17 Sep 2005
They’re a bit weird. Most telephone cable you can run straight through, but not Commander cabling. For whatever reason [read: establishment of a commercial monopoly enforced by tax-payer dollars through the ACA], their cables are different. Special. Not terribly complicated, but unnecessarily so.
They reversed it for no reason.
One end is the opposite of the other. You can see it in the picture above — note that both sides go black, red, green, yellow — but one side is the underside (note gold contacts) whilst the other is the top (note un-snapped-off[!] clip).
It’s not particulary hard, it just means you need to stay vaguely awake when crimping stuff. It also means that you do need to crimp stuff, and that off-the-shelf telephone cables won’t cut it. I’m pretty convinced that this means it’s not a normal telephony cable, and that the ACA can therefore go and shove their restrictions somewhere else. Or, alternatively, abandon them altogether, and let natural selection take its course. If people can get themselves killed whilst crimping signal cables, well…
17 Sep 2005
Beyonce, Becks and me me me – smh.com.au
Just a quick link. I’d love it if the newspaper actually provided links to the various papers mentioned. I’m no huge fan of the “celebrity as an object of study” thing, but snippets of this article stir [my] interest.
The only parts of any value to me in this article are in relation to the connection between media focus and our society — surmised in two short quotations from the piece:
Explaining how Beckham’s career has been littered with Christian symbolism, Brick said redemption, resurrection, and salvation “are the narratives that tell his story”. The footballer’s perception of himself seems to concur: he has appeared in magazines adopting a Christ-like pose, has a crucifix tattoo and named one of his sons Cruz, Spanish for cross.
But Brick’s paper said reading Beckham as postmodern religious icon, a new god of the global consumer culture, was insufficient. “Rather, Beckham’s celebrity speaks to the paradoxical desire to attribute meaning in a culture which is increasingly defined as meaningless…”
Paul McDonald, from Roehampton University in England, pointed out that at the start of last century, press profiles concentrated on political, business and religious leaders, “yet by the 1920s, the focus of that attention had shifted toward coverage of figures in entertainment or sports”. The media’s attention had moved from the idols of production towards idols of consumption.
Still, it’s worth reading the whole article to contextualise those snippets.
15 Sep 2005
I received an email from Matt Thommes (matthom) today, regarding his comments on a post not showing up as he’d commented a few days back. I thought that was odd, because I don’t think I’ve ever moderated one of his comments — they’re perpetually relevant and on topic, or just said in good fun with taste –, and people who have posted here previously should be automatically authenticated and allowed to post.
His problem arose, he says, when trying to include certain character entities, or when posting twice on the same topic. I think I’ve misproved the twice-on-same-comment thing, but the entity concern is valid — when using numeric entity codes. (Those are the ones that take the form &#xxxx; where xxxx is a number)
There’s not much documentation on this, but it would appear it’s an inherent WordPress anti-spam procedure, lest spammers encode their entire message in this way (that would have negligible SEO benefit, but carefully crafted messages can entice users, and the ease of distribution means that the chance of someone clicking through makes it worthwhile, for them) and thus avoid detection.
In fact, the only near-official word I could find on the matter was this comment on Matt Mullenweg’s (WP lead developer) weblog, in which he states:
I do block comments with numeric entities lower than a certain number.
Whether or not this holds true for the WordPress platform as a whole, I can’t say conclusively — though it seems that’s the symptom, here.
In Matthom’s case, the concern was marking up an HTML tag for display in a comment — using entity codes < (<) and > (>).
I usually use < and > for this purpose, so I hadn’t noticed the problem until now. That works fine, but I think WordPress deleting this outright is a little extreme… Not entirely sure what the problem is here.
15 Sep 2005
josh@joah:~/Desktop/test$ rails Test
Rails requires Ruby version 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) or later.
You're running 1.8.2 (2004-12-23); please upgrade to continue.
josh@joah:~/Desktop/test$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-23) [i386-linux]
I am indeed running a build released two days prior. The version number is the same. What gives?
