jeff.hume.ca

Yesterday I recorded a podcast with my good friend Dave McCarthy. It goes by the name A Foot In The Crease and each week we plan to talk about hockey in Toronto, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and hockey in general. Our first episode turned out quite well, despite some technical problems. For example, due to poor microphone placement the volume level of my voice is way too low compared to Dave's. I hope to have this and other small issues fixed for next week.

I humbly suggest that anyone who is a Leafs fan or is interested in hockey might find this to be an interesting listen. Here are the show notes for this week:

Today we kick off A Foot In The Crease with our first episode wrapping up the week of August 26th. In this episode we preview some segments we hope to return to every week including Who's Hot, Who's Not, On The Bubble and Rigamarole. Topics covered include big new deals under the new NHL collective bargaining agreement, a preview on potential Leaf Carlo Colaiacovo, and all that rigamarole over Heatley and Hossa.

This week's music included "Lost Weekend" by Brother Love and "143" by Stingray - both of which can be found at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can listen to it directly from the website by downloading the mp3 or subscribe to the RSS feed in your podcasting program of choice including iTunes. I have submitted the podcast to the iTunes podcast directory and it can be found here (link opens iTunes). Unfortunately, iTunes is being very frustrating and for some reason is listing my email address in the Artist field when it should really say "Jeff Hume, Dave McCarthy" like it says under the name of the podcast. I don't know why this is happening and I'm hoping to solve the problem by getting all traces of that email address out of the RSS feed. I've done that, but it will probably take time for iTunes to update with the correct information.

Update: iTunes is now listing the proper author in the directory and has stopped listing my email address. It actually updated faster than I thought it would.

In an unintentionally synchronous event just as we've started to get snow staying on the ground here in Toronto, I've redesigned my site around a snow/winter theme. After helping a friend the other day with some CSS issues, I had the sudden urge to redesign and I acted on my impulse.

The picture on the right which was the inspiration for the design was taken while winter camping. It is of my friend Keelan laying down in the snow and making a snow-angel after we carried our gear back to where we would be setting up camp. The funny thing about the photo is that contrary to what you may think I have not photoshopped it in any way and it was actually taken in bright daylight. What happened was that I had accidentally breathed on the lens which in turn fogged up. It made for a really cool inadvertent effect.

Yep, I've once again satiated my redesign urge. After weeks of starting designs and losing inspiration, I finally created this one. It took a while to figure out and squash all the IE bugs, but I'm quite happy with it now.

I've updated the main page to the new design, but the backend pages (archives, comments, everything) are a mess as they are the old templates using the new stylesheet. I'll fix all that stuff tomorrow. But right now, I really need sleep.

Goodnight.

Today I heard an advertisement on the radio that began, "Have you seen all those yellow things popping up around the city lately... they're dandelions." (insert a few cute popping noises here.) It subsequently went on to tell me that because of a new pesticide bylaw, we will be seeing a lot more of them this year. It finished off by telling me to contact my city counsellor to support "responsible weed control" and to "help keep Toronto green."

Perhaps "responsible weed control" is not very harmful to the environment, but it struck me as highly ironic that a group would use the phrase "help keep Toronto green" to support pesticide use. Oftentimes you hear that kind of language when dealing with environment-preservation issues, not potentially damaging materials.

Personally, I have no real problem with the dandelions. The yellow colour makes the grass a little bit more interesting.

I opened up the paper this morning to read a complete waste of space on the second page. The headline read "Obese girls and boys bullied more often, research finds". I'd like to thank The Globe And Mail, which is usually a very good newspaper, for bringing me this absurd article. What research was this? I could have done this "research" myself, in the playground, when I was five years old. Everyone knows this. Even though it is wrong, it is a fact of young life that everyone is aware of - fat kids get picked on. Why does the newspaper have to tell us about it? And moreover, why are people spending money on research like this? Instead, they should donate the money to a charity which deals with victims of bullying and abuse.

Zeldman writes that background patterns are making a tasteful comeback in web design, so I thought I would try one to shake things up. The current pattern is courtesy of the large selection provided at Squidfingers.

After writing a somewhat long entry a few minutes ago it was promptly lost after my school's internet connection dropped off for a few minutes in the midst of posting it. Arg. I don't feel like writing it again.

It seems that my comments aren't remembering personal info between each page. I must have screwed something up while messing with the templates in the past. If anyone else with Movable Type has any ideas, that would be great.

