Dave’s Good Stuff

I knew, once I started reading that I’d be tagged.

So… it makes sense that the closest book is the one I’m currently reading. No, it’s not Lord of the Rings. That’s at home, though having one of my half a dozen or so copies here at work isn’t a bad idea…

From Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier…

A French army officer asked him what he had learned from Napoleon. His reply was that he faced two problems during the war. One was the rifled musket behind earthworks, and the other was moving huge amounts of men and materiel [sic] by rail, and that Napoleon had nothing to say on either of them.

Bruce Schneier is, in my opinion, one of the most reasonable and grounded security minds today. Grounded by uncommon sense, he rarely fails to enlighten. The above passage Ulysses S. Grant’s reply to the French army officer during a visit to France following the US Civil War. It helps illustrate Schneier’s point that dynamic security systems, those which can adapt mid-attack, are more effective than static security systems, those that respond in a specific way every time. Security card readers are static. They deny you or allow you based on the presence of an access card. The armed guard is dynamic. He/she adapts to changing conditions. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? It was the difference between United Flight 93 and the rest of the plans that didn’t make it on 9/11.

Moving on… tag outs to you…

Matt. I think we could count the New York Times. Who knows? I’m new to this. Can a newspaper count? Sure. Why not.
Paul and Amy. The manual for Gears of War would definitely count, and Squanto says “hi!” to Roe.
Tim. Do you still play pool at all? You were really shaping up there…
Lydia. 9. I really like all my friends and wish them all the best, and 10. Why won’t someone tag me with one of those viral tag things? I’m here in my new office, sniffling, and no one tags. What gives?
M. Get the camera phone, already.

The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post in your blog the following three sentences.
5. Tag five or more people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

Dave Moulton speaks wisdom…

I see it on the various bike forums and blogs, where cyclists recall the near misses, and their run-ins with aggressive drivers. The problem is, the person posting is re-living the event, and causing others to re-live their bad experiences. We cannot erase bad events that have happened in the past, but we can learn from them and move on.

I like the bit about re-living. That is of the truth for me.

Henceforth, while I may offer a note about negative experiences with motorists, I will not detail, nor dwell on them, and will do my best to spin it positively.

I shall not interpret those that stop unnecessarily at intersections as having little comprehension of the Way of the Bicycle (though this may, in fact, be the case), rather I will see it as a kindness that they chose to let me through, or an opportunity to show them a considerate and attentive cyclist. I will spend more time and energy focusing on the good aspects of my rides, and let the bad slough off like water off a ducks feathers.

I’ll let you know how this works out for me…

I’m trying out the new Wordpress 2.5 RC1. If you notice anything odd around here (other than banal and useless posts), that may or may not be it.

So far, I’m pretty impressed. Obviously, you won’t see many changes to the appearance of the blog, as that’s entirely theme driven.

The admin screens are considerably nicer, with the exception of the widget management. I liked the old way of configuring sidebars. The new way, while interesting, seems a step backwards.

[UPDATE - 2008-03-24T14:28:35+00:00] I can’t say what bugs or issues others have come across on their blogs, but my experience and the comments of people here indicate the following:

When commenting, you don’t see any message indicating that the message is in the moderation queue, and the comment does not appear on the site. The comment is, in fact, in moderation, but the message stating as much no longer shows up. This could be an issue with Wordpress 2.5, or with a comments plugin I’m using.

When commenting, two checkboxes appear, one above the comment form saying “Subscribe to comments via email” and the other below the comment form saying “Notify me of followup comments via e'mail“. This is almost certainly a bug in the comments plugin I’m using. I’m monitoring plugin updates.

It was reported that every post, when viewed singularly, shows only “Blog Archive” in the title bar. The post title is missing. This was true, I reproduced it myself, but now seems to be resolved.

It appears that the atom feed is broken. The RSS2 feed is fine, but the atom feed has no entries, and will throw an error.

There have been many times that I’ve received the error “You attempt to post "" has failed. Please try again.” I have no idea what the problem is here, and haven’t looked for any log entries on the server. It’s never happened before, so I suspect an issue with the 2.5 RC1 release.

