Category: Byte.me

Shopping for a new computer and some work to set it up kept me busy on Saturday, when I wasn’t working on the house.

Continue reading “Migrate Settings”

My Canon G3 digital camera and Sony desktop computer stayed in Winnipeg with Claire. I got a Canon Powershot 410 before moving. I bought it at Shopper’s Drugs. It runs on 2 AA batteries. It didn’t have a DC adapter and I didn’t want to use battery power while the camera was transferring files to the computer over a USB connection. The Canon adapter is expensive and it would have been a special order – which I wasn’t going to wait for. A card reader was a less expensive and quicker option. It works to transfer the .JPG files from the camera card to the computer. It seems to be a simple and faster way to move images – plug the card into the reader, and the reader into the USB port, and copy the image files on the card to a new folder or file on my computer. From there I can crop and compress images with MS Photo Editor and attach them to emails or upload them here. I couldn’t install the Canon image management software on my Pentium MMX Toshiba, under Win 98SE. The Canon software, which I had been running on the Sony before I gave the computer to Claire, had useful features for organizing files and getting thumbnail views, but I think there is nothing special about that. I can probably get the same functions in Photoshop – it’s a question of finding something that works on this machine, or waiting to get settled in and getting a more powerful home computer. Meanwhile I can shoot, save and send so it’s all working.

When my future ex-wife started using the Internet, and when her mother and aunt started using the Internet, they used to forward email chain letters to me. I sent them information about web sites with information about virus hoaxes and urban myths, and explained how to bookmark them (I like bookmark – a much better word than Microsoft’s Favorite).
Wolfgang Stiller had a site at www.stiller.com/hoaxes.htm. He called his site Stiller Research. Quite a few pages linked to his hoax information page. He had developed a shareware virus checker called Integrity Master. He seemed to be a serious and knowledgeable person, regarded as an authority on viruses, data security and virus hoaxes. Googling the name brings up the president of the North European division of Alcan, an artist in New York, a mountaineer in Colorado Springs, and lots of hits relating to virus information – most of them going to stiller.com. He may be the mountaineer in Colorado Springs.
His hoax page is gone. Googling Stiller Research still brings up hits at stiller.com, but it has become a link farm. Nothing but ads. The page source suggests the site has been taken over by hitfarm, a notorious adware site.

My friend Randy, who is an academic librarian, recently posted an entry with a section on criticism of Wikipedia. His entry is called Various. He cites an essay called the Amorality of Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr. I have to agree that the linguistic and cultural implications of Wikipedia are being oversold by the usual assortment of technical writers, visionaries, dreamers and loons. I also agree that the quality of the entries is inconsistent but I think it is not as bad as some of these comments suggest.

Continue reading “Wikipedia”

Over the last few days I fixed the template for the page (Individual Entry Archives) with the Comment Entry fields to fix Typekey Login for commenters. I also experimented with some MT plugins – Stylecatcher, MTProtect, and CCode/TCode. I also spent some time redesigning and editing my web pages.

Continue reading “More blog changes”

After trying out different font families, I kept getting the same result as I mentioned in my last entry. Putting two spaces after the period (.) at the end of a sentence did not make a difference. After some research, I realized that this is a function of HTML, my font settings and my justification settings.The entry editing screen is a text editor. When the text is published in HTML, extra spaces are not counted. There is an HTML tag that will insert extra “non-breaking” spaces, and there are ways of automating that in external text editors, perhaps also by MT plugins. Many authorities favour using a proportionally spaced font and letting HTML sort it out. There are some reasons not to use two spaces, because in some applications, the extra whitespace can cause problems. It doesn’t seem to matter in an HTML page display in a browser window.
Many claim that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence started with typing teachers, not grammarians or printers. It was useful to add the extra space in typing with a typewrite, in a monospaced face, and that was considered as good practice. It may still be useful in processing text for output in a monospaced font-face. Adding the extra space in a text processor for HTML output requires special characters. Typing the spaces in the text processor has no impact.

I have been committed to Movable Type, but I have had some problems with it. When friends like Randy with history and good connections in blogging talked about changing to WordPress, I tried to compare the products. I think SixApart and MT will lose ground if SixApart doesn’t address some problems. I don’t want to spend time on importing entries and writing new stylesheets and templates for a WordPress blog. For the time being, the balance of convenience favours staying with MT and hoping for improvement.

Continue reading “Moaning about MT”