God Hates Shrimp quotes Leviticus 11:9-12, the same book of the Bible which condems homosexuality:

9 These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.
10 And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:
11 They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.
12 Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

How can we trust this source to condem homosexuality if it says such absurd things as this? Put me in front of the pearly gates and I don't know if I'll repent for eating shellfish.

Jason Kottke comments on a Girl Scout cookie boycott and controversy in Texas. The reason for this boycott is because some Girl Scout troops had sex-ed meetings with a group called Planned Parenthood. From the article it seems like most of is basic sex education - pregnacy, masturbation, contraception, accepting homosexuality. Once again, people feel the need to hide their head in the sand over this.

The best quote comes from a leader who disbanded her troup over the issue. (When I say best I mean it is the most absurd):

"You're telling these girls to raise their fingers up to pledge to honor God and country, and yet you're handing out materials saying homosexuality is OK."

Yes, homosexuality is OK. And even if you believe that it is wrong, it has nothing to do with pledging yourself to your country.

Last night this site fell victim to a malicious comment spam robot. Within ten minutes the robot had posted about 200 comments on a single entry and had brought the server to its knees. I eventually managed to get through and close comment on the entry.

This cannot even be considered comment-spam. The script changed its URL and IP every time so as to avoid being blocked by MT-Blacklist or the new feature in Movable Type 2.66 which blocks an IP if it posts too many comments within a certain time interval. Other comment spam uses the URLs in the page to boost their Google page rank. This one did not have URLs contained within the post and the domain entered was randomly generated and they probably did not exist. This attack had no benefit on the part of the sender. It was simply a malicious attack without any purpose. I would say that this is even worse than spam and will be harder to stop, given that it can avoid the current methods of blocking.

The openess of weblog comments is going to be destroyed because of a small group of idiots. It may be that in time we may have to simply give up our current open system. Solutions such as registered comments promised for MT 3 and captcha plugins which require a code to be entered all have various problems. Registration is a barrier for real people to post insightful comments and Captcha compromises accessibility.

These people should be thrown in jail or severally penalized. The much hailed anonymity of the web might have to be sacrificed for the problem of spam to be actually stopped.

Comments are closed for now and possibily indefinitely.

Update: I should probably mention that the comments were labeled as an attack by the "GNAA". I have no idea what that is, but I'm going to look around and see who else has fallen victim to this.

So, Once again I've put myself to work and created a brand new design for viewing. Personally I quite like the design and I think I'll keep it, however it isn't finished yet. Some of the back pages are in a state of flux and have the old template with the new stylesheet. This makes them look incredibly strange. They should be fixed pretty soon.

As can be seen at the top of the page I have a couple new sections. These are Photos and About. Currently they are broken links. About will have just general information about the site if I can think of anything to write. If I can't think of anything useful to write, I may replace it's spot with a more worthy category (perhaps writing.) Photos is also new and in the future it will contain, well, photos of various sorts.

My link list/blogroll will return soon. I'm working on an easier system of adding to it. I'm thinking that I will make another weblog that will output to a simple list of links. After that I can just include that file into every page with PHP. That should make it easier for me to keep the links updated and current.

Lastly, stay tuned for the possibility of multiple stylesheets for your styling pleasure.

Yes, the site was down over the weeekend. I was away as well. Now, however, things are up and running again. Hopefully it stays that way.

The blank page problem is solved! Thanks go to my uncle! This will now make it easier to post.

Well, I'm happy to now be the owner of a brand new shiny (with fingerprints on the back) 15 gig iPod! I have one word: Wow. This is officially the coolest gadget I've ever used. The first thing that struck me about it when I opened the box (which was the coolest packaging ever) was how small it was! Lifting it out of the box I marvelled at the perfect silver back which reflected my face. It makes it look really cool, but fingerprints and scratches (I have one already) can be a problem. Despite that, the smudges and scratches are only visable in bright light conditions. Even the remote has this shiny metal on it. I don't know how often I will use the remote, considering it makes the cord a fair bit longer and leaves it dangling. Time will tell. Some other observations:

- The actual interface to the iPod is amazing. Finding any song on it is a matter or seconds. The scroll wheel rocks and the touch sensitive buttons are great.

- The backlight is extremely cool. Especially in a dark room the screen light and red buttons look very good.

- The dock is useful, especially with the line-out cable for hooking up to the stereo.

- I downloaded the app Pod2Go. It lets me read RSS subscriptions as notes and weather amoung other things. Movies didn't work for Toronto, unfortunately.

- Did I mention it's small and looks great?

- Syncing with iTunes is nice and easy. Just plug it in and it works. Likewise, syncing my Address Book and Calendars is easy with iSync. Now that I actually have a use for the app I will say that it is quite nice.

