franzone.com

This week’s Friday Song of the Day is China Girl by David Bowie. Why? I don’t know… I’m in a bit of a The Wedding Singer mood. Plus any song with the line, “Oh baby just you shut your mouth” has got to be good. Am I right? Right… right… right, right. (Yeah, I’ve lost my mind a little today)

I couldn’t escape this feeling with my China Girl
I feel a wreck without my little China Girl
I hear her heart beating loud as thunder
Saw these stars crashing

I’m a mess without my little China Girl
Wake up in the morning, where’s my little China Girl
I hear her heart’s beating loud as thunder
Saw these stars crashing down

I’m feeling tragic like I’m Marlon Brando
When I look at my China Girl
I could pretend that nothing really meant too much
When I look at my China Girl

I stumble into town just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head
Plans for everyone
It’s in the white of my eyes

My little China Girl
You shouldn’t mess with me
I’ll ruin everything you are
You know;
I’ll give you television
I’ll give you eyes of blue
I’ll give you men who want to rule the world

And when I get excited
My little China Girl says
Oh baby just you shut your mouth
She says … sh-sh-shhh

David Bowie - China Girl

Did you know Microsoft is trying to get their proprietary Office format passed as an ISO standard? Neither did I until I ran across this. Below are reasons that this should NOT be accepted as a standard. There is also a link where you can go and sign the petition… do the right thing!

I ask the national members of ISO to vote “NO” in the ballot of ISO DIS 29500 (Office OpenXML or OOXML format) for the following reasons:

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is information missing from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
5. There is no guarantee that anybody can write software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent lawsuits or patent license fees by Microsoft;

Danny Tuppeny is running a giveaway contest on his blog. The prize? The NeverShutsUp.com domain. All you have to do is head over to the contest page and leave a comment.

Realizing that the week was nearly at it’s end and I hadn’t run yet I got up out of bed this morning against the cries of my sleepy head. The weather wasn’t as bad as it has been; it was in the high 70s instead of the mid 80s. The run went fairly smooth and I actually sprinted a bit at the end of the run.

During the last half of my run I started thinking about fighting and martial arts. I’m not sure why exactly. I guess I was thinking that it’s been nearly a year since I left my martial arts studio in Milton, FL. I’d really like to get back into it, but I just don’t have the time these days. I commute to work now and so I end up being gone between 12 and 14 hours per day. Oh, well… at least I can still run to get exercise.

Click To Enlarge

I was trolling through Google’s blog search tonight when I happened upon a site that seemed a bit familiar. You know how sometimes you meet someone and it just feels as if you’ve known the person before? Well, I feel as if I’ve known this blog before.

DevDad.com is a blog written by a stay at home dad who works in web development and SEO. Hmmm. That sounds a lot like me… well until recently when I had to take an office job. Not only that but his site uses the same WordPress theme as this blog currently does. Pretty funny. Anyway, his blog contains humorous stories about his life working at home and a lot of nice pictures of his beautiful family. He also offers his services, including rates on the site which vary from guest blogging and copywriting to full web site design packages. Although he does offer a few links to some guest blogs I’d like to see a portfolio of work with samples from all of his offerings.

DevDad in his Stay At Home Dad Digital Camera Give-Away is giving away a brand new Canon PowerShot SD750 digital camera, and all you have to do is make a post like this one! Also up for grabs is one Smug Mug Professional account values at $149.95 plus a $30 credit towards photo and gift printing and fifteen… count ‘em fifteen… Smug Mug Power User accounts valued at $59.95 plus a $10 credit.

So if you own a blog you better get over there quick and write your entry; the contest ends on August 31. If you are just a reader then check his blog… the writing is very entertaining and the pictures of his little girl are oh so cute.

I’d like to highlight a product for web development today called Instant Source by Blazing Tools Software. Now a huge disclaimer… I would not normally consider posting about a tool that is specific to the dreaded Internet Explorer. This is an exception, however because this tool is so absolutely cool and useful. (Plus I’m currently searching for a Firefox alternative)

Instant Source lets you take a look at a web page’s source code. Big deal, right? Well of course you have always been able to do this using the View Source command common on all browsers, but Instant Source kicks this concept up a notch. Now you can view the code for selected elements instantly, without having to open the entire source of the page. The program opens up a toolbar window at the bottom of Internet Explorer which displays the source code for whatever part of the page you select in the browser window.

