Matthew's Weblog

Thin film to trap light and increase efficiency… pretty cool!

…which it turns out is illegal.

….you can’t have a CNAME be the same as a zone name, since a zone has at least an SOA record (and, arguably, at least one NS record as well), and the CNAME can’t co-exist with it. Just use an A record and be happy.

and that defeats the purpose of me not having to maintain multiple 2nd level domain name IPs with CNAMEs.  But now I’m older and wiser…

Neat idea now that CDs and DVDs aren’t that necessary… replace the Mac optical drive with a second hard drive.  Not always practical but could be good for some folks, or maybe for me in the future.

So, I finally bit the bullet and customized a