- Using it in Firewire disk mode is nice and easy too. Just plug it in and it shows up on the desktop.

That's all I can think of for now. I love this little thing, and I think I'll get a lot of use out of it. I might post some pictures later, but I'm sure everyone has seen a million pictures already.

So you ask, why have there not been any further tales of the black knight Internet Explorer of the House of Microsoft and other tales for two cycles of the sun? That indeed is a question worth the time of the powers that be. I believe that I can answer this question. That which is known as Movable Type did not allow me to pass through its sacred gates of protection, even when the correct password was uttered. Obviously this was a sinister trick of the enemy. Thus, much deliberation and debugging by my valiant webmaster Uncle, the issue has been resolved and the multitudes did rejoice.

Yet as always and forever more, evil still lurks in the heart of the webserver, sticking its foul claws into the fruits of of labour. This time, it has manifested itself in the form that is known by some as "The Blank Page Problem". This fearsome deamon of the ancient world is known to take away new posts by surprise after their release into the wild. Once it has snatched them away, it presents the shepherd of the posts with a void of whiteness in their web browser.

And in such a manner the saga continues.

Well, I was looking over some cool CSS designs last night and decided I should spice up my design a bit more. So, if you haven't noticed the change yet, scroll down the page and notice the content fading back behind the jeff.hume.ca header. There may still be bugs, since I haven't tested it a great deal. I know it wont work fully in IE, since it uses a transparent PNG image, and IE shamefully doesn't support those. So in IE it should just be a solid image. The content should still scroll behind, but you wont be able to see through. I've tested it in Gecko-based browsers, and Safari and it work in both.

Well, I'm back. The weekend at the cottage was great. It was a much needed getaway, although it went by much too quickly. I can't wait until summer when I can spend more time there.

Lets see, what else is new. I saw Matrix Reloaded on Friday. It didn't have the same new quality to it, but it was still a really awesome film. I don't understand what many reviewers are complaining about. The story was quite interesting, although the bits in Zion were a little slow. The action was mind-blowing, no lesser words can describe it. At first when I saw it, it didn't really sink in, but then after thinking about it, it is truely amazing compared to everything else in the past.

I hope to get an iPod tomorrow (finally). They should be in stock at dealers around the city by now. I hope.

Here's another interesting thing, Brent Simmons is working on what he calls a "smash view" for NetNewsWire. It looks nice. I can't wait to try it.

Thats all for now.

After all my raving about MT Includes, I'm trying out including things with PHP.

This site now uses valid CSS and valid Strict XHTML 1.0. Now I must figure out my Safari bug.

Update: I fixed the Safari bug. The bullets in the post info were somehow screwing it up and making it want to wrap the text to a second line. I just got rid of the bullets. Now it works!

I added a couple cool new things to the site yesterday. The first one is some new buttons down the right side. All those are from gtmcknight's "Steal These Buttons" page. In addition, I made one of my own:

I've tried submitting it to "Steal These Buttons" but his email seems to not be responding. I'll try again today.

Another change that you may have noticed is fancy "nice titles" on links with title attributes. I got the code and image from here. Thanks to Erik for helping me debug some problems they caused in Safari.

I've just discovered the beauty that is the MTInclude tag. I've transfered my side content with the calender, search, links and stuff into a Module Template and then including it in every other template that needs it. I didn't know about this before and just stumbled accross it. This is very cool. It allows you to include blocks of code like you would with a language like PHP or the like and it will parse the MT tags in that module (I don't know if PHP would do that). Cool Stuff.

Well, I haven't posted in quite some time, so I figured that I'd post the stereotypical "I'm busy" post. And yes indeed, I am busy. Last week I was out almost every night doing something and this past weekend I was busy each day as well. Now I'm heading into a lighter patch of life and Easter long weekend is coming up.

On another note, it was/is beautiful out today. Highs of about 27C which is insanely high for this time of year. Just last week we had snow on the ground! It's suppose to cool down later on this week, but having this glimpse of summer sure was refreshing.

Supposedly I'm the number one source for leaked safari. I would think that a mac rumor site or another apple site might get the number one spot in Google, but for some reason, google likes me.

Another interesting one is Saddam body double pictures.

And my favorite referal of the day is names of arrogant people. Well I might have had some names throughout my posts, but I can't say I have the master list of arrogant people in the world. I'm sure I could think of a lot though :).

I love reading my referal logs to see what kind of weird search queries are directing people to my site. The most recent strange one is the pictures freezing monkeys in the snow"

That's my specialty, of course.

jeff.hume.ca - your one-stop source for frozen monkeys.

