It’s been a bit of a process getting this blog update to WordPress 2.1. The hardest part is making sure all your plugins work and figuring out what templet tags have changed or not. I’ve got the CSS of my site cleaned up with some minor tweaks, but I feel like the pages are loading slower now. I don’t know, but there will probably be some minor changes yet to come. Most you probably won’t even notice. Regardless, if you have to make the upgrade, do so very carefully.
Update: I have added a RSS feed for the comments of my blog. I know that I find it pretty handy for other people’s sites, so it was about time to add it to my own. You can find it at the bottom of the sidebar on the main page, or you can take this link and add it to your list of feeds that you pay attention to.
A story that I caught over on BoingBoing has me fascinated. The basic low down is that one night in November of 1987, a couple of TV stations in the Chicago area were hijacked of their signals. This means that someone had the right knowledge and equipment to pull off this amazing stunt. For a brief period of time, people were treated to a guy in a Max Headroom[wiki] mask with a moving background and garbled audio.
You can see the event transpire on WTTW[wiki] as it actually aired during an episode of Doctor Who[wiki] via this YouTube link. I know that if I would have caught this in 1987, when I was nine, I would have been creeped out. Below is a CBS news report detailing the event[wiki].
The fine for a prank like this from the FCC isn’t cheap, and the “masked man” was never found. Getting onto WGN[wiki] is what really blows my mind. Even though that attempt didn’t last very long, you’d have to be close by to get it to work. However, you think someone would notice a bunch of people hauling large pieces of broadcasting equipment around. Also, you can see in both of these video examples that there was at least another person who helped pull this off. Curious that after nearly twenty years, the secret has remained safe.
The BoingBoing post goes on to point to other links that further the background of this story, and I’ll post them here as well because they are nothing short of incredible pieces of underground history. Damn Interesting has an article about the event itself, especially a closer look at the audio from the signal hijack of WTTW. Signaltonoise offers further background on the incident involving Captain Midnight’s hijacking of HBO in the year prior[wiki], which the CBS report mentions above.
I instantly sent this to my former chief engineer at WSUI because he eats up this stuff just like I do. Jim has some experience dealing with the realm of TV as well as radio, and we both worked in tandem with a bunch of TV guys. Of course, he still does.
“This would be much tougher now a days. With the digital links in place the pirate would have to shell out bigger dollars for the digital modulator. Sometimes hackers do find a way to edge into this stuff on the cheap. I kind of remember the hubbub of the day.”
– Jim
As much as TV is changing to a more IP delivered system, you know that this will inspire someone to try something just as daunting. They go to great lengths to keep those systems closed, but nothing is ever secure enough to someone who really wants to stir something up. Just look at what happened during an airing of a press conference with Dick Cheney on CNN in November of 2005. A producer exercised their feelings about him by slapping a big “X” graphic on his face during the live feed, and CNN dropped the producer when it was discovered to not be an accident or technical error.
The human will is a marvelous thing, and this is the most incredible element in all of this. Fines and security won’t stop someone who really wants to stir things up. I would bet that this got a lot harder to do, especially after 1987.
Being someone who uses PodPress with both of the podcasts that I produce, I thought I would pass on a heads up in regards to the recent release of WordPress 2.1. If compatability of this plugin is of a concern to you, then you’ll be interested to know that the plugin has been updated to version 7.1. I did some preliminary testing and can verify that this does work.
I have not upgraded any sites to WP 2.1 yet, but that will be happening over this week. I’m also doing a bit of reprogramming to this site, offline, in order to clean up my CSS and make some other, minor tweaks.
I was thinking about this the other night. This fall will mark ten years since I was a freshman in college. I can’t imagine what it would be like to enter the University of Iowa with the amount of tools that I have at my disposal now. RSS feeds are one thing, and it puts the mandatory subscriptions to newspapers to shame. If you think paying for college is expensive, try being a poor college student and having to shovel out cash for a one year subscription to the New York Times that you’ll only need for about four months.
Then there is Wikipedia. Google is one thing, but a laptop and campus wide Wi-Fi would make life completely insane. Look at the coming iPhone and what that would be like. The Internet is at our fingertips now. Literally!
There I would be, sitting in my introduction to neuroscience[wiki] courses, wondering what I might be able to find about synapses[wiki] that the professor is talking about. I’ll spare you the boredom from there, but that entry sent me on a trip to memory lane about a lot of subjects that I studied back in the day. IPSP’s[wiki], EPSP’s[wiki], protozoa[wiki]…
A recent article in the Guardian speaks about the rise in popularity of Wikipedia and how it seems to be outranking Google. I can’t say that is too far off the mark. I use the two in tandem. If I’m not searching directly on Wikipedia, I’m searching Google for the entry on Wikipedia that I want.
I recall my high school days when the Internet was “installed” in the library. A lot of my teachers disliked the idea of students doing research there. It was ok if we parsed other libraries, online, for information, mainly to find other publications. Taking something we found and applying it to whatever we were assigned to complete through research? They made us cite it in the bibliography with a method that was intended to be excruciating so we’d think twice before finding a website for research about something like “polyvinyl chloride”.
