bedeviled mojo slop

I was driving down to the Shelter Skatepark this afternoon to renew my membership and passed a car with the license plate, PASTRAMI. That's dedication y'all.

Also, if you live in suburbia, your neighborhood may or may not organize a Halloween parade. Our neighborhood organized a supreme gala fest. That occurred today at maybe 2 PM EST. Here are a couple of shots of the organized mayhem. The parade in this first shot extended about a lot of feet with not one, but two firetrucks! One firetruck in the front and one firetruck in the back. I'm not scared of much in this world, but these sugar-crazed zombies freak me the hell out. These costumed menaces crave one thing and one thing only: S-U-G-A-R! This house is equipped with enough sugar candies to kill a small army. I pray it's enough.

Oh, and apparently werewolves can be firemen. Who knew they liked to wear blue jeans?

Technorati Tags: shelter skatepark pastrami halloween parade

delicious-java

delicious-java is a Java API for interacting with the del.icio.us social bookmarks service.

Changelog.
Download.
Javadocs.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us java

So, I recently experienced some issue with Flash where I couldn't get any sound from Flash. This was particularly disturbing considering I found the Napoleon Dynamite soundboard yesterday. However, there is a solution that I found on the Macromedia Message Board.

I had the same problem with sound and flash... Ran garage band and all flash sounds work now.

Hooray!

Technorati Tags: flash garage band napoleon dynamite

Early this morning I finished up Ratchet & Clank. Again, it was fun, fun, fun. I can't imagine that there was any way to beat the last boss without dredging around and shelling out the 150,000 bolts for the R.Y.N.O. (Rip Ya a New One) weapon. I didn't use a cheat to get the 150,000 bolts, but I did have to employ some scotch tape and the following sly technique because damned if I was going around for hours killing idiot enemies to get all those bolts.

From one of the Ratchet & Clank FAQs:

This will ONLY work if you have that disguise gadget thingy that makes you
turn into a robot, the taunter, and a hoverboard. Go to planet Rilgar and go
to the hoverboarding place. Use the disguise and turn into a robot and go to
the lady and play the hoverboard race. Now when it starts, instead of racing,
you are standing there in the hoverboard racetrack. (It's kinda hard to
explain. Try it out yourself and you'll see what I mean.) Take out your
taunter and go to some boxes on the racetrack. Now make Ratchet face the
boxes and use your taunter on the boxes and the money will flow to you.
ALTHOUGH it will only continuosly flow to you if none of the boxes appear on
your screen. So ratchet has to face the boxes, but the boxes cannot appear on
your TV screen or else it wont work. Now put something on the O button of
your PS2 controller so Ratchet will keep using the taunter. Then do whatever
you want. Take a nap, go to the movies, go to school, eat a PB & J, enjoy the
great outdoors, whatever. And while your doing this, ratchet will be using
his taunter getting you more and more bolts. In about four hours, I got about
110,000 bolts. I'm not so good at explaining things, so I hope you
understood! Good luck!

Worked like a champ and in the morning when I woke up I had 260,000 bolts. I am such a nerd. But not as big a nerd as that FAQ maintainer. He's rockin' the ASCII art ... ASCII art!

Technorati Tags: ratchet & clank

I was poking around the Flock bugzilla instance to see if anyone else had reported not being able to post to their blog from Flock. newPost xml-rpc not quite right (my emphasis in italicized bold).

recent versions of drupal (http://drupal.org/) use an XML-RPC that does strict
type checking against method signatures. as such, newPost (metaweblog or
blogger) fails on drupal because Flock sends the "publish" paramater as an "int"
rather than a "boolean" as the spec calls for.

So, let's see, what happens if I now add the following method to blojsom's MetaWeblog API handler.

public String newPost(String blogid, String userid, String password, Hashtable struct, int publish) throws Exception {
return newPost(blogid, userid, password, struct, (publish == 0) ? false : true);
}

Let's try posting to a local blog and see what messages we have on the console. Are we happy yet?

Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - newPost() Called ===========[ SUPPORTED ]=====
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - BlogId: testing/
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - UserId: david
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Password: *********
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Publish: true
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Created blog entry file: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.html
Oct 24 15:30:41 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Saved meta-data to: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:30:41 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Loaded meta-data from: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:30:41 DEBUG [Thread-35] weblogsping.WeblogsPingPlugin - Pinged notification URLs based on blog entry event

So, the question is, who needs to change? Do I need to change blojsom's handlers to support software that is sending an int when it should be sending a boolean as per the specification? There isn't a specification I've looked at (1, 2, 3) where anyone is calling for an int in place of a boolean. It's easy enough to add and this isn't meant to be that much of a bitch, but come on here

And yes, as noted in the comments, an XML-RPC console panel would help to debug. But, a little localhost action goes a long way.

P.S. Also needed to update the editPost function as well.

public boolean editPost(String postid, String userid, String password, Hashtable struct, int publish) throws Exception {
return editPost(postid, userid, password, struct, (publish == 0) ? false : true);
}

Which yields entry editing happiness.

Oct 24 15:50:01 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - editPost() Called ========[ SUPPORTED ]=====
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - PostId: testing/?permalink=Test-post-from-Flock.html
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - UserId: david
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Password: *********
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Publish: true
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Loaded meta-data from: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Saved meta-data to: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [Thread-38] weblogsping.WeblogsPingPlugin - Pinged notification URLs based on blog entry event

And with that, we're done.

Technorati Tags: flock xml-rpc blojsom

It seems as if plans are underway to make BarCamp happen in the BigApple.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. All attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn are welcome and invited to join.

When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

I've tentatively marked myself as a participant, so hopefully it'll happen on a date that works schedule wise.

East coast represent!

Technorati Tags: barcamp new york city

So, I'm woefully behind in blogging about Ireland, but there's actually a reason for that which is another post in and of itself. So, in lieu of a humorous and insightful post about my vacation in Ireland, a post of some photos of Ireland. Enjoy!

In the Republic of Ireland, all the road signs are Gaelic first, English second.

After a brief nap in the afternoon, the last adventure for the first day was to tour the Guinness factory.

The tour was sort of a letdown since it's self-guided, but admission does give you a token for a free Guinness at their sky bar. They even put a little 3 leaf clover in the head for you.

The view from the sky bar around Dublin is spectacular and worth the price of admission. Portions of the window highlight key places in Dublin. In this photo, off in the distance, is Trinity College.

Powers Court Gardens is a huge estate. If you need to reconnect with your inner gardener, behold their expansive gardens.

There were literally hundreds , if not thousands, of roses in this one section of all different colors.

And then there's Blarney Castle where tourists show up in droves to kiss the Blarney Stone.

You have to get all Matrix-style to kiss the Blarney Stone. I gave the Blarney Stone a nice smack-er-oo. I've heard the locals pee on the Blarney Stone at night.

It may look like a tight fit, but you could fit a motorcycle and a pedestrian or two in the space that's leftover This is, however, not the tightest road I drove on in Ireland.

People lived in huts like this thousands of years ago. Has anyone else seen that show on HGTV called "Small Space, Big Style"? Yeah, well, you have to respect this 17 sq ft. (if that) space.

I hate to break it to you emo punks, but it's not some underground rock movement. Emo is yet another money hungry, power mongering petrol company

You sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo wish you made forts like Dun Aengus when you were a kid!

300ft. unprotected cliffs. Apparently, back in the day, families on the Aran island had their own patterns for sweaters. If someone washed up on shore and their body was all bloated and unidentifiable, they knew from what family they came by their sweater pattern.

The Burren is this insane lunar-esque landscape. Lots of rocks.

The Cliffs of Moher are like 700 ft. They basically kick the Aran islands cliffs collective ass.

In Derry, which is located in Northern Ireland, there's a wall around a portion of the city. You can walk it. Also, in contrast to the Republic of Ireland, in Northern Ireland, everything is in English.

If you're a fan of Irish Whiskey, take the Bushmills tour. This tour was far better than the Guinness tour as they took you around the actual production facilities where Bushmills is made. Also, this is the only place you can purchase a bottle of Bushmills 12 year old Single Malt. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Newgrange. This place was constructed thousands of years ago. It was also constructed in such a way that the passage way, where you see the people in the upper corner are congregating, lets through light through to the inner chamber during a few days of the winter solstice.

Technorati Tags: ireland

Gada.Be is another nerdly metasearch service. Read more on their about page.

In any event, I figured since other people were developing plugins for other software packages, I'd go a similar route and re-purpose the data populated by blojsom's Technorati Tags plugin for use with Gada.Be. I should've called that plugin the Keywords plugin since basically all it's doing is adding an edit box to the screens when you add or edit a blog entry to mark an entry with certain keywords. These keywords can be applied to any such service like Technorati, del.icio.us, or in this case, Gada.Be.

And so, the GadaBeTags macro. It slices, it dices, it'll remember your mom's birthday! As you can see, it grabs the keywords and creates the appropriate link to the Gada.Be service. Add that macro to either your global macros page so that you can use the macro across templates (say for your syndication feeds) or add it to an individual template. Then simply use #GadaBeTags($entry) when you're looping over your entries and you're good to go. Change the macro to suit your blog's style or use whatever CSS magic you feel is necessary.

Technorati Tags: keywords blojsom technorati del.icio.us gada.be

Awhile back, traps were set outside of the shed to catch a rabbit that made its home under the shed. He nipped at all the pretty flowers and pilfered some vegetables here and there (I'm sure he was responsible for killing the 3 stalks of corn before they could fully mature). The plan was to catch the bunny and then take him far far away where he could enjoy the fruits of another forest. Things sort of went according to plan. The traps finally managed to lure and catch the rabbit. Unfortunately, and it's not known when he was actually caught, but I'm sure it was some time when I was in Ireland. Needless to say, one of the traps contains the remains of what, many weeks ago, resembled a rabbit.

Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeech!

Nicola Piccinini, created a post mailer plugin for blojsom.

A missing feature in blojsom is the capability to send, every time an entry is added, an email with its content (title and description). For example Blogger allows it and I find it useful because I'm using email as an archiving system (thanks to the recent avalability of free, with large disk storage and well working email services).

So, if you'd like that capability, download here and experiment.

Technorati Tags: blojsom email blogger

Punch Apparel is using blojsom for their blog. Rock on. They've got some swell t-shirt designs.

Maybe I can make a trade ... blojsom t-shirt for a punch apparel t-shirt? I'm especially fond of the Delawhere? shirt.

Technorati Tags: punch apparel blojsom

openDemocracy has switched some of their blogs from TypePad to blojsom. One of the technical developers slightly modified the existing MovableType to blojsom script (download here) to add author information to blojsom's entry meta-data file. Although they probably could have used the Syndication Feed Import plugin, it was probably just as quick to modify that Perl script.

Welcome aboard!

Technorati Tags: blojsom

Last night I finished Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Fun, fun, fun.

Now I need to buy the first Ratchet and Clank to see where the madness all started. In Up Your Arsenal, the game designers allowed you to purchase a weapon from the first 2 games at certain points from the weapons vendor if you had those saved games on your memory card. If nothing else, it might motivate you to go out and spend another $20 on one of those games. I'm not so much looking forward to the 4th in the series, Ratchet: Deadlocked since it doesn't seem to have the evolving story-line of the previous 3 games. But, we'll see...

I realize that returning your shopping cart to one of the staging locations in a supermarket parking lot isn't exactly the most fun task in the world, but the 'bag who I watched push his cart in front of another car really takes the cake as 'Bag of the Day!

• RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE
  (tags: development ide rails ruby ruby_on_rails software tools )

Today was my first day of driving in the United States after 8 days of driving more than 1500 miles throughout Ireland. People sit on the wrong side of the car and drive on the wrong side of the road here in the States.

The streets throughout the States are much bigger than what you'll find in Ireland, except for maybe the Motorways like the M1. The road atlas from Ireland had color coded the roadways depending on its size. There were certainly roads I drove on that were not on the map and therefore had no color. Maybe those were the knuckle bone white roads.

Technorati Tags: ireland

Today I leave Ireland after a 12 day vacation around the country. Goodbye!