bobafred

Either the people behind the deli counter at my local Publix don’t know what 1/3 of a pound is or they just don’t pay attention when I ask for that amount of Boar’s Head Branded Deluxe Ham – 42% Lower Sodium. I’m gonna go with that they don’t pay attention. Either way, it really annoys me.

After a week’s worth of work, I’ve finished rebuilding my server. To mark this great event, a new layout was necessary.

Its a pretty standard blog type layout, but I’m happy with it. Some things may change over the next few days, most likely some colors here or there, but I don’t anticipate anything major. The things I am most happy with are that it scales much better than my old layout (all the way down to 800×600 without left-to-right scrolling), the CSS file is substantially shorter and cleaner, and it just looks damn good.

I’m calling this theme Imperial Cloud City. The way I imagine it, after the events of Empire Strikes Back, the Empire would have taken over Bespin and it would have been a gray and dreary time for the citizens that remained. For those that are interested, my last theme was called A Certain Shade Of Green and the color palette was based on Boba Fett’s armor. Yep, these are the kinds of things I think about while picking colors and doing layout.

The image used for the header is a b&w crop of a pretty bad photo I took during my last visit to Chicago. I uploaded the full photo to flickr if you’d like to see its entire crappiness.

Some notes about things: The Archive page now has archives by category in addition to by month, if you put a carriage return in a comment, it’ll show up now, and some new blog links have been added. Also, the links & such section has a link for Adam’s walk jog run web app and a button for the atlbloggers.net site. You should check them both out.

There seems to be at least one bug with (wait for it…) IE on the archive page. I’ll fix it soon, maybe. Otherwise, let me know if you find anything odd. Thanks.

Background: I have a live web server and a test web server. The test server contains code that will be on the live server very soon. The live server displays straight quotes and the test server displays smart or curly quotes in posts. I hate curly quotes.

After using my brain, I determined that the problem was that I am using a different WordPress function to display the contents of each post. The function on the live server, get_the_content();, displays straight quotes. The function on the test server, the_content();, displays curly quotes. I hate curly quotes.

I did a bit of searching on the WP support forum and came across this topic that has a hack to the WP code that works well. The downside is that I don’t really like having to modify the WP code, but I like curly quotes even less so I’m OK with this for now. I’ll just have to remember about this when I upgrade.

There are other solutions I still want to investigate, like plugins that replace the curly quotes, but I wonder why WP would be replacing my nice straight quotes in favor of ugly curly quotes? I’m sure the Internet has the answers I crave and some day I might find them. For now, though, I’m tired of looking. I know there are WP users that read my site. Have you guys noticed this alarming behavior?

Finally, if you’ve been paying attention, you might be asking yourself why I would be using a different function to deliver the content if it doesn’t work the way I want it to. Well, it actually does other things better that I am willing to make sacrifices for. But, not curly quotes, I hate those bitches.

Hostel, the movie I continue to talk about, has changed release dates at least 312 times since I last posted on October 26 that it had a new date. So, the (final?) new release date is January 06, 2006. I think this will be the final final date, because there are buddy icons on the movie’s website that say that date. Its got to be difficult to change those, right?

To round out the Hostel news for today, Director Eli Roth has his very own blog with exciting news like:

“One kid said it was the sickest film he’d ever seen, which I thought was pretty high praise.”

Gotta love that.

While this could be a post about the impending deliciousness of Thanksgiving, based on the title, its not. Instead allow me to nerd out for a second and speak about the great utility that is Yum, aka Yellowdog Updater, Modified.

Here was my dilemma: my base Linux install was lacking Emacs and since I hate vi, this had to be remedied. Instead of finding the source, downloading, and compiling or even finding a Fedora RPM, I merely had to type:

yum install emacs

This is only a basic example of Yum’s greatness. Yum is also quite useful to keep your currently installed apps up to date:

yum update [package]

If you leave off the [package], Yum’ll update all your installed components. I’m sure that there are tons of other uses for Yum that I am unaware of, so if you’re running Linux, man yum for all the details. There are other similar utilities, like up2date, but I think I’ll be sticking with Yum.

After getting some shit last night at the November APWBWGTTD meetup for not posting in forever, I was all set to write something today. With pictures and everything. Then I discovered that I can no longer FTP to my server and I decided to scrap it for now.

At this point trying to figure out what is going on would be a waste of time as I plan to actually follow through with rebuilding my server next week. As a result, you can count on random outages throughout the week. It really shouldn’t be too big of a deal since, like I mentioned, I haven’t been posting anyway.