I love WordPress. I use it for several websites (including the one you’re reading and my personal site). It is easy to use, very extensible, is open source, and you can find metric-butt-tonnes of plugins and ready-made themes for it. As a developer and designer I have been able to create websites whose very core functionality is purely built on WordPress and its hefty list of extras built by the masses for creative goodness sake. Trés cool.

Now, version 2.5 really does to the next level. The back-end admin interface is completely rethought from an admin’s perspective. The design is yet more intuitive than before, and the added features blow your mind. How about single click plugin version upgrades? Built-in Gravatars and photo galleries? Pretty sweet.

It’s still in alpha (I keep telling myself) so you won’t see it on Negative99 for a while… and even when you do you might now be able to appreciate from the front all the beauty and genius that went into the inner-workings and into the back-end… but trust me, it’s there.

Here’s a snippet from WeblogToolsCollection.com.

WordPress Development Blog: 2.5 Sneak Peek I love the staccato description Matt uses to start the post: A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? The first Release Candidate for WordPress 2.5 is out for those that have been waiting patiently to try out the new features. Matt details out the updates and the new features of 2.5 on the development blog and the good news is spreading in the WordPress circles.

Another article from BlogHerald article.

Here are some pics (and you can view the full photoset here):

During the conference Adobe released new and highly anticipated versions of many of their software products, the most exciting for me being Flex Builder 3 Beta 2. They also demo’ed some prototype software they are working on for future release, such as an application called Thermo that allowed a developer to convert a designer’s comp into an actual front-end user interface with relative ease [here's a video clip].

Each night of the conference included “After-hours lounges” featuring 8-player LAN Halo 3 on Xbox 360’s, and 4-player LAN Quake 4 on high-powered PC’s. I sampled both with pleasure.

Here are some random observations I made during the conference:

• More guys had pony-tails than girls did
• More female attendees were divorced than were married (I assumed - based on their age, lack of any “ring”, and propensity to prattle on about their kids)
• Many of the featured conference speakers sported the casual look (jeans and a button up shirt)
• There was constantly a source of food and drink from 8am until midnight each day

Then I saw on Lifehacker (an absolute gem of a site) an article on a great little utility called TED (Torrent Episode Downloader). TED, when paired with your friendly BitTorrent client (I like uTorrent), will make watching episodes of today’s most popular shows nearly effortless (we’ll discuss the gray legalities in another post sometime).

Anyways… after getting TED I saw Battlestar Galactica listed and figured - what the heck. I was instantly enthralled… consumed. The plot is aggressive unlike any series I’ve seen. The actors are almost all unknowns and it injects the cast with a refreshing burst of creative believability - as seen in 300, whose cast of mostly unknowns is widely held to have bolstered the film’s success. The special effects are superb, but the acting is even better. The storylines are rarely contrived, and often wildly unpredictable - so much so that the Season 3 finale this past Spring ended with the most intense, cinematic, plot-electrifying 10 minutes of revelations and confrontations I can possibly imagine ever occurring in any movie, TV show, or theatrical presentation.

But alas… I wait for Season 4… but it won’t begin until… November.

Must… h o l d… o n . . .

On the way home there were several traffic signals without power… and in New York negotiating busy intersections freeform - without any signals or traffic cops - is always a social experiment worthy of its own 500-page exhaustive commentary featured in Psychology Today. When I got home my pool was an inch from overflowing! Several branches (the big kind) had been knocked down off my neighbors’ multiple maple-leaf machines.

And as I feared, when I walked in the house - no power. Of course, I’ve been without power before… but this time it was cramping my routine a bit. I’m used to hopping on the ‘puter and catching up on all my emails I can’t read at my top secret laboratory job. But the power was out for a little while and I actually had to occupy myself with other household diversions… odd.

My modern-day electro-junkie dilemma reminded myself of a quote I like:

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
~Susan Ertz, “Anger in the Sky”

For those who don’t know, SOA (often pronounced soh’-uh) stands for Service-oriented Architecture and is a current fad in enterprise information systems. This conference was a buzzword-fest of the highest magnitude. There were more Powerpoint slides with corporate-speak and technology catchphrases than you could garbage-collect with a Cray.

While the breakout sessions proved to be enlightening, the general sessions in the main ballroom were definite snoozers. Almost all of the general sessions were given by “sponsor representatives” who used the time to hock their products and services with an advertising pitch cleverly disguised as a SOA lecture. Normally I would have skipped these sessions to mingle on the expo floor and get vendor demos of SOA software solutions, but they deliberately closed the vendor expo area during these sessions so that attendees had nothing else to do. To further frustrate things, the multiple general sessions pushed the conference schedule past 7pm all three days!

