michael schurter

Right after I graduated from college, I taught 2 low level CS courses over a couple of semesters. Two of my students created some sort of chat program where you could punch your friends in the face if I remember correctly. It was awesome.

Now they’ve graduated and brought something even more amazing into this world: ManBabies.com

I could try to describe it, or respond to it, but I really think you just need to see it for yourself.

I’m so proud.

I just added the Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugin. You should now be able to get e-mail notifications when new comments are posted. This should make flamewars and trolling much easier.

For what its worth I also installed the Google Sitemap Generator plugin which seems to work alright. My main gripe is that the author uses a blog post dated June 5, 2005 as the home page for the plugin! I actually passed it up and kept looking the first time I hit the page because I assumed the plugin was old.

I have to admit, sites that use a blog like a full-fledged CMS usually annoy me. Of course tons of sites probably do it without me noticing, so I suppose if its done well, I don’t mind.

A while ago I installed the WP-Syntax plugin. Here’s a snippet of Python to test it out since I haven’t gotten around to posting any code lately:

d = {'test1': 'hello world'}
d.setdefault('test1', 'goodbye world')
d.setdefault('foo', 'bar')
print d['test1']
print d['foo']

This prints:

hello world
bar

becase setdefault() only changes the value of a dictionary key if the key has no value. Very handy.

My final bit of WordPress hacking has been to switch to using Subversion to update WordPress. Juggling files to do updates is just annoying. With Subversion I just checked out http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/2.2 and run svn up whenever an update is released.

I suppose I could just schedule running svn up with a cron job. It would even automatically e-mail what files it updates because cron e-mails stdout by default. But considering how much I love automatic updates on Windows, I think I’ll hold off on that…

Update: Grrr… Now if only I could convince WordPress not to convert my <div> tags to <p> tags when editing posts and messing up my whitespace when saving!

…its just irrelevant. The operating system you use doesn’t matter much anymore, and arguably it shouldn’t.

I’m not defending Vista. In fact it seems like the perfect example of how Microsoft doesn’t understand where the computer industry is headed.

By the time Windows 7 is released the operating system should just be a minor personal preference like choosing Gnome vs. KDE.

Of course video games and specialized software will keep people on Windows. Luckily at least specialized software is migrating to the web very quickly. Video games will hopefully become more cross-platform in order to remain popular in a world where there’s actual competition in the operating system world.

I haven’t posted in a long time, and this is a really lame way to start posting again… expect some much more interesting posts in the near future.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve (yet again) sold my soul to devil and agreed to put some sponsored links on my blog! The sponsors were very nice to work with and allowed me to clearly mark every ad with a fieldset:

Read my blog!

• Me vs. Vista - this is kind of a whiny post about Vista, but it really was quite frustrating to realize what kind of a beast I’m going to have to support for years to come.
• Feisty Fawn Update - I’m happy to report wireless is still working flawlessly on that IBM Thinkpad T30 with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. In fact Ubuntu handles it much better than the flaky drivers IBM provided for Windows XP (and XP doesn’t support it out of the box).
• ATI Proprietary Driver Annoyance - Since writing that post I’ve found out most of the Linux community is frustrated with ATI’s terrible Linux support. I suggest simply living with the open source drivers or buying an nVidia card.
• Lost in a Sea of Web Frameworks - I’m still lost in that sea. I’m currently using CherryPy for one project and Drupal for two others. I guess I still haven’t been able to get PHP out of my life!
• Hurling Chairs - This is an ancient post about Steve Ballmer throwing a chair. Still makes me laugh. I’m a bit harsh in the article though… I have a feeling someday I’ll regret making fun of bald white males.
• My Thoughts on Consumer Electronics - The article I link to still makes me laugh.
• IT Horror Story - So is it stealing to get sponsored for a somebody else’s story? “Steve” — I owe you a beer… or root beer if you’d prefer.

For anyone concerned, here are some advertising schemes I’ll never buy into:

• Pay to post — I will always clearly mark what is an ad and what isn’t.
• Those stupid little pop-up JavaScript ads on words. I hate those.
• Pop-ups — but only because they’re soooooo 1999.

However, if anyone would like to sponsor a Punch-the-Monkey-to-Win-an-XBox, I’d be more than happy to put it on every post. I have a room full of xboxes from those ads…

…as summed up by Joel Johnson. (Thanks to Aaron Colflesh for the link!) Children be warned that our good buddy Joel uses some grown-up words to describe the stuff you’re throwing tantrums to get every Christmas.

For anyone too lazy or squimish to read the article, let me sum it up for you: Gadgets suck.

In other news I thought I might be a neo-luddite for hating gadgets, DRM, and people who pretend tags are new when they’re just keywords which have been around forever. A quick skim of the Wikipedia article on neo-luddism made me realize I’m not that extreme, but rather, just grumpy and sleep deprived most of the time.

Hopefully you can apply an Electrical Engineering degree to something more productive than just gadgets.

For Samantha’s new job at First United Methodist Church in Peoria, she and I are supposed to send them a photo along with a 2 paragraph bio for the church newsletter. After reading today’s Pearls Before Swine, I’ve decided its a better description of who I am than I could ever come up with in 2 paragraphs:

Alright, that’s enough navel gazing… Back to the geek blogs…