Adam's Blog

The backend rewrite is nearly complete. The only section left is the Users section, however, since the blog is not really set up security wise for user rights yet, I'm not going to be finishing it for 0.4. I will apply the new backend styles, however. Anyway, here are some screenshots of the new backend. Click each one to see a larger version:

This is lifted DIRECTLY from the Register. All credit goes to them, I'm reprinting it here only because it's funny as hell. Update 08/08/06: I've moved the images to the body of this post to speed up load time. They are all weighty animated gif files.

I have been busy at work, so I haven't been able to sneak away to really knock this stuff out. The topics manager is now complete, and it's been AJAXified, but only partly. There are some things that are simply not well suited for AJAX. It's interesting, because as slick and fast and powerful as it is, javascripting is actually a much more meticulous process than PHP. It's much less forgiving and the errors are much less descriptive. I have also removed a lot of the password prompts. Every single admin page load, including the AJAX requests, require your cookie for authentication, and even the cookie is just random data. I'm fairly certain we haven't sacrificed much in the way of security by only forcing the login once. Even Gmail doesn't ask for a password with every session. That said, the backend is now mostly complete. I do need to add one more feature, which is image uploads, a portion sorely lacking. This has been needed for some time, as when I need an image, I need to FTP it up, which is lame. So I will incorporate image uploads shortly, and then break for the wedding and honeymoon. Then...

The first parts of the new backend are written and in place! I'm very excited to get rid of some of the legacy code that powered this blog. As I replace the old crufty code, I'm taking out all of the tables, all of the old HTML, many of the CSS classes have been replaced with more powerful styles. When I get back from the honeymoon, I'll be packaging a new release of Small Axe, which will be, by far, the best one so far.

After reading this article, I'm pissed. A little-known Southern California band called Supernova is suing NBC for "stealing" their name for the upcoming show, "Rockstar: Supernova." This is the epitome of lame. The American justice system is so broken it makes me sick. We've all known for some time that the patent process, led by the seemingly supremely inept USPTO, Now, apparently, you can select a word from the English language and simply claim ownership of it via trademark. It's one thing if your name is "The Wizzle Bangs," something keenly unique. But if you choose a regular word, like say, "Windows," you can apparently own it after a few years of use. What the hell is wrong with the US when an office like the USPTO can be so incredibly out of touch? Bought by corporations? What is wrong with us all that we tolerate such nonsense in the court system? Why do we stand for frivolous lawsuits, ones that -- gulp -- are supported by the actions of government agencies staffed by people who are either truly stupid, simply don't care, or at best, are too lazy to do any research. If this lawsuit goes through, I'm going...

At some point, after the honeymoon, I'm going to take a nice, stable snapshot of sethadam1.com and turn it into the next release of Small Axe. I've added several new features in the last few days. Last night I fixed the related stories to be a config switch, as detailed here. As you may have noticed, I redid the entire stylesheet for the site too. Today I added a new AJAX backend for the admin section and you can now edit topics via AJAX. If this is Small Axe 0.4, 0.5 will have to have a backend rewrite. It's just ancient. There are several things that need to be fixed to prevent future bugs. I also changed the RSS feed to obey the "related" switch. If you're set up to use tags instead of topics as your related basis, then the RSS feed will display the first tag instead of the topic as the "category." So all posts in my RSS feed as now going to be using tags instead of topics. I don't know what I will do about topics in Small Axe or on sethadam1.com right now. On smallaxesolutions.com, the topics mean something. Here, they are completely random. So, for now, not entirely sure. Read on for more.

So, one of my favorite sites, The Onion, is a satire magazine. The entire website (and before that, faux newspaper) are ficticious, and most of the time, it's both hilarious and painfully obvious. So when I stumbled on This piece of work, some brainless conservative finger-waggin nutsack chastising a ficticious woman, Caroline Webber (remember: ficticious!), for celebrating an abortion, I had to laugh. You see, the piece itself parodies the conservative pro-lifers beliefs about pro-choicers. It's entirely sarcastic. But this moron if having none of that. He's not realized that the article is fake, not done any research and found that the Onion, which nearly all skilled internetters know is a humor site, is a humor site, and has embarassed himself by quite sternly responding to ...a joke. Nice work, you stegasaurus. ...But wait! It gets better!! In his follow up post, Pete explains that he thinks that "Ms. Webber's" exaggeration hasn't gone far enough, because he meets people like that in the field "all the time," and therefore, the content is believable. Take a second to read this comment, it sums up PERFECTLY what I think we're all feeling: if this douche can't tell that this is satire, is...

Small Axe (at least, the sethadam1.com build) has had "related posts" displayed on each entry's page for some time. However, since the "topics" I use are all random and unrelated to the post, the related posts weren't... uh... related. So, I added a new configuration option. Now you can choose in the backend whether or not you want related posts to be "related" by topic or by tag. By toggling the option, suddenly, related posts were -- get this -- actually related! This is entertaining the hell out of me, and because of that, I will be forced to tag THIS post "Nerd." Sigh.

I have decided that rather than bookmarking cool sites that I really want to revisit but never do, which is a regular habit of mine, I'll post them here where I can find them (under the "Links" tag!) and share them with everyone. So, without further adue, here are today's links.

Escapa!: A fantastic javascript game

Some nice GIMP tutorials

How meditation works

Wikipedia's List of words of Yiddish Origin I knew WAY too many of these words.

OpenDNS What a great idea. Seriously.

Bob Cesca's Piece of Bigotry in the name of Christ A little controversy to stir up your day. LOVE this piece.

This weekend was my bachelor party. We hit up the Yankees/Devil Rays game, which the Bombers won. There are SO MANY Yankees fans who just root for the Yankees with no backstory. They don't know the players, they just like the ultra-stylish NY logo. It makes me nuts. They are currently hosting a DL with TONS of their stars. Can most of these fans name more than 3 people on the field right now? Do they know Andy Phillips? Melky Cabrera? Bubba Crosby? I mean, seriously... Kevin Thompson?! At least the Yanks won.