I'm doing more template work today. The main page should now work properly in IE. I have fixed the category and montly archives. I still need to fix The permalink pages, comments, trackback, search and maybe more that I haven't remembered yet.

Yes, I have a new design! I spent tonight creating it and making it into a MT template. All that is working right now is the main page, all the archives, search pages, category pages, comments, trackback, etc. are broken. I'll fix those tomorrow, but now I must sleep.

It has come to my attention that some browsers might not display this properly. Internet Explorer has a couple bugs that I need to work out. Mozilla/Camino/Gecko Browsers display it great and Safari does as well. I haven't had a chance to try it out on windows and any browsers there. I'll figure out later.

I'm now running Movable Type 2.6.2. Looks like it's working so far.

Today the SQL install on the server was screwed up. I had to re-enter the last few days of posts. Things might not display with the right dates.

An update to Movable Type 2.6 may come soon.

Test

You're not funny

Stop with the stupid comments, I'll just block the IP or delete them. There is no point.

I've added a RSS 2.0 feed. This joins my current RSS 0.91 and 1.0 (RDF) feeds.

RSS 0.9x is the most common format and all RSS News Aggregators should read them. RSS 1.0 is really RDF and is not as widely used. RSS 2.0 is very similar to RSS 0.9x, but it has more features.

This is another test. NetNewsWire doesn't seem to be picking up my new categories.

Update: After removing and adding the weblog it works again.

I'm testing multiple categories from NetNewsWire Pro.

I'm looking into adding alternate stylesheets to the site. This will allow a different user to use a different theme. The tutorial here looks like a good one to follow.

Categories are up now. I love Movable Type.

Comments are finally working correctly! I had to install some more perl stuff onto the server that told it to refresh the pages properly. I received great help from the community here and then in another thread here.

Now when a comment is posted and you reload the page it will show an updated number in the comments (n) link!

Now I need to figure out categories.

It seems I've fixed the comments problem, I'll see if it works now.

Update It isn't fixed.

Update 2 It seems that when I edit the post the comments counter updates. Hmmm.

The comments link at the bottom of each post doesn't seem to be updating when a new comment is posted. Maybe I messed up the javascript somehow.

Well finally I have the new Movable Type version up! Its not perfect yet, but its much better than before. One big thing I'm having a problem with is importing my old Blogger posts. Movable Type should do it for me, but of course when you want technology to work, it doesn't. For now I'll put a link to the old archives on the main page and they can be browsed from there, the only bad thing is that they wont take advantage of the search and calendar functions, and they will use the old template.

Anyway, if anyone finds any bugs please let me know. Suggestions on the template are welcome as well. I haven't finished the design yet, but I thought I might as well put it up as the main page anyways.

Since I can't get Movable Type to import my old Blogger archives I have to just link to them. I have now put them here. Hopefull things will be more elegant in the future.

Here's another entry just to get more content on the page. I want to bring more colour into the page. I also need to get categories working. I can set a category, but I need to find the right tag to put it into the page where I want it. Theres a lot of documentation for the system that I haven't read yet. I'm also going to try the extended Entry thing.

Here's another entry just to get more content on the page. I want to bring more colour into the page. I also need to get categories working. I can set a category, but I need to find the right tag to put it into the page where I want it. Theres a lot of documentation for the system that I haven't read yet. I'm also going to try the extended Entry thing.Here's another entry just to get more content on the page. I want to bring more colour into the page. I also need to get categories working. I can set a category, but I need to find the right tag to put it into the page where I want it. Theres a lot of documentation for the system that I haven't read yet. I'm also going to try the extended Entry thing.Here's another entry just to get more content on the page. I want to bring more colour into the page. I also need to get categories working. I can set a category, but I need to find the right tag to put it into the page where I want it. Theres a lot of documentation for the system that I haven't read yet. I'm also going to try the extended Entry thing.

Here's another entry just to get more content on the page. I want to bring more colour into the page. I also need to get categories working. I can set a category, but I need to find the right tag to put it into the page where I want it. Theres a lot of documentation for the system that I haven't read yet. I'm also going to try the extended Entry thing.

test test test

THis is a test entry to see how the templates look with lots of text. This system is somewhat confusing. It was hard to get it set up to go into the correct directories at first. The template system is a little confusing as well, however it should be better in the long run, since Movable type is much more flexable and powerful. Now that the server can run CGIs properly I can have better systems like this.

I will change the main site over from Blogger very soon.

test2

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