WhistlinDixie

Firefox Finally Plays WMV

The Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft has released a plugin that finally makes Firefox consistently play WMV files. The plugin requires Firefox 2.0 and Windows Media Player 11. (Sorry to all of you who refuse to upgrade from WMP 10.)

Prior to this plugin, getting WMV files to play in Firefox was a crapshoot at best. I’ve personally never gotten it to work, even with trying it on multiple computers and on multiple Windows installs on my laptop. I guess some people have, but the success rate was not exactly great. I’m glad to see that MS actually put the effort into making Firefox, the biggest competitor by far to Internet Explorer, work consistently with their video formats.

Time For A New Lock

I just ran across a video on YouTube about a rather nifty way to defeat a standard tumbler lock: lock bumping. Here is a news story about lock bumping. I, being the irresponsible person that I am, will even show you how to bump a lock.

I’d go and try this myself, but I am lacking both in the having a spare key and the having a lock to experiment on departments. No way I’d pull this on my grandmother or aunt.

Crash This

While watching the new episode of Heroes tonight, I noticed a large number of advertisements for the new NBC show The Real Wedding Crashers. Personally, I think the concept of this show is absolutely horrible.

Punk’d is slightly entertaining because they are messing with people in everyday situations. Wedding Crashers, however, is based on the concept of people willingly ruining a day that should only come once in a person’s life: the day they are married.

I would never consent to anyone messing up my wedding, and I would more than likely beat the crap out of someone if they even tried. One of the teasers featured the reverend that was officiating the ceremony receiving a call on his phone while performing the vows and stopping the service to take it. Even with all of the respect that I have for clergymen, I would still have given him an earful. If I was the parent of one of the kids who consent to this (they don’t deserve to be called adults if they consider this to be funny), I would disown them for ruining such a special day.

What’s next? Ma’am, your baby died… Not! You’ve just been Punk’d! I don’t even understand why people watch this crap.

Status Update

Finally got the tags to work. Only took an hour and a half of troubleshooting since the installation instructions were incorrect. Grr! Also, a little bonus, I got a calendar for easier browsing of the archives. Hacked it a bit to get the nifty tooltips to show up on the hover, but I think it turned out nicely. Hopefully, I’ll get the this links later this week and the gallery started this coming weekend.

Blog Merge Complete

I have completed moving the material from the blog and news pages of Solitary Confinement over to WhistlinDixie. However, I have left comments turned off for all of these items since they were posted in the past. Also, due to the basic nature of my previous site, there were no comments to begin with, so these posts will stay comment-less for perpetuity.

You may also notice that the site looks very different (as well as acts very different) from when it first started up. This is because when I started, I was using a CMS called GeekLog. After about a day, I decided that I did not like it and I also discovered that it had a rather small community built around it, meaning not much support. After playing around a bit, I decided to go with an application called Nucleus CMS. It is simpler and tailored for what I need: a blog. Nucleus also has a large, active user community, meaning a plethora of skins and plugins are available for it, making it much more flexible.

Outstanding tasks:

• I have noticed that clicking on a tag in the tag cloud does not seem to actually bring up a page that contains all of the items that have that tag, but rather all items on the blog. I’ll take a look into that another day.
• I still have to populate my links page (some CSS hacking will take place first to get some pretty menus) and my about page.
• Then, and only then, will I get to getting Gallery2 up and running and port over my image galleries.

WhistlinDixie.us Comes Online

WhistlinDixie.us is here at last. I had previously written the blog Solitary Confinement hosted through Kettering University, but, due to artificial limitations placed on the servers by the IT department, was unable to ever make it into anything more than just a plain old website. Since they refused to install any kind of server-side programming environment (J2EE, PHP, ASP, etc) or database (it would make our servers too vulnerable), I was forced to make a static site that emulated a blog, minus the comments or any real features. With WhistlinDixie, I hope to achieve what I started out for in the beginning: a full-featured blog that is under my control.

In the future, I will work on porting over the old content from Solitary Confinement. I will start with the about 120 posts that I created during the life of the site. After that, I hope to get Gallery2 working and then port over my image galleries one-by-one (need to be careful with bandwidth limits).

Lastly, I would like to thank Chris at badger4life.com for providing the space from his hosting account with LunarPages.