However, not all was lost, and the breakout sessions were really worthwhile. Once you got a corporate lecturer out of the main ballroom and into a breakout room, it was like someone lifted off their managerial sales hat and gave them a developer’s cap… because these smaller venues boasted some brutally honest lectures. Some key principles that were thematic in these more down-to-Earth presentations were:

• Don’t try to boil the ocean.
• If you’re implementing SOA because your boss heard about it from some executive on the golf course, then you WILL fail.
• SOA success stories come from BIG companies with a BIG IT staff and BIG budgets.
• If your business processes aren’t yet aligned across your enterprise, then what good is a SOA?

If SOA is a forest, then web services are the trees. I will be creating a presentation soon on the basics of web services and SOA, and I’ll post it on Negative99 when I do.

I feel like we’re natives living in wood huts on a primitive desert isle. One day a steel I-beam washes ashore, and already people want to start talking about what the skyline’s going to look like.
~ Steve Mooradian

You know… if you’re gonna’ be stupid, you gotta’ be smart about it.

I love one-liners, and the poetry of this one rang true in my ears as soon as it left my lips. I quickly Googled to see if anyone had ever officially said it yet (like Yogi Berra), and to my delight they had not. So I get to have my very own one-liner… my very own Yogiism. Well done me.

The event that stimulated this burst of reason was this - I was told of a group on the website Facebook (a social networking site similar to MySpace) that was entitled “Henry Mills sucks penis” [the name has been changed]. This group was started and joined by current and former members of a local Christian school… and the object of their wrath, Mr. Mills, is a well-respected official of that same school and church. The group’s Facebook page includes disrespectful and insanely inappropriate and infantile content that I won’t share here.

Now… how nervy do you have to be to create and/or join such a group actually using your primary Facebook account with your name and picture displayed for any school official or parent to identify… and to do this while having not yet graduated from the school?! While you’re at it why don’t you just set your diploma on fire right now?! And needless to say, once the school found out about this Facebook group just a few days ago, it was quickly put out of its misery.

So upon hearing this story I exclaimed, “You know… if you’re gonna’ be stupid, you gotta’ be smart about it!” There is harmony in this statement - it’s found in the mix of bumbling wisdom and denotative paradox. But as I pondered, I discerned some “deeper” force at work here. So I put my thoughts down in the form of a socio-algebraic law:

Mooradian’s Law of Multiplicative Idiocy

As the probability of an individual or entity to engage in an idiotic action increases, the faulty cognitive processes driving this increase also propend the same individual or entity to engage in further related idiotic actions, such that the original idiocy is amplified through a mechanism of synergistic multiplication. This described propensity incites a daisy-chain of idiotic action occurring independent of (and possibly in addition to) the coincidental succession of an individual’s or entity’s natural random idiocy as expressed by a Poisson distribution.

As a previous leader of soldiers, I truly saw this law in action. Anyone who’s been in the military knows soldiers and sailors sometimes have an affinity for mayhem. And certain sailors and soldiers have perfected foolishness down to a black art. Now, it amazed me how my soldiers would sometimes commit egregious acts of idiocy, and follow it up by recording their actions in photographic or audio-visual form - thereby supplying incrimination leading to their own demise!? That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

Recently, on a local blog, I was conversing with an argumentative and illogical fellow. No sooner had I soundly discounted all his faulty lines of reasoning, when a mysterious second fellow appeared on the blog and echoed the first fellow’s identical illogic. Little did “either” of them know that I’m an admin for the blog… and I could see that “both” fellows were posting from the same IP address! Upon greater inspection, a third and fourth troublesome fellow on the blog were also from this same IP address! When pressed for the truth, the original fellow claimed that the other “three” fellows were indeed real people (housemates) whom he shared his home computer with. Of course, he couldn’t then explain why when I tracerouted his IP address it routed back to a single-point external gateway for a local health insurance company (as verified by their IT security staff). That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

How about the lady who tried to pay for her Wal-Mart merchandise with a counterfeit bill? She used a bill of such a high denomination ($1 Million) that not only did the store have no choice but to examine the bill with such scrutiny as would certainly discover the fake… but the store wouldn’t have had nearly enough cash to even make change, anyway! That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

The robber who empties the convenience store cash register, but then pays for a soda with his credit card before leaving. The student who vandalizes school property, then brags about it to a teacher. The man who shows up to DUI court drunk. That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

In the end I decided to wrap everything about me into one site. The design had to be bold and vivacious, yet clean and classy. Light on dark was a given. In the end, my nuclear engineering roots provided the inspiration for the design (hence the magenta trifoil and glowing green). I titled it, Nuclear Magic.

