I read 
that there was a major power outage (Dutch) in the southern portion of The Netherlands. Nu.nl has some weird pictures with the ‘Fair’ of Eindhoven just milling about like if there was no power outage. Obviously some people use generators. My advice in case the power goes out: just go to bed.
Excellent pictures of more demonstrations at Alfons’.
Big news: Earlier Paul “SuperWindowsSite” Thurrott criticized Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 development, meaning to say that there’s no real progress and that it looks like that the newest version might not even completely support any of the webstandards. Firefox and Opera are still topping the list. Earlier I said the following of the ‘imminent release of IE 7 Beta 1’:
I’m not impressed, for the simple matter that I do not believe that IE 7.0 is an actual upgrade if compared to Gecko, KHTML or the Opera engine (all three renderers have been rewritten from scratch to accommodate new CSS/HTML/XHTML standards).
Somebody should tell Microsoft to rewrite IE. And open source the current codebase. For one browser it meant the start of a new life. Oh and the Slashdot discussion about this is rather tasty too.
OK. So your new Mac OSX now comes with Ruby On Rails, something that you could have downloaded before the announcement was made.
So, that’s it. Have at it!
W10x!
Earlier,
I uploaded ‘AHCommentCentral’, which is a plug-in that is supposed to help closing/opening comments and ping/trackbacks in your post sections. For now, you’ll find the initial release right over here. That is, for the daring people who experiment. It’s GPL-ed too, which is (only) natural for ‘non-compilable’ sources1.
I left out certain options (you’ll find references to them in the sources): the ‘auto close feature’ (see PrintAutoForm) and the Post Exceptions list (see call to get_options to retrieve data from the ‘ahi_cc_excluded_posts’ options field). In earlier versions, I actually had that ‘auto-close feature’ working, but I decided against adding it to the initial code.
There are couple of things I don’t like about creating WordPress plugins: Designing screens is obnoxious. Here’s a tip for you lazy programmers: grab the ‘wp-admin.css’ file dump it in a directory and then install NVU. Yes, NVU is buggy like crazy, but proofed to be quite the help while racing through all these HTML form elements (A couple of years I was thinking about creating a form-designer). We need XFORMS. Direly.
Another thing that is annoying (when creating these plug-ins) is that the current plug-in structure forces you to start globalizing’ certain variables. I won’t do a rant about globals. There are plenty of them. Global variables kill cats. Somehow, PHP forces programmers to write bad code. You know, poetry is one thing, but comparing PHP code with written literature is a joke. It’s like giving a kid 2 notes (A and B minor) and tell him or her to write 80 melody lines out of those notes. The problem is not in creating 80 of ’em. The problem is that the eighty tunes will always sound alike. But OK, I admit: PHP is not as bad as ASP (which is just a fancy name for Visual Basic for Applications [cough] and servers!).
As for the name: I think I was watching Comedy Central the other day and the name got stuck somehow in the nether regions of my brain. I considered renaming it to something absurd like, ‘W10x’ (which you pronounce as ‘What The Funk’) or better yet, ‘W09y’ (you pronounce that as that typical Eigthties greeting ‘See You Later, Aligator’). I’m actually dreaming of an ‘EP01BF’, which is the abbreviation for Peanut Buster Parfait. OK. Comment Central.
1 What’s the point of releasing ‘closed sourced’ PHP applications? [that’s a joke]
UPDATE: I just updated the plug-in.
UPDATE#2: Older versions of WordPress