Whoa – Scalzi? Subversive? Apparently Annalee Newitz of io9 thinks so:
bq. It’s great to see two smartypants writers [Doctorow and Scalzi] aiming their often-subversive messages at the next generation. “#”:http://io9.com/385442/cory-doctorow-and-john-scalzi-are-doing-it-for-the-kids
Doctorow I’ll buy. Scalzi, not so much. I wonder – has Annalee ever actually _read_ Scalzi’s blog?
It’s incidents like “this one”:http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/29/7yearold-boy-removed.html that demonstrate to me that there is a general sense of paranoia in American culture these days that borders on insanity. In the article linked above, you have a father who mistakenly ordered a hard lemonade for his 7-year-old son, followed by the hysteria of the ballpark guard and the local judicial system. This case is demonstrative of the fact that parents are considered villains until proven innocent, at least in the eyes of our legal system.
Having worked briefly in the social services system, I know there are parents out there who are either negligent or deliberately abusive (and sometimes both); so the existence of a social services system is both justified and necessary. But what I think the current set of laws forgets is that parents are human and sometimes make genuine, honest mistakes – as the father in this case seems to have done. But rather than deal with this as a mistake, the courts overreacted and demonized the father, immediately assuming the worst and raised his case to a ridiculous level that seems, to me, to be completely unnecessary.
This sort of thing goes right along with the current trend of political correctness in our society that people are now afraid of making smart and right decisions in favor of making stupid, politically correct decisions that will, in theory, offend the least number of people. It makes me wonder at how such people ever got to be our leaders, and it frightens me not a little bit that we’ve given them so much power over our day-to-day lives. Common sense, critical thinking, and wisdom seem to be skills lost on the vast majority of people in power nowadays, and what we’re left with are spineless puppets who would rather cater to poll numbers and public opinion[1]. It makes me afraid, very afraid.
fn1(footnotes). Don’t get me wrong – I do want our leaders to pay attention to what the people want, to an extent. We do, after all, elect the leaders that we hope will have our best interests in mind. But when you end up with leaders who are faced with the kind of foolishness presented in this case, and who won’t act on with a certain level of wisdom, then I question whether said leader should be sitting in that particular seat of power.
Over the weekend, I spent several hours cleaning up yet another hacker who had infiltrated my server account. I became aware of him only after upgrading a couple of my WordPress installations from 2.5 to 2.5.1, only to find that the version number shown in my dashboard still showed 2.5. I searched the WordPress support forums and didn’t find anything useful for awhile – until I came across a link to this “blog entry”:http://wordpressphilippines.org/blog/has-your-wordpress-been-hacked-recently/ detailing the symptoms of a known hacker and how to look for and clean up after him. Sure enough, I found the presence of an unwanted text file, as well as a WordPress user who only showed up in the DB (and nowhere else) and an active plugin (that also showed up only in the DB and nowhere else) that pointed to a file in the tmp directory at the root of my server account. I’ve had to go through every database and certain tables to find traces of this guy and purge him out. Most of the WordPress installations on my account are still offline as I work through changing passwords to the DB and user passwords to WordPress and bring each back online one by one. It’s time-consuming and messy.
Interestingly, solving this problem also remedied problems I’ve been having the new WP 2.5 Media Uploader. A couple of weeks back, the uploader suddenly stopped working, asking the user to login again while trying to upload a file and then returning a 404 error and failing on the upload. I thought the problem was with WP 2.5 itself, but now I believe it to be another symptom of this hacker’s presence in my system. I’m happy that things are working better now, but I’m going to be much more vigilant in the future to this sort of tampering. I highly recommend reading the above linked article and checking your own setup for the presence of a hacker.
Sometimes I think hackers deserve their own special corner of the hot place.
With every new version of WordPress, I update my list of plugins that I consider to be essentials. That is, these are the group of plugins that I install in almost every instance of WordPress that I run on my site. In the last couple of weeks, there have been several really slick little plugins that have either been developed or updated for WordPress 2.5. Here are the ones I’ve adopted:
“cforms”:http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin has become my contact form plugin of choice. It is a very powerful and robust plugin that allows user customizability right down to the last detail. As such, the admin interface is a little daunting, but the power that cforms provides makes it well worth the effort to learn it. At this point, I think it’s fairly safe to say that there isn’t a better contact form plugin out there.
“Extra Sentence Space”:http://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/extra-sentence-space is exactly what the typing Nazi ordered. High school typing class taught us that it’s proper form to place two spaces between sentences. HTML documents only display a single space, no matter how many you type. This plugin brings back the ability to add the second space back in and clean up your document formatting.
I’ve been using “Flexible Upload”:http://blog.japonophile.com/flexible-upload/ almost since it was first developed. What’s attractive about this plugin is that it allows you to resize images on the fly and, if so desired, add a personal watermark to your own images. Now, with all the problems surrounding the Media Uploader in WordPress 2.5[1], Flexible Upload provides the means to bypass most of the buggy AJAX code and get your images uploaded to your blog quickly and reliably.
“Ozh”:http://planetozh.com has fast become one of my favorite plugin developers. He consistently creates plugins that are practical and high quality. I’m running three of his plugins on all my installations that make the WP 2.5 dashboard experience a lot more fun.
“Ozh’ Admin Dropdown Menu”:http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/wordpress-admin-menu-drop-down-css/ reorganizes the WP 2.5 dashboard, putting all the links in a single row at the top of the dash. What’s more, a simple mouseover for any menu tab will display a dropdown menu that will give one-click access to any submenu in the dash. This plugin effectively cuts dashboard navigation times in half.