However, this new website not only serves as my personal site but was also a great proof-of-concept for using Wordpress as a CMS. Wordpress is widely regarded as the premiere blogging software… but its potential as a CMS is profound. So many web designers and developers already have Wordpress blogs and are familiar with skinning and modding them… and the administrator interface is easy-to-use. Pound for pound you won’t get more bang for your buck when developing a dynamic website. Wordpress works great, is free, and is easier to use for what it does than anything else I’ve ever even heard of.

Everything you see at SteveMooradian.com that is not part of the site’s physical design is dynamic. This is extremely significant. ALL images are called out in CSS or in MySQL… not the source files. All main textual content is stored in MySQL. On my Web Design, Programming, and Guitar & Music pages the lists of sites, projects, and bands (respectively) are all Wordpress posts with categories matching the page title. The links at the bottom of every non-Home page are actual Wordpress “Blogroll” links with categories matching the page title. Except for the Home and Gallery pages, each page is built from identical PHP code!

All my coding was done using Notepad++. All graphic work in the design was created by myself using Adobe’s Photoshop and Fireworks software. All markup is valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS3. All of the site conforms to 508 and WAI-A accessibility standards. All dynamic content is semantic. NO TABLES!

I designed the site using progressive enhancement so that I could be search-engine friendly and accessible while also providing a rich user experience to those with Flash and JavaScript-enabled browsers. Examples of progressive enhancement are as follows: I used sIFR to style my headings for users with Flash-enabled browsers. NO images were used for any headings on my site. I used swfIR to style most of my content images for users with Flash-enabled browsers. All drop-shadows and rounding on content images happen dynamically. I used GreyBox for all in-browser popups and image popup galleries for users with JavaScript-enabled browsers.

My new site has already been featured on many CSS and web design galleries… including a prestigious “Editor’s Pick” on the W3CSites.com gallery (which requires strict adherence to valid markup and web accessibility).

I find her show to be a wealth of information. Much of it is basic and the people who call in don’t always ask the hardest questions… but even somebody like me… who lives and breathes computers (and who has a graduate degree in the stuff) can learn a bunch just by listening to her. She always has tons of tips of helpful hints on about any computer related topic you can think of. And her website is loaded with info and links to preferred software.

I get asked a lot of computer questions by people… people from all my circles of life… because they think of me as “the computer guy”. Quite frankly, many times the questions I get asked are simple… not just simple by my standards… but even simple for a layman. People ask me these questions because they want a quick answer and don’t want to take the moment to look up the answer on their own. In fact, you should see the disappointment that falls over someone’s face when I tell them which website has the answer to their question. Now you may say - what do you mean… shouldn’t they be excited to have a website to find their answer. Yes, they SHOULD, but they aren’t… they are disappointed that they actually have to GO to the website THEMSELVES… and they don’t feel like writing the URL down and/or committing it to memory so they usually never go there. Isn’t that crazy?

On Kim’s website and you’ll find much, but the real gem to most people is her downloads section with great links to shareware and freeware applications to perform some of the most important functions on your computer… like spyware detection and virus protection.

I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about their computer (and is not into lots of geek-speak) to listen to Kim Komando’s show. I especially recommend this if you find yourself constantly asking help for routine and basic questions regarding commonly used software and features. I super-mega-recommend this if you know me!

Of course, none of those fake email addresses exist. Like many domain admins, I was forwarding any “stray” emails to an unknown userid to one central account. Now, imagine thousands of mail servers replying back to this catch-all account with “Delivery Failure Notice” and “*SPAM* tracking notice”. Yeah, that’s me right now. I just disabled the catch-all account so I can now begin deleting the 1400 crap emails in my inbox. The only reason it wasn’t 14 million is because my account reached capacity.

Here’s the email that everyone now thinks that Negative99 users spammed out (with profanity edited out):

They passed beyond his sightline. Because it was that bitter taste which brought the high tide in over the piling.

[...here was a graphic image for some moronic pharmaceutical called "Hoodia"...]

And Miswess, she is goan sleep, too. Always granting the eye of childhood, which tends to see anyone over the age of twenty-five as elderly, he thought Shinny must be a11 of seventy-five now. Dull dirty half-shine oh boy you gotta remember that one that one aint half-bad oh boy I am stoned now, all the past was prologue to this sh** hey baby this here is the mainline oh f*** Im tucked but this is crystal top-end sh** this is going out on a mile-high wave in a f***ing Rolls this is — “What do you want first, Paul?
She had dragged him from the wreck of his car and instead of calling the police or an ambulance she had installed him in her guest-room, put IV drips in his arms and a sh**load of dope in his body.

