brainscat.com

Excitedly, I bit off more than I can easily chew by volunteering to patch something in WordPress. It all stems from this bug.

I’m unhappy with the current behavior of RSS 2.0 feeds (I’m not sure about the other syndication formats) in summary mode. The problem is that while in summary mode, you can’t view any links offsite through the RSS feed. After much confusion, with the help of Dougal and Photomatt I learned that it was because the <content:encoded> tag in RSS 2.0 is dropped when a feed is in summary mode. <content:encoded> is the happy home of RSS data, the meat of your feed, that has all kinds of markup attached to it whereas <description> is meant only as a plaintext summary.

Anyways, my [not so] bright idea is to create a <content:encoded> section in the summary feed where the excerpt is truncated based upon the non-markup data. That means I have to ignore tags while at the same time being aware of whether or not I’m breaking the XML, and if I do, automatically fix it. The human brain can easily do this in a few seconds but defining rules for a computer to do it is taxing this human’s brain. Time for a break.

An invite to Gmail will be sent to the first person to post at the twenty4.org Gmail Giveaway. Have fun.

Update: 6 left from myself. Changed the directions to go to twenty4’s webpage, as he may get more traffic and get these invites gone.

This past weekend I was lucky enough to get together with my buddies Nate and Freiman for camping. We jumped into a Jeep and drove 560 miles up to Eagle Harbor, Michigan to relax on Lake Medora and see the surrounding marvels of Lake Superior. Instead of giving you boring details that can’t come close to how the weekend was, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

A new PhotoFriday, a little later than usual, but I think it’s worth it.

I’d greatly appreciate it if you went to this website to help me get a free iPod. If you’re worried about the legitimacy of the site, read this testimony from Wired magazine. All you need to do is complete the trial offer to help me out and you don’t have to email anyone if you don’t wish. In all honesty, I saw this website a while back on some forums and thought it was crap, though I’m glad to be proven wrong.

Update: I did the Columbia House DVD offer, though looking back, I should have probably done the BMG music offer. Some of the services require that you really do nothing, and can cancel them, though the CD service one looks to be the best value for least investment. Besides, it would’ve been great to get more CDs to put on the iPod…

Thanks to Steve, you may enjoy this wonderful sight of robots in a battle royale.

The quickest way to get to the men’s bathroom from my office is through the west corridors of the Auditorium.

It takes a total of 1 minute 36.9 seconds to go to the east, while only taking 1 minute 30.5 seconds to go to the west. For those of you who work in the westernmost offices, your decision should be made all the much more clear now. Good day.

How to tie a tie by way of Matt Mullenweg.

I stumbled upon a compiliation of corporate names and their etymology today through Randy Peterman’s blog. While many tales are quite interesting, perhaps the story that stood out most in my mind was McDonald’s history.

I’ve heard (unknowing of it’s validity) that McDonald’s was looking to compete with the success of Big Boy restaurants by cloning the recipe of the “Big Boy” sandwich, a double decker with onions, pickle, lettuce, and thousand island dressing. Interestingly, the two brothers who founded McDonald’s are named Dick and Mac…

Next time you head off to McDonald’s be thankful you’re not eating a Big Dick.

John Lim writes an interesting defense of PHP’s flexibility as a virtue, and it’s worth a quick read.

As promised, here’s a patch to blacklist pages in MediaWiki. When I figure out how the hell custom namespaces work (or if they’re possible even) I’ll add namespace blacklisting.

I had so much trouble photographing this because getting everything in focus with the tiny lens on my camera was a chore. Thankfully, this one turned out.

Tim Bray throws together an excellent summary and analysis regarding the recent claims that Linux infringes 283 patents recently put forth by OSRM. Tim gives the real deal and puts things into perspective.

It looks like my quest for more robust MediaWiki permissions has taken an adventerous turn. One of the commiters was happening to look at the support forums and helped explain the necessary changes for black-listing MediaWiki pages. I’ve started preliminary work on the code and I’ll probably get to the rest of it on Friday. Stay tuned for patches.

This is a plea for help regarding the MediaWiki permissions model. I spent the majority of all last night looking for a way to have an open wiki with certain pages that weren’t viewable by anyone except sysops. I know you can lock a page from editing, but I need certain pages to be invisible.

The closest I could find was a whitelist scheme. For my purposes though, the whitelist scheme would be far too hard to update, as my number of public pages is far greater than private pages and maintaining a whitelist would be too time consuming.

Are there ways to do one of the following?

• Namespace the default set of documents and whitelist them, while creating a different namespace for the private pages?
• Manage a blacklist of pages? Or blacklist a namespace?

Any answer I find will be posted here and on MediaWiki for posterity, and will be greatly appreciated.