“Ozh’ Absolute Comments”:http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/absolute-comments-manager-instant-reply/ makes it fun and easy to reply to reader comments by reorganizing the Comments menu and allowing for instant comment reply right in the dashboard. It’s fast and powerful, and every WordPress user should be running this plugin.
“Ozh’ Better Plugins Page”:http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/wordpress-better-plugin-page/ cleans up and reformats the plugin page, making it a little easier to look at and use. It also provides a set of filters that can be used to display only a particular subset of plugins.
The WP 2.5 dashboard comes with a fixed width, which is rather ugly for those of us who use a large monitor resolution. “Remove Max Width”:http://dd32.id.au/wordpress-plugins/remove-max-width/ undoes this limitation and allows the dashboard to stretch completely from side to side.
“ShareThis”:http://sharethis.com/ has been around for awhile now, but it compacts social bookmarking down into a single button. Using this plugin gives your readers the ability to share the wealth and send additional readership your way.
I’ve been using Textile as my text markup option almost since I started using WordPress several years back. Textile and and its plugins have undergone various iterations since that time, but “TextileWrapper”:http://www.huddledmasses.org/category/development/wordpress/textile/ is the one I’ve been using for the last year or so. The thing that I like about Textile in particular as a markup tool is because it uses common characters for the markup, making it extremely fast to add formatting to my writing as I go. I use TextileWrapper on all my WordPress installations and won’t set one up without it. Everyone has their markup tool of choice, but this is the one that I think is easiest to use.
Anyone who’s ever had a catastrophic blog failure resulting in lost data knows the value of backing up your database[2]. “WP DB-Backup”:http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup should be required for every WordPress installation[3]. It makes it easy to keep a backup copy of your DB on file, y’know, just in case.
“Shift This Order Pages”:http://www.shiftthis.net/wordpress-order-pages-plugin/ is a little clunky to use[4], but it beats hands-down having to go into every page on your blog manually to change the menu ID. If I have an installation of WordPress that contains more than a couple of pages, I make sure I include this plugin to move pages around more easily.
I know I, for one, like to have the option of subscribing to comments on particular blog postings, and I don’t generally like to add individual RSS feeds to my Google Reader. “Subscribe to Comments”:http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/ gives readers the option of getting follow-up comments in their email.
Web servers don’t provide a means of automatically adjusting for daylight savings time. “Timezone”:http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/timezone/ fixes this by automatically applying this adjustment twice a year. Just tell it what time zone you live in and whether you make the adjustment, and it does the rest.
These are my favorite plugins, and I firmly believe they are well-worth your time to investigate, as well. Feel free to tell me about any other essential plugins you use by commenting below.
fn1(footnotes). A problem which, at this point, still has no real solutions, despite many reports of bugs on the WordPress support forums.
fn2(footnotes). And the rest of you _ought_ to know the value of backing up regularly.
fn3(footnotes). Frankly, it ought to be included into the WordPress core, in my opinion.
fn4(footnotes). It took me a little while to figure out just exactly how to make it work.
Those of you who have been subjected to my gaming-related posts here can breathe a sigh of relief – I’ve got a new gaming column called “The Casual Gamer”:http://www.differenceinopinion.com/category/columns/the-casual-gamer/ over at Difference In Opinion, so most of my gaming-related essays will probably appear there almost exclusively. Now, Difference in Opinion is a website built by a friend of mine that contains reviews, news, writeups, etc., of various video games, movies, and other forms of entertainment. The site has just recently undergone a redesign featuring columns from several contributors. Feel free to head over there and check things out.
I will never cease to be amazed by the amount of crap goods out there for sale, as for example, this “mustache comb necklace”:http://store.makoollovesyou.com/products/148-Mustache-Comb-Necklace. In sterling silver. For $120. And that people will actually waste their money and _buy_ these things. We truly live in a luxurious economy where 1) someone would even conceive of a concept like this as a viable product, and 2) where consumers could look at that product and say to themselves, “Hey, I really want that. In fact, I think I _need_ it. And hey, look! Here’s a fat wad of cash I don’t need for, say, food or utilities or whatever. Must. Buy. Stupid, ridiculous. Lip-ferret comb.” And they then adopt that thousand-yard zombie stare of the hopeless consumer slave.
I hope I’m not the only person who’s disgusted by the wastefulness of this growing trend in American consumerism.
This is an enjoyable little video that depicts an abridged history of the world’s wars from WWII through the Gulf War 2 using the foods of the nations involved in each. It’s very artistic and, at points, humorous in its caricaturizations.
(Source: “Boing Boing”:http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/04/17/best-of-bbtv-food-fi.html)
Who remembers the ‘two-space rule’ from high school keyboarding (a.k.a. typing) class? You know – it’s the one where you’re supposed to put two spaces after every sentence-ending period (and also after certain colons that break sentences up). ((From what I understand, this rule isn’t even taught much anymore.)) So of course, this little rule doesn’t apply to web documents, as a general rule, since HTML formatting compresses everything down to just one space after a sentence-ending period, no matter how many spaces you actually type. I’ve always thought this ends up making things look pretty scrunched and claustrophobic. Well, I’m pleased to say that I’ve now adopted a “new WordPress plugin”:http://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/extra-sentence-space/ that adds that extra space back in and puts end-of-sentence formatting back to the way it should be. I gotta say, I love it.
Today’s “Sheldon”:http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/080414.html cracks me up – it’s pretty much exactly the way I feel about ebooks and ebook readers as a general rule. Below is the first panel; click through to read the rest.
It’s positively inhumane to expect people to go down to their little cubicle offices in the basement and actually get any work done on a day like today with weather this beautiful. There oughta be a law…!