He did not just pass this beneath her nose but pressed it briefly against her lower face. He imagined her laughing.

He had never been as close to her as he was then, as she carried him piggyback down the steep stairs. It was only after midnight, an hour after Geoffrey had ridden into the gathering storm to try and fetch the doctor, that the midwife had grown alarmed.

All that gibberish is supposed to trick spam filters into thinking it’s a legitimate email. And that’s a typical attempt… piecing together portions of novels and other texts.

I suppose this is a happening every website goes through eventually… like a teenager demolishing their parents’ car. So I need to face the fact that I… the WarAxe… the admin of Negative99… he who casts a plague on all your houses… has been attacked! Who would decide to use Negative99.com email addresses? Perhaps a rival blogger? Perhaps some commie atheist? Perhaps a disgruntled target of my jovial cynicism? I hope it’s that last one.

Idiots… on marijuana.

The ever-vigilant web stylist, Ms. Gepner, sent me a screenshot of the bad news that I knew was coming but was living in denial of. Yes, the newly released beta versions of Microsoft’s sucky browser did indeed break my website.

The upcoming style problems with Internet Explorer 7 (the latest aberration in standards compliant web browsing) have been foretold by design gurus for months. The development community has been lamenting the fact that Micro$oft saw fit to only fix a puny smattering of IE6’s bugs (of which there are MANY)… yet at the same time they removed a small “hack”, better known as the Holly Hack, which will now hearby eliminate the primary trick that web designers have been using to work around all of the IE bugs that have plagued it for as long as anyone can remember.

Now web designers have a terrible situation. All their Holly Hacks they’ve been using to beat IE versions 6 and below into submission are now gone… thank you Bill “Enemy At The” Gates. Yet, most of the bugs that we were using those hacks to fix are STILL IN THE BROWSER! You can’t make this stuff up. So now we have to use conditional logic in our webpages to load multiple CSS files… a primary CSS file and then an additional one to handle IE6 and below… and probably a third one to handle IE7. Fortunately, I was able to handle IE7 with one extra line of style so I wrote it in without another CSS file.

Here’s what the circus that was my compliant code looks like now:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css.ie6″ type=”text/css” />
<![endif]–>
<!–[if gt IE 6]>
<style>
#subcontent {float: right; position:absolute; margin-left: -175px; width:175px;}
</style>
<![endif]–>


Ugly. Very ugly. I hate Internet Explorer. For the love all that is decent and pure and right in this world… please, download and use a compliant web browser.

Well, I’ve caught myself recently pulling these same shenanigans. Today, in particular, I started a sentence with “Back when we had to log into Unix workstations”… and I could have easily added something about not having new-fangled so-called wireless internet. Now, this really isn’t shameful, but I can’t help but wince at myself whenever I hear something like that coming out of my mouth. Lately I’ve taken to starting those sentences in the mimicked voice of the proverbial old man (the one with the weather-forecasting big toe) and in that way almost poking fun at myself before anyone gets the chance.

And why not reminisce about the good ‘ole days of computing? It’s not like I’m telling stories about punch cards (way before my time). The days of hunting around campus for a free workstation in one of my undergraduate institution’s multiple computer labs was a time of computing excitement. The so-called information superhighway was just starting to flourish and the rise of the first-person shooter had dawned. Them was good days! For fun we’d reset the servers of the freshman dorm workstations… great amusement for upperclassmen, and a belated explanation for the oft random crashes of those pesky freshmen terminals.

I could go on about learning to surf the “command-line” way using a UNIX window running in MIT’s X11R5. Or how about gopher? Or using the brand new Mosaic program to browse something called the world wide web? Ahhh… pure nostalgic geekness.

All information is here: www.microsoftnysettlement.com.

If you’re not from New York, better fortune elsewhere. I’m no fan of Spitzer (our Attorney General) but this is the second check he scored me… the first was against the RIAA which, despite the meager $20, was a sweet smelling rose of a little dagger thrust into the belly of an evil organization of greed and artistic destruction. May the Lord deal with the RIAA be it ever so severely! More on that.

…don’t confuse a blog with a forum. They are different beasts. Their human-machine interface is (or rather should be) different. A blog does not usually make for a good forum. I hate to do this, but take WordPress.org for instance… this support section is really used as a forum, but in a blog format… IMHO, it is not the correct solution.

