Hate just link-dumping on my site, but I cannot find video of this event, yet. Guess I’ll have to wait until morning. . .

Colbert Lampoons Bush at White House Correspondents Dinner– President Does Not Seem Amused

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

For those of you who’ve been following the development of RSS even a little bit, you know how crazy it’s gotten out there.  It’s gotten to the point where an honest web developer doesn’t dare create the damned feed in the first place.  But fortunately, people much more influential in the Open Source community than myself are starting to put thier foot down and demand a sane and reliable RSS format:

threshold state: Conventional RSS

I posted earlier about various problems and ambiguities in the RSS 2.0 specification. Reaction to that post, and email discussion with some other developers, confirms conclusions I reached months ago: that no one is in a position to provide definitive answers. The RSS Board is either unwilling or unable to produce a clear and unambiguous spec, and, though there is no shortage of opinions on how various things might be resolved, there are no clear winners on which ones to choose.

So, in a (perhaps futile) attempt to resolve a few of the problems, here’s a draft interpretation of the RSS 2.0 spec, as I plan to implement it in Textpattern. It’s tentative and probably incomplete. This is not intended to duplicate or contradict the spec; any feed implementation that follows these proposals should be entirely valid according to the written specification.

I say Bravo and Here, Here! I’m redesigning the main portions of this website, and will soon need to implement a new RSS feed, which has thusfar been the least promising portion of the process ahead. If, however, the folks that make WordPress and TextPattern are going to agree on a standard interpretation of the RSS convention, then perhaps there is hope for me yet.

Of all the damned-annoying things!  It occured to me whilst I was turning plugins on and off what the problem actually was:

As I turned plugins off (say, the weather plugin, for example), the Thickboxes would magically start working in FireFox, but the sidebar and footer wouldn’t draw themselves.  Well, that makes sense, because the sidebar still includes calls to functions which are no longer available since they’ve been deactivated.  So, just remove those references, and you’re all set, right?  Wrong.  Once I removed the calls, the page would draw itself and the Thickboxes once again crapped out on me.

This process continued until I got up and left the computer in a huff.  While puffing a cigarette, it dawned on me that while I had been troubleshooting the sidebar plugins, the problem might in fact be the footer
that did not get loaded when the plugins were deactivated.  I took a look at the footer, and lo-and-behold, there was but one piece of code which was not native to WordPress: the Performancing Metrics tool.  This tool requires you to load a JavaScript bit at the footer of the page.  When I removed this code, the Thickboxes work fine.

I can deal with losing the PFF Metrics, but they are in fact quite nice and quite illuminating for analyzing the traffic on this one specific section of the website.  I would prefer not to lose them, if I can help it.  I am *not* about to lose the Thickboxes, since I very much want to use them for vBlogging, assuming that it’s possible.  I submitted a new article to the Performancing support site, hoping to get some answers.  I also queried the original creator (scroll way down) of the Thickbox code, hoping that between the two sites, I can get a good solution.

It’s true what they say: love stinks. Well, sometimes, anyway.

I’m about completely frustrated with my endevours to implement Thickbox on my page. For some reason, it’s just not working, and in very strange ways indeed. For a start, I got it to work breifly, but only in IE and not in FF. That’s very strange, since the original blog of the guy who wrote the script says that, if anything, IE should have had a problem. Grr. . .

I wrote a comment on the blog requesting help, and I’m hoping to hear back soon. I still haven’t gotten any farther with my “master plan” of trying to implement a video blog through Thickbox, because I can’t even get the basic boxes to work on the blog. I’ve tried forgoing the plug in (which only calls the Thickbox scripts and places them in the header) , opting to take care of this manually through the header.php file, but that didn’t seem to make a bit of difference. Perhaps I’ll try that again.

Ultimately, I suspect that the problem is more likely a CSS problem than anthing. Ah, my old nemesis CSS. Hopefully, someone more clever than I can spot the problem.

