Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

You suck, but do you have a solution?
September 17, 2008

Ah, the heck with it. I don’t write a lot about a whole lot here any more, because most of what I am excited to share revolves around Habari. But then, all of the people who talk about what to write about on a blog tell you to write about things that you have passion about. And I’ve never not done that, but I’m purposefully filtering out a lot of Habari stuff because I feel like my audience doesn’t care. Which is just a weird thought. Anyway, no more of that madness.

Something that has been tryingly amusing lately are a certain type of email that shows up on the mailing lists. As I’ve mentioned to people in person a few times, Habari certainly isn’t talked about as much as some other blog software, but I’ve been tracking the usual channels for Habari buzz, and there are usually 50 to 70 new people noticing Habari every day. Which I think is pretty good, and would love to see increase.

One Way in which Habari Absolutely Slaughters WordPress
September 09, 2008

It’s hard to make headway against the “leading brand” without showing exactly what sets you apart from them; what you do better. I think that Habari needs and can provide many examples of how we’ve taking what everyone looks toward - probably most rightly - as the “standard” in blog software, and done something radically better. This is one example that stands out firmly in my mind.

I am not the only person who has noticed that WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License. In the license, it very plainly states:

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

The only conclusion is that if your theme executes functions that are provided by WordPress, then your theme is indelibly connected to WordPress, and must itself be made available under the same terms as WordPress.

Screen Measurement
August 30, 2008

One application that I look for every so often is a screen measuring application. Developing on the web, I often find myself in need of being able to measure how big something on the screen is in pixels. It’s strange that I have not yet found anything that truly suits my needs and workflow.

What I usually end up doing is taking a screenshot of the screen and opening it in Irfanview to measure it. This isn’t exactly efficient.

Winklers of the Carribean
August 27, 2008

On August 13, Berta, the kids, and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. We made arrangements for this couple months ago via Carnival’s website as our family vacation for this year. Our destination: San Juan in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk.

So on that Wednesday, we loaded our luggage into the car and drove to the port in New York City. We were running a little bit late because we had to drop off the house key with our cat sitter, and I was afraid we weren’t going to make it, but we did manage to not “miss the boat”. Nonetheless, that short delay did manage to affect our whole trip.

Dish Replacement
August 26, 2008

I know that many people are looking forward to my telling of my vacation, especially about the part where I was dead, but as I was writing it last night (actually, dictating it to the computer, just like this entry) I had gotten 45 paragraphs in thought, “Gee, I ought to save this at some point,” and at that very moment, my text editor decided to completely crash on me. So the end result is that you won’t be hearing about my trip for a little while longer yet. Suffice to say that I have enough to say about it that I will definitely need to write about it.

In the meantime, allow me to complain about my satellite dish receiver. I’ve been a longtime Dish Network customer, and when we moved to the new house we renewed our subscription to the service and got all brand-new equipment. One of the weird things about the new equipment is that it’s all rental. We previously owned our equipment, now we rent it for a small fee every month just like other people do from their cable companies. It’s not a big deal, but if I think about it too much it really gets on my nerves. Fortunately, there is an upside.