Click the image to enlarge

You can even set it to show source code for every element under your cursor, allowing you to quickly peak through the source as your cursor moves across the page. Instant Source can show all Flash movies, script files (*.JS, *.VBS), style sheets (*.CSS) and images on a page. You can save all external files into the selected folder with a one click. Other features include handy HTML, JavaScript and VBScript syntax highlighting and support for viewing external CSS and scripts files directly in the browser.

Features:

• You get the HTML of the page element as quickly as possible - just hover the mouse over it, or select it.

I’ve been doing WordPress plugin development for a little while now. I finally got around to setting up a development environment for this purpose. I wanted to have all of the version 2 releases available for testing so I went to the WordPress site to see how many there were. Seventeen. Hmmm, this could take a while. Setup the database, unzip the WordPress install, create the configuration file, use a browser to run the installation… you see my delima. Well, being a software engineer I decided there had to be a better (translates quicker and lazier) way of doing this.

Database

All WordPress installations need a MySQL database setup to function, right? Initially I figured I’d have to setup seventeen databases for this batch. I’d also have to create new databases for future releases. Wait a minute! WordPress supports multiple installations within the same database. Problem solved. I create my development database and tucked the connection settings aside for later.

Obtaining The Software

Now I needed to get a copy of all of the WordPress version 2 releases to setup. I created a folder on my web server to serve as a repository for these installation archives: >mkdir -p ~/software/WordPress/Releases. Next I browsed over to the WordPress Release Archive and copied the links to the version 2 releases into a text file, one link per line. I grabbed the zip files, but you could just as easily implement this using the tar-balls. For easy downloading I saved the text file to ~/software/WordPress/Releases/WordPress-Builds.txt. Then from the command prompt I navigated to the Releases directory and used the wget program to retrieve them all for me: >wget -i WordPress-Builds.txt.

Automating Installation

Ok, so far the process has been a manual process and nothing that you wouldn’t do for a normal WordPress installation with the exception of downloading all of the releases. This however is where the normal process would have been tedious for seventeen separate installations. Thus… automation.

First I wanted to automate the unzipping process, which isn’t all that tedious but it will be a start. In the root of my development web ~/dev.franzone.com I created my Bash script file to perform the automation. There will be a loop that drives the installation process. This loop basically finds all of the releases in my releases directory.

# Find all releases
for F in `find ${RELEASES} -name "*.zip"`
do
  # ...
done

That’s right… I’m talking about the hairstyle, not the fish! So what’s a mullet hairstyle? Basically it is short in the front, top and sides and long in the back. The saying goes, “business in the front… party in the back!”

It’s a widely known fact that every time a mullet is born an angel dies, a puppy gets hit by a bus, a kitten explodes, a starving kid is eaten by a kid that is starving more and somebody is forced to read Ayn Rand’s “Anthem.” It’s basically a law in most parts of the world to avoid a mullety fashion.

This hairstyle is so bad that many people have taken up the sport of Mullet Hunting. These are some sites and resources to start you down the path to mullet heaven.

1. Wikipedia - Mullet (haircut) : no list on a matter of such grave importance would be complete without an entry from always trustworthy Wikipedia.
2. Encyclopedia Dramatica - Mullet : this is a very funny page on the hairstyle which is also the source of the quote above.
3. Mullets Galore : this site has probably the most in-depth encyclopedia of mullet definitions with corresponding photographs on the internet. The user interface is extremely clunky and outdated, but the content will have you in stitches.

During Digg.com’s downtime today the new site design was accidentally leaked. Mashable.com has the story:

Is this the new Digg design Kevin Rose has been talking about? (Click for larger image). It certainly includes the features that have been mentioned, like an “All” tab to view all media on the site. Still no photo section, though.

A user at the iVirtua forums spotted the design during Digg’s downtime today, although it seems to have disappeared now.

Site error found on Giveaway Of The Day.