Side note, polyvinyl chloride is the full name of PVC. PVC is a type of plastic. While doing research in the same library that I’ve already mentioned, I also discovered that PVC is a common material used in S&M and fetish costumes. Needless to say, that raised some eyebrows of my instructors. A piece of information that has stuck with me to this day, all because of a trip to my local library. Who knew? Buy hey! There’s a wiki for it!
Wikipedia is handy and an everyday tool for me. Still, I’m a little lost on something. I’ve thought about starting an entry for various things, mainly the podcasts that I’m doing. Is that the correct thing to do, or should one wait for someone else to start a wiki for them? I might go ahead and do it anyway. If that makes me come off as selfish, then so be it.
WordPress 2.1 is officially out for the masses. Check out that link to get all the details about the latest features, changes, and fixes. There’s a bunch.
I know that I don’t have the most amazing domain name for my blog here, but at least it’s not as bad as some of these. Caught wind of this from PC World, and it is the “top ten worst domain names” that, oddly enough, companies actually use.
A few of my favorites…
1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com […]
3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net […]
10. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe ? Try their brochure website at
www.gotahoe.com [easywebbers]
Try them out for yourself. They all work, and some are more legit than others.
Tod Maffin mentioned this on his blog sometime ago, and it’s too much fun to not pass on. Weather Bonk is a great mashup of Google Maps and The Weather Channel, not to mention a variety of other great utilities.
I use a combinations of widgets to get the current weather for Vancouver on my desktop, but the Route Weather is a pretty amazing tool for mapping out the forecast of your road trip. I also love the variety of webcams that you can locate with the map. The site seems to have a pretty good pulse on what is available for nearly every major city in North America.
Be careful. You could end up toying around with this site for hours.
It has appeared to the world at MacWorld Expo, and I’ve watched the keynote to know that it’s freaking sweet. The fact is, you can’t buy one yet. That’s why I find this pop up ad incredibly interesting, even though the sucker seeped through Firefox. “Sign up now to win something that no one can get their hands on yet!” Sounds like… fun?
The iPhone is hot even before anyone can actually buy one. I even made Rebecca watch some of the keynote, and though it was a bit torturous for her, she’ll admit that what she saw was pretty cool. Who knows when we’ll be able to get our hands on one in Canada, but the hype is a bit over the top for me.
2 megapixel camera, music, movies, pictures, calendars, contacts, web browsers, and a phone. Now that’s not all that it has, but the biggest hard drive you can get on it is 8GB, not to mention battery life? I’m not totally sold on wanting one until the storage gets bigger and the power supply lasts longer.
I realize that my iPod mini and Nokia 6682 are completely lacking in comparison, but it can work for me right now. However, if it came down to getting a Blackberry or an iPhone for professional needs, I’d go with the Apple product.
I’m knee deep in the world of WordPress right now. I actually oversee five setups, and when there is a new release of an upgrade, that’s five sites I have to work through. Backup here, backup there, overwrite the old, and in with the new. It’s a few hour process when all is said and done.
The big thing right now is that 2.0.7 was released just a few days ago. In fact, 2.0.6 was released not even two weeks ago, and I’d avoid that version if I were you. There was some security concerns in the PHP, meaning that could allow some hacking to happen to your blog. Not good.
The hugely geeky reason that I know this is that I have recently joined up with the development mailing list. Just a couple of days after the 2.0.6 release, there was an announcement on the list about the issue and a test version sent out to all subscribers for testing. This is why I always hesitate to be on that “bleeding edge” of things. It’s good to let people much smarter than you test things out if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.
The WordPress Podcast is what really got me into the idea of joining the testers mailing list. WordPress 2.1 is in beta, and I get a kick out of seeing the exchange of knowledge about what’s new, what doesn’t work, and so on. You can get more info about it at WordPress Planet.
I did a local install of it and made a preliminary look through of the next generation of WordPress. There’s some interesting things, but it’s still too early for me to report on it. Regardless, I’m looking forward to the full release, as many folks have for over the past year.
The WP Podcast did just mention that there is talk about a 120-day turnaround between versions 2.1 and 2.2, a vast departure of the development, or lack there of, that we’ve seen from the WordPress folks. This won’t stop me from doing development from here on out in 2.1. Who knows when it will go into full release.
Wrote this post while waiting for the last of the sites to finish updating and listening to the They Might Be Giants podcast. Holy crap. Now back to your regularly scheduled geekiness.
Update: This post about 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 is a really great read about the new version that should be coming out soon. In fact, this article sites as January 22, 2007 being the day that this version is to be fully released.
I posted this earlier, but it mysteriously vanished. My ISP has been doing some things behind the scenes to help improve things, so I’ll chalk it up to that.
Anyhoo, been listening to the new album from Muse a lot lately, “Black Holes and Revelations”. A lot of the tracks on this one have a political layer to the lyrics. This one, not so much. Still, I dig the video.