Forum software usually lists MANY threads going on and they are usually in order of when they were started. This has a few benefits. If you are returning to a specific thread you can remember when abouts it falls in the timeline so you can find it again. Have you ever tried finding a previous thread here with search? Good luck. And if you return to a forum thread it usually has a marker indicating it has new content… which for forum threads is easier than marking threads with new content by physically moving their position. Moving blog posts around to show activity only confuses the matter. Posts that could be very valuable are susceptible to being pushed into irrelevancy by newer ones, and the older valuable posts become lost. I see this time and again on this site, as well as a hoard of others. This is part of the reason why people ask the same questions over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over….

Forum software sometimes allows the ability to reorder comments in the threads by search relevancy, commenter rating, value points awarded, and some other ways. Not usually blogging software… but that’s fine because that’s not what blogs are for. A blog… short for weblog (coined many years ago by some guy who now doesn’t have a lot of money - seriously), is a different entity with a different user paradigm from a forum… with different purposes and different use case models.

Forum software works poorly for a blog, and blogging software works poorly for a forum. If you want to get sketchy and claim that modifications and subtle user interface customizations could turn a blogging software (like WordPress) into a forum-viable platform, then I would suggest that you are merely using the generic database query engine as a back-tier and rewriting the blog software to instead act as a forum front-tier. Basically, coding forum software into a blog so it’s no longer a blog. So in essence you aren’t using the blogging software anymore for your forum. Otherwise, any solution requiring text entries could use blogging software… CMSs, Forums, B2Bs, and the list goes on.

I know that a person does not need a master’s degree in IT to understand this… but mine sure helps me.

As I was saying, my new 250 GB backup storage device is being used to house my games. I finally got around to installing and playing Call of Duty 2, an FPS set in WW2. The graphics are incredible! My system isn’t top-of-the-line for gaming machines sold today (I have an AMD64 2.8 GHz - 1 GB RAM - Radeon 9600 Pro), but this game’s graphics are fluid as gasoline. I’ll throw on here some of my own screenshots when I get into some fun areas. I just started and I’m a Russian soldier defending Moscow from the oncoming German assault. This has some special meaning for me as I was in Moscow about a year and a half ago and got to see the WW2 monument they have their marking the high-water mark of the German advance. This picture on the left is the best one I could find of it. The article I grabbed this pic from had the following excerpt:

Anti-tank Hedgehogs :: a memorial to Moscow defenders. Erected in 1966 on the 23rd km down the Leningrad highway. The authors are architects A. Mikhe, A. Agafonov, I. Yermishin, and engineer K. Mikhailov.

The hedgehog is what they called these caltrop-like devices you see three of. They were designed to slow advancing tracked vehicles (and they worked pretty well). Way cool stuff!

No, this is not a thoughtful analysis of the social ineptitude revealed in the behavior of the brain-wiped and their addiction to online chatrooms, forums, bulletin boards, MMPORGs, etc. It is not a critique of the decay relationships experience when someone decides to engross themselves in a false realm because the fourteen straight hours of running online errands (killing the rogue dwarf, returning the wizard’s staff, cleaning the online stables, etc.) to finally get that coveted pearl helm (that so many other worthy adventurers are wearing these days) were more important than eating dinner with your family, sleeping with your wife, showering, making your child’s lunch, and going to work.

Yes, this is a tempered rant revolving around the events leading up to my eventual ninth attempt at setting up my new hard drive… along with the excessive time to make a ninth attempt at copying the old hard drive to a partition on the new one… excessive enough to necessitate my typing this post on a laptop backup ‘puter. And I wonder how successful could a ninth attempt be? I wonder if the upper partition limit of 137GB for Windows XP was a factor? I wonder why the hard drive setup utility from Maxtor looks identical to the one Western Digital offers? I wonder if this metal box is just whirring as a cunning attempt to deceive… a ruse of sorts to simulate productive activity when in actuality it is toying with me… making me wonder if it is a friend… or foe?

Now, the 1600×1200 resolution is formally known as UXGA. [Hey, that's the title of this blog entry!] Yes, you’re very perceptive. There is an exotic hierarchy of high resolution monitor standards and their equally fascinating naming conventions. Most any resolution has a widescreen cousin with a ‘W’ in front of it. UXGA’s cousin would be WUXGA with a resolution of 1920×1200.

The best quick reference for all screen resolutions is (you guessed it) at Wikipedia in the article computer display standard.

Oh, and by the way… it’s pronounced “jif”.