Dang. Well, in other news, Thomas Dolby has created a new blog. Found that on Photo Matt’s site like anyone else who pays attention to thier WordPress Dashboard, and as I look through it, there’s a bunch of cool stuff in there for us musicians. Not that I think I’m going to create anything like he does, nor do I hold pretenses of being able to afford the gear, but it’s awesome to see what can be done.

LATE UPDATE:  Whoa!  That was wierd!  I decided I would play around by deactivating a few plugins to see if the Thickbox thing would work.  It did, breifly.  For some reason which I don’t understand, when I turned off the Events Calendar, it worked.  But then, I turned it back on, the Thickbox didn’t work as I anticipated.  When I turned it back off again, the Thickbox still was not working.  What the hell?  I played around with a few more, turning them off one at a time, and occasionally the Thickboxes would work but the same indistinct pattern kept happening.  Nothing rational is happening at all.

So, perhaps the problem really is a plugin problem or conflict of some sort.  Perhaps something that another plugin is doing with CSS is causing the problem?  I haven’t a clue, and I’m getting tired right now.  Bed time for me, work on it tomorrow hopefully with better luck.

OK, trying an HTM file in a Thickbox, to see if that works any better. .

Clickety Here.

got the Thickboxes to work, now trying to get them to work with a PHP extension.

That’s a negative, there, good buddy!

We’ve all heard lip service from candidates before, no reason to get too exited.  At the same time, it appears as though Elliot Spitzer at least felt enough pressure in this one Hudson Valley meet-and-greet not to comment on the subject, albeit through a surrogate:

Hudson Valley News story

Chief among Spitzer’s campaigns stances is campaign finance reform. The subject of “clean money, clean elections” is an “underlying principle that we embrace and would like to see the state adopt is key in his campaign. That is a subject on the minds of Citizen Action. As Spitzer entered the conference hall, the 250 delegates chanted “clean elections – clean money.”

If I’m not mistaken this is another meeting that the Citizen Action people invited Metro Justice to attend, and yet another I could not attend. Oh, well. We all do what we can, I suppose. . . .

Doing a bit of research on Ethanol and gasoline, since the information coming out on TV and radio seems so scattershot and incomplete (big surprise, there).  There are a number of questions I’m looking into, trying to formulate an actual line of attack for the article:

1)  What is the Net Energy Balance of Ethanol?  Meaning, how much energy does it produce compared to the amount of energy it costs to produce and distribute it.
2) Currently, 1 billion gallons of Ethanol are produced anually, how much land does that require?  How much is going to be required for a substantial dent in the oil consumption of the US?
3)  Farming creates it’s own waste, and there is always the threat of overproduction and depletion of soil.  To what extent is this a concern with corn production, and is there enough land to accomodate our goals while preserving our farmlands?

Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol

Studies conducted since the late 1970’s have estimated the net energy value of corn ethanol. However, variations in data and assumptions used among the studies have resulted in a wide range of estimates. This study identifies the factors causing this wide variation and develops a more consistent estimate. We conclude that the net energy value of corn ethanol has become positive in recent years due to technological advances in ethanol conversion and increased efficiency in farm production. We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy ratio of 1.24.

Not sure how I feel about this:

My Way News - Spanish ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ Draws Ire

British music producer Adam Kidron says that when he came up with the idea of a Spanish-language version of the U.S. national anthem, he saw it as an ode to the millions of immigrants seeking a better life.

How many different versions of the Star Spangled Banner are there? What’s wrong with one more? I think that the producer is probably right when he says that its a testiment to the dedication of spanish speaking people who live in this country to be part of this country.

On the other hand, I confess the thing I like best about it is that it is going to make Conservative heads explode, and that’s got to be a good thing.

How is this a bad idea? Let me count the ways:

Lawmakers jockey to offer relief from gas prices - MarketWatch

Senate Republicans sought to steal the show Thursday, unveiling a plan that would give taxpayers a $100 gas-tax rebate. But prospects for success were clouded, since the proposal is part of a larger package that includes language to open part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to oil and gas drilling — a long-sought GOP priority that’s been repeatedly stymied by congressional Democrats and a few Republicans.

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