My brother and I, since his visit, have been trying to, if not coordinate, at least motivate each other’s exercise efforts. Thus far it’s been… unsuccessful. We’re working with our Garmin GPS computers, using Motionbased.com, and MapMyFitness.com to record our activities. This is OK, but doesn’t work that well for activities that don’t involve the GPS device.

What we really need is something that fits the following:

To *easily* enter our data, to include:

• Activity Type (Workout, Running, Cycling, etc.)
• Activity Location (Portland, Kansas City, etc.)
• Activity Intensity (Easy, Medium, Hard, Insane)
• Activity Muscle Group (Legs & Abs, Arms & Back, Chest & Shoulders, etc.)
• Time (Start, Total and Moving)
• Heart Rate (Resting, Average, Minimum and Maximum)
• Speed (Average, Minimum and Maximum)
• Pace (Minimum, Maximum, Average Overall, Average Moving, Best)
• Elevation (Minimum, Maximum, Gain, Loss)

To have read-only access to view each other’s data.
To have access to view summaries of each other’s progress.
To be automatically informed of each others progress.

• Daily/Weekly/Monthly Summaries
• Instant update notices when something is changed or added.

To be able to comment on our own and each other’s activities.
To create custom reports on whatever data we want to carve out.
To be able to set goals.

• Body weight, BMI, lifted weights, distance, speed, HR, etc.

I’ve found, but haven’t examined very closely the following:

We Endure
Fit Day
Fit Watch
Online Fitness Log
Traineo

I’m sure each is good in it’s own right, but how well will they fit?

Anyone have any ideas?

I’ve added a comment subscription plug in, just in case you want to be e’mailed when a new comment is added to a post you’ve commented on. Right now, comments subscription is on by default. When you comment on a post, there’s a little checkbox you can de-check if you don’t care what other people have to say, but that wouldn’t be very nice.

I’ve recently been plagued by comment spammers again. Thing is, I’ve set things so that people need accounts here to place comments. Then, once the comment is posted, I have to approve it, delete it, or mark it spam. I’m not too worried at this point, b/c any spam that makes it through still needs approval… at which point I just mark it spam. They won’t show up, in other words, defeating the purpose of the spammers. However, I don’t get how they get through when they need an account. I’m under no illusion that Wordpress is perfect, or immune to clever attacks, but still… that seems a simple thing to block. Read the rest of this entry »

I was talking on the phone with my brother today. We talked about ex girlfriends, current girlfriends, wives, cycling, and trips to see each other. While talking about cycling, I sent him the embeddable HTML link to my calendar. At that point, it occurred to me… why am I fighting the RSS feed issue, when I can just embed the actual calendar in a sidebar? I gave it a shot, and now I have the best of both worlds… I have the calendar like I always wanted, as well as the agenda in a way that makes sense. I’m not sure about the bandwidth usages, but I’m reasonably certain that Google wouldn’t have made it possible if it was going to be too bad. Read the rest of this entry »

This post will disappoint many people who are currently looking for a good, working Google Calendar plugin and/or widget for Wordpress. If you’re looking for one, then so am I. Google’s default feed from the calendar is sorted by last modified date, and frankly, I just don’t see the point. I would MUCH rather, in all situations, rather have the feed sorted by event date… you know, when the appointment described is happening, rather than when the appointment described was described. Perhaps someone could enlighten me on the reasoning… surely there is and I’m just missing it.

I’ve tried several solutions, including Event Calendar, the Google Calendar widget, iCal4WP and various RSS feed widgets… they either don’t work the way I want, or don’t work at all.

I *might* just have to dig in and learn how to do it myself… unless someone has an unpublished working prototype or finished plugin that I’ve not found.

Had some DNS issues. Poorly configured registrar records and expired domains left me with inaccessible domains for a bit. Back now. Enjoy.

Trying out some new themes… it might be a little “dynamic” over the next few days as I play around with the site. I may try to wrap my old look around the wordpress theme format also, just to see how that all works. Then again, maybe not. Read the rest of this entry »