Checksum Arcanius

Today, I was trying to put away my mother’s glasses, which she had left on the dashboard of her Highlander, which I was driving for a family trip to my sister’s place in Seattle. I opened up the sunglass compartment – and voila – my sunglasses, which I had relegated to the “lost or broken” pile that all my sunglasses seem to quickly migrate to, reappeared. This was no common joy; this was overjoy, as it was bright and sunny, and these are by far the most superior sunglasses that have ever graced my posession. They went to good use on that born-again maiden voyage.

Then, upon returning home, my newish Lexar Jumpdrive appeared out of the drying machine – having already withstood the torment of the washer as well – and it looks and works none the worse for the wear. How about that! Finally, this morning, I drove by the Shell station, and what to my wondering eyes did appear, but my work basge which had extricated itself from me on Friday while I stopped by the same station. It had once been lost, but now was found.

A better googler than I (namely, Dan of Carputer fame) forwarded these links to me, which I used to tweak my Windows XP + Installed Applications (because its really one big organic entity) to a better state. I hope they help someone else too.

This one isn’t too uncommon, but the info there gave me a much better understanding of where to look in the registry to accomplish what I wanted: Customize the right click context menus

More uncommon (and also very cool, imho): Edit the Places bar locations in Open/Save As boxes

Cheers!

Two teenage boys were killed and another was injured in a fiery single-car crash in the Cougar Mountain area near Issaquah yesterday.

The crash occurred about 1:05 p.m. on Southeast 60th Street near 182nd Avenue Southeast, said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff’s Office. The 2000 Volkswagen Jetta went off the road, struck a tree and burst into flames.

Excessive speed apparently caused the crash, Urquhart said.

The 16-year-old driver and a male passenger in the front seat died at the scene. A 14-year-old in the back seat was taken to Harborview Medical Center.

Investigators did not release the identities of the boys. All are believed to be from Bellevue, Urquhart said.

Thats 8 driveways down from me…

The Seattle Times Contributed to this article

Simple: so you don’t have to look like a fool and publish gibberish like this.

“Because they are windowless, iframe elements support the zIndex attribute in Internet Explorer 5.5 and later. Windowed controls, such as select elements, ignore the zIndex attribute. If your applications were designed for earlier versions of Internet Explorer, you might want to redesign pages containing iframe elements that are stacked on top of windowed controls. You can use the visibility attribute to hide windowed controls that you want an iframe element to overlap. You can also position windowed controls so that iframe elements do not overlap them.”

… Or Internet Explorer could follow the rules, and web designers wouldn’t have to worry about Select boxes appearing on top of divs, and other such crap that makes IE a pain to make webpages for.

I believe I have found a more elegant solution for my permalink problem – directories. I already had WordPress running running from from the /wp, directory, but with a duplicated index.php in the root directory, which acted as a front end. Now, I still have that same setup, but the internal pointer is to the copy inside the /wp directory, so all the links you see will have /wp in front of them now. So all I have to do is keep that direcotry untouched, and all my links should continue to work. So this is my little way to fight link rot, unless you already linked to me, but even then I won’t contribute to link rot until I move on from wordpress, if ever. Yay!

For the Titan Robotics Club, I mostly stood by while Bob set up Mailman. He managed to get everything working extrodinarily well, even making all of my mail work better (especially with AOL) , by using Comcast’s mail server as a smarthost.

Now, Mailman isn’t a perfect solution to the TRC’s needs. For example, each mailing list a user subcribes to creates what is essentially another user account. This list-centric thinking instead of user-centric thinking means that the a single user could have to remember a seperate passwords for each list, unless they explicitly set them up the same. This is a true issue, and the designers of Mailman know it as well (its on their list of things to fix in upcoming versions).

However, the more I become familiar with Mailman, the more I am impressed by its consistent design philosophy and robust nature. So far, it has caught every single bounced email (no eternal loops like the MeetingCenter would send out), its archives are excellent resources, and its admin pages are feature-rich and while not compact, overall quite well laid out.

Three cheers for Mailman. I might learn Python just to help out with the project.

Yesterday, for an unknown reason, I awoke at 6:00am. And I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I capitulated, ate breakfast, showered, and left for work. By the time I made it there, however, the anti-sleepiness had completely left me, so I scooted the chiar forward, leaned it back covered myself with my coat and got another hour and a half or two hours before work.