I made both of my kids go to bed early tonight. Neither made a fuss about it though.
Author: Kevin Lawver
-
Wrong Is Wrong
CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons\
How do we justify this? If this is against the law, both US law, and treaties we’ve agreed to as a country, and the President can’t sign a “finding” that breaks the law – how were we able to do this? Why didn’t someone in the government put a stop to it?\
Are we so far gone as a country, so without ethics, so without a moral compass, that we’re not all outraged by this? We’re in the business of torture.\
I’m ashamed of my government. It’s time for us, as a nation, to take a long hard look at ourselves, and how our government represents us.\
We should demand better. There are solutions to terrorism and to the other problems that plague us that don’t require torture and don’t require us to turn against our better nature.\
Shame on us for not demanding better. Shame on us for re-electing the fools who brought us here. Shame on us and Congress and our courts for not holding them accountable. -
Blogroll Changes
I know, you probably didn’t even know I had one, did you? But, I do, and it’s been updated. I used to use Bloglines to import it on the page, but I realized that that’s ALL I used Bloglines for, and it was a pain. So, I’m doin’ it myself now. I’m taking the OPML file exported from NetNewsWire and transforming it with XSL into the unordered list you see on the page. I’ve put more details and the files (so you can try it yourself if you want) on the blogroll.\
Is it revolutionary or even all that interesting? Nope. But, my foot hurts, the pain pills make me stupid and sleepy and this is what I do in between the extremes of the two (stupid and sleepy).\
Oh, and last night, I organized my del.icio.us tags and got the latest version of Cocoalicious so I can keep all my links organized (because they weren’t before, you know).\
If I can’t sleep tonight, I might play with doing something fun with my Flickr photosets or maybe something else. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just watch more bad movies. -
My Boys: Halloween Edition
My boys, taken by their Aunt Heather. Brian was a dinorsaur and Max was a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup, breaking his three year streak as Spiderman.\
We’re not sure what kind of dinosaur Brian was. He was either the fearsome Droolosaur, or the tame and cuddly Brianosaur.\
I’m sorry I missed it all, but they sure were cute. Brian in his costume was one of the cutest things ever. -
Gore Gore Gore
And I’m not talking about the 2000 election. Yeah, I’m totally over it by now. This is my favorite picture of my poor ankle. That incision is impressive, isn’t it? It’s three times longer than my ACL scar. It’s longer than Jen’s caesarian scar (she said I should post that bit of info).\
I’m stuck on the couch for at least another week, foot elevated the whole time, no doing anything except stuff I can do on the couch while drugged up (hence the tag experiments from last night). I wonder what I’ll do tonight when I can’t sleep any more, I’m uncomfortable and I’ve watched all the DVD’s in the house… -
First Post-Op Appointment
I went to see Dr. Wilson this morning for my first post-op appointment. I took pictures. Warning, they’re pretty cool (cool = gross).
-
Movable Type Categories As Tag Cloud
Like yesterday’s post about del.icio.us tag clouds, this was an experiment because I was bored. I figured it was so easy to make the link tag cloud, it should be almost as easy to create one from my categories. The challenge is that I have almost 1600 entries (actually, this is #1600!): so many that I don’t want the number of entries in a category to correspond directly to the text size (because 200em is really big).\
All it took was a little PHP on top of the tags to do the category list.\
Of course, this will only work if you can use PHP on your server (and why can’t you, huh huh huh), and if you publish the page as a PHP file. You may want to change the way it increments numbers to get the right scale between categories. Play, and if you end up using it, please post a comment so I can come check it out.\
Here’s what I did (of course, this is the “meat” – you have to add the rest of the page around it):<code> <ul class="tags"> <MTCategories show_empty="0" sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend"> <? $count = <MTCategoryCount>; $fontSize = 1; for ( $i=1;$i<10; $i++ ) { if ( $count > $i ) { $fontSize = $fontSize + .1; } } for ( $i = 10; $i < 300; $i=$i+20 ) { if ( $count > $i ) { $fontSize++; } } ?> <li> <a href="<MTCategoryArchiveLink>" title="<MTCategoryCount> Entries" style="font-size:<?= $fontSize ?>em"><MTCategoryLabel></a> </li> </MTCategories> </ul> </code>
The CSS is pretty much the same as yesterday, although I’ve tweaked it just a little since then:
<code>ul.tags { list-style:none; text-align:justify; } ul.tags li { display:inline; padding:0 .3em; }</code>
-
Late Night Markup Tip
Tired of writing markup? Make too many stupid mistakes, like unclosed tags, unescaped ampersands, unquoted attributes, etc? Stop writing markup in a plain old text editor and switch to an XML editor!\
I’ve been using OxygenXML to write markup for several months now and I find that I make far fewer mistakes there than I did when I wrote everything in BBEdit. I love the one click validated, pretty print, and that it has good code highlighting for other languages (its PHP highlighting is especially good).\
Using an XML editor should save you keystrokes too. Oxygen closes my tags for me, and shows attributes in bright red when they’re not closed. It even goes back and highlights the opening tag when your cursor is at the end tag. Nice.\
Yeah, it’s midnight and I’m awake. Gotta wait twenty more minutes before my pain pill, then it’s sleepy time. -
Importing Your Del.icio.us Tag Cloud In Movable Type
Someone on the Movable Type ProNet list asked how to import their del.icio.us tag cloud into thier blog a couple days ago, and since I’m stuck here on the couch, I’d see if I could figure out an easy way to do it… and you know what, there is!\
All you need to install is the very cool MTGetXML plugin, and create yourself a new index template. The important bit to add is this:<code><ul class="tags"> <MTGetXML keeproot="0" location="http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@del.icio.us/api/tags/get?" cache="60"> <MTGetXMLElement name="tag"> <li style="font-size:<MTGetXMLValue name="count">em"> <a href="http://del.icio.us/USERNAME/<MTGetXMLValue name="tag" encode_url="1">" title="<MTGetXMLValue name="count"> links"> <MTGetXMLValue name="tag"> </a> </li> </MTGetXMLElement> </ul></code>
* USERNAME = del.icio.us username
* PASSWORD = del.icio.us password\
Here’s what my CSS looks like to get my tag cloud to look the way it does:<code>ul.tags { list-style:none; text-align:justify; } ul.tags li { display:inline; padding:0 .3em; }</code>
And in case you missed the link earlier, here’s what it looks like. Enjoy!\
Update: And because I couldn’t sleep, I did the same thing with my categories. It was a little more involved (because I have some categories with more than 100 entries in them, I didn’t map them right to font sizes, so I had to do MATH!). I kinda like it. It takes some PHP (for the math bits), but it’s almost as easy. I’ll post my template for it later. -
5 In The Morning and Can’t Sleep? Time To Mess Up Your Blog!
I got about two hours of sleep. It’s really hard to sleep with a foot that’s on fire.\
You may notice a couple different things if you read the main page of the site. I’ve added a couple links, and moved some stuff around. What’s cool, is it took very little markup changes to do what I wanted. With the new three column layout, things were feeling a little cramped. So, on the main page, the stuff that used to be on the right is now at the bottom under the entries. It should clear out some room for the content and make it easier to read.\
The best part is that the different formatting of the menu on the home page is almost entirely CSS. I had to move the markup down there on the homepage (it’s just an include), and I needed to fix a couple url-encoding bugs to get the page to validate again, but to get the pics, links and feeds to line up the way I wanted just meant some descendant selectors from #body. Mmmm, I love CSS.\
I think it’s time for more pain pills…