Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

‘Gallery Shortcode Style to Head’ WordPress Plugin

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As you may be aware, I dabble here and there on the fringes of the software development world. Mostly I goof around with my own personal projects (like this site) that don’t really benefit anybody but me, but occasionally I find and report bugs in open source products and—on rare occasion—I even contribute code. My one claim to fame (ha, right) is that I contributed some code to allow Keith Solomon’s ‘Configurable Tag Cloud Widget‘ plugin for WordPress to display the list of tags as a drop down selector (you can see me mentioned in the changelog for version 5.0).

Since I’m a stickler for my site passing XHTML validation, and the way WordPress handles image galleries doesn’t validate, I was very happy to stumble upon Matt Martz’s WordPress plugin called ‘Gallery Shortcode Style to Head’. This plugin rearranges where WordPress puts the gallery style code and permits WordPress galleries to pass XHTML validation.

Well, I discovered a small issue with the plugin, figured out what was happening, figured out how to fix it, and offered my patch to the author. He promptly wrote me back to say that he was planning to discontinue the plugin, and asked if I’d be interested in taking ownership of it. So—as Matt announces on his site—I am now the owner of the ‘Gallery Shortcode Style to Head‘ WordPress plugin (which can also be found in the WordPress Plugin Directory). Go figure!

Read more . . .

Haiku Project Makes First Test Release

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The developers of the Haiku operating system, an open source effort to build a BeOS-inspired, desktop-oriented operating system, have made their first formal test release. The Haiku R1 Alpha 1 release is available for daring testers from the project web site.

I wrote a bit about Haiku last month. It is one of my favorite open source projects. The various Linux and BSD Unix distributions are great operating system for what they are, and they can’t be beat for server purposes, but they don’t ‘just work’ as well as they should as desktop systems. Despite the strides made by some key projects like Ubuntu which have finally made Linux usable by mere mortals, it still isn’t totally ‘put together’ for desktop end users. Haiku, however, is being built differently. It’s target user is the desktop user. It, like BeOS before it, approaches the user with a simple, beautiful, minimalist interface that stays out of your way. It doesn’t expect you to be a nerd to use it.

Of course, at this early stage, being a nerd helps—Haiku doesn’t yet support wireless networking and may need some nerd-attention to get running on some computers. The system is off to a great start though. Check it out!

Great Weekend

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It’s been a great weekend, but it’s been a busy weekend. My sister came up Friday afternoon to visit for the weekend so we had a nice dinner with her at our favorite Thai restaurant (Star Thai in Fair Lakes).

On Saturday, Melissa had an art show in Falls Church which apparently went reasonably well. While she was at the show (with my sister playing art assistant), I had a few things I needed to get done. You know, fun things like getting new tires for the Subaru and buying a Mossberg 500A shotgun at Virginia Arms in Manassas. Oddly enough, the tires cost quite a bit more than the shotgun. We concluded the day with a great dinner with the whole clan at my parents’/grandmother’s house.

Today, after Mass, we had a nice lunch with my parents (so the whole Bradford clan was together) and then we all went out to the house. The drywall has been put in so it’s starting to look much more like a house. I probably should have taken pictures, but I didn’t. It’s looking really good. Then we went to the mall for Melissa and Kristen to shop. I just went around to the different computer and cell phone stores to check out all the fancy new technology from Apple, HTC, Palm, RIM, and others. I’m a nerd, I know.

As always it was great to have spend some time with my sister, parents, and grandmother. Good times.

Now, sleep.

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Memo to CNN: Use Your Brain(s)

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You may have caught an erroneous news report this morning, first reported by CNN, that a U.S. Coast Guard vessel had fired upon a threatening vessel in the Potomac River in Washington, DC. According to these initial reports, the skirmish happened around the time that President Barack Obama (D) was very close by at the Pentagon. As a result of the ‘incident’ departures were halted at nearby Reagan National Airport for twenty minutes.

The problem? There was no incident, there were no shots fired, and nothing newsworthy was happening.

Indeed, there were Coast Guard vessels on the Potomac . . . engaged in a regular, low-profile training exercise. As part of the exercise, Coast Guardsmen were communicating on a radio training frequency. Apparently somebody monitoring this frequency heard the exercise chatter—including a report of shots fired (complete with Coast Guardsmen saying, “bang, bang” to represent gun fire . . . no kidding). Apparently the folks at CNN couldn’t be bothered to ask, say, the Coast Guard was happening before reporting about this supposed incident on the river, and a media frenzy ensued.

Reporting a minor training exercise as a possible terrorist attack without any verification whatsover is, plain and simple, bad journalism.

Mobile Browser Notes

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There have been a couple of changes to my official mobile browser support for the site over the last several weeks.

First, Torch Mobile’s Iris web browser for Windows Mobile has been discontinued, so I have ended official support for it on this site. Iris was a WebKit-based browser that was closely related to Apple’s Safari and the default browsers on Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS. Torch Mobile has been acquired by Research In Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry smart phones, and will no longer produce software for Windows Mobile.

Second, with Palm’s announcement today of the new WebOS-based Pixi smart phone the company has [finally] discontinued its last Palm OS-based phone, the Centro. With the effective end of Palm OS, I am ending official support for the Palm Blazer web browser. If you’re still using a Palm OS phone, I recommend you install Opera Mini for your web browsing needs.

Hopefully the mobile browser universe will start stabilizing now. Please?

Anyway, I’m not doing anything to break the site in Iris or Blazer yet, so things should still work for now in those browsers if you insist on using them. Blazer did require some code acrobatics to support, and moving forward I won’t put any effort into those, so things will probably go goofy in Blazer after my next site update. Ah, the sweet smell of progress.

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Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.