shy of the first. Rory came over to watch it with me, and we also watched the hit-man documentary afterwards.

This cold-illness-type-thing is waning, but it is still annoying. I want it to go away, so I am gonna hit the sack.

NSPR is Neat

Posted on by grahams

Ok, I was here until around 7pm last night, which was a terrible choice, because there are home games at Fenway all this week… It was hell trying to walk the block between work and the Kenmore station against the baseball sidewalk traffic… I came into work later today planning to leave some time after 7:30p.. Hopefully the commute will be a bit simpler then, but who knows…

NSPR is pretty interesting, even if I am only using a limited subset of its functionality. I am working on modifying a load test client for one of our server packages. Originally, the test client compressed the data using Zlib, then sent it out over an SSL client… This put a lot of strain on our servers, and to see if there would be a benefit in using one of the hardware SSL accelerators out there, we decided to remove SSL from the client/server. Unfortunately, SSL and Compression were tied together pretty tightly in the test client, so I am rewriting quite a bit. One of the cool things about the I/O part of NSPR is that it allows you to add layers to the sockets, so I am adding a compression layer, and later I will remove the compression from the old SSL layer. Then we will be able to add the 2 layers in any combination with any other layers we dream up in the process.

Out to lunch

Posted on by grahams

Going out for lunch with Chuck…

In case anyone wondered what the “Not sending the BMessage” problem I was having with my skinned button control… When I overrided BControl::AttachedToWindow() I forgot to invoke the original AttachedToWindow (which meant that the Target wasn’t being set as it is supposed to).

Well?

Posted on by grahams

What’s new? First of all, Black & White is by far one of the most beautiful, well produced, fun, revolutionary games I have ever played. It definately deserved all the hype it garnered.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a good movie, don’t get me wrong, but it is incredibly overrated. I was reluctant to go see it because it was sold as a fighting/kung-fu film. But then many, many, people convinced me that it was poorly advertised and it wasn’t truly a kung-fu movie. Well, those people are simply wrong. It is impossible to truly call this movie anything other than a kung-fu movie. But that doesn’t make it bad, it just isn’t my cup of tea. The fencing/sword scenes were exquisite, some of the best I have ever seen. But, as I suspected, the wire work was as lame as I presumed. It completely breaks the suspension of disbelief, simply because it doesn’t look natural in any form. If humans were able to fly around, I can’t imagine we would do it by flailing our legs back and forth… But whatever…

Crouching Tiger was a fighting movie… Perhaps it was a fighting movie with great acting and direction, and perhaps it was a fighting movie with a slightly larger plot framework than other fighting films (although I don’t think the plot was that strong, but it is still a fighting movie. And again, that doesn’t make it bad… It was a good film, and one of the best movies of the genre I have seen, but it just pisses me off that people tried to sell me on the movie by convincing me it wasn’t a fighting movie.

Good night

Posted on by grahams

Going to bed now… I spent a few hours tonight working on the playlist editor… I solved the BPictureButton flickering bug; i stopped using BPictureButton. :) I instead wrote my own derivative of BControl that instead takes a BBitmap and gives me way more control over the whole situation (and gets rid of the silly need for the BPicture, which I still don’t quite understand).

Anyway, my “SkinButton” class works exactly like BButton except for one thing, it isn’t firing off its BMessage when it is clicked upon. I am calling Invoke() in MouseDown() as the docs tell me to… I will have to crank on it tomorrow, but I am happy with what I accomplished tonight. I think I have my GUI teeth sharpened again. :P

Time to go to peaceful slumberland now, perhaps after reading some bookage. Hopefully sleep will come easier tonight.