Mountebank Blog

I’m thinking, before this blog really gets big (tiny as it is right now), of switching away from MovableType and to WordPress. It’s not really because of Six Apart’s recent, much-lamented decision to make Movable Type cost money (and not just a little, either). They’re still going to keep the free version, which seems pretty suitable for my needs, and it’s easy enough to stay free with just keeping the older version instead of upgrading to version 3. But I can see that the constant “rebuilding” required by Movable Type could become a bit of a problem when (if) this blog ever gets big. I’m also concerned about size on the server…which is nowhere near a problem yet, but could be, someday, and WordPress seems (from what I hear) to manage this problem much better.

From the quick look I’ve had, WordPress seems to have even better features, and it really installs much easier than MT. But will I be able to keep my oh-so-beautiful design? Or, more accurately, will I be able to figure out how to use the templates and features of WP? That, truly, remains to be seen, especially since I can’t say I’ve really mastered MT. At all! But, I’m always in the market for another time-waster. Hah!

One of my wife’s colleagues had a computer problem…well, a problem with popups, popunders, and popallarounds, so prevalent, and so disgusting, that it was impossible to use the internet.

So my wife volunteered my services to get it “fixed.”

I have never seen such a huge collection of adware, spyware, highjackers, toolbars, search assistants, nasty dialers, and general gunkware on one machine. This colleague, it turns out, has two teenage sons…and you can just guess what kind of websites they’ve been looking at!

Now I don’t mind that, I was a teenage boy once myself, and although I didn’t have the internet, I surely took every chance available to have a look at what girls with no clothes on might look like. After all, I hoped to see one for real someday!

But, while “boys will be boys,” and so forth, didn’t anyone ever teach these boys not to just click “OK” to every little popup that appeared on the screen?

The very first ad-aware scan found over 700 items. Then Spybot S & D found another 450! Then there were about 27 more which could not be deleted by either program.

I had to boot into safe-mode and do some very tedious hand-deleting to get them all out. The toughest was a nasty little critter called “sysupd.exe.” That monster simply did not want to be deleted.

But (I think) I finally got rid of all of them, and now the internet is again usable on that machine….but it won’t be long until those boys have it loaded up again!

Somebody needs to teach teenagers…not only do you need a condom if you have real sex–you need the cyber-equivalent if you’re going to have screen sex!

Working more on my blockquotes, I found that Adrian Holovaty had developed a method to dynamically label blockquotes with css.

But it wasn’t quite good enough…

Then I found an even better method, using JavaScript, invented by Dunstan Orchard, and also implemented differently by Simon Willison and Paul Hammond.

I fiddled with it some more, rewrote slightly, and then used css to format the source line the way I liked it.

So now I think I’ve got it working. If I just include the cite element in the blockquote tag, the javascript should automatically grab it out, and make it a link at the end of the blockquote, if it’s a website, or just a text reference to the source if it’s not.

So let’s see if it works. Here’s a blockquote from a website:

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has filed freedom-of-information requests with education officials in Ohio and Montana to obtain detailed information about recent decisions to water down the teaching of evolution.

In Ohio, the church-state watchdog group is investigating the Department of Education’s approval of a lesson plan titled “A Critical Analysis of Evolution.” In an April 6 letter, Americans United asked Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Tave Zelman to provide copies of “all documents referring to or relating to” the development of the lesson plan.

AU attorneys have made a similar information request in Darby, Mont., where the school board recently voted to require science teachers to “assess evidence for and against” evolution.

Religious Right groups have launched a national crusade to weaken instruction about evolution in public schools because it conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible. The federal courts have barred the teaching of creationism in science classes, so these organizations are now urging educators to teach “intelligent design” and to offer evidence “for and against” evolution.

“If officials are changing the public school curriculum to conform to religious dogma, that’s clearly unconstitutional,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Sound science education must not be sacrificed on the altar of religious zealotry.”

Or here’s one from a book:

The crowd had pushed to the west end of the platform as the ship swarmed up the mountain. Harriman had stayed where he was, nor had Dixon and Strong followed the crowd. The three were alone, Harriman most alone for he did not seem aware that the others were near him. He was watching the sky.
Strong was watching him. Presently Strong barely whispered to Dixon, “Do you read the Bible?”
“Some.”
“He looks as Moses must have looked, when he gazed out over the promised land.”
Harriman dropped his eyes from the sky and saw them. “You guys still here?” he said. “Come on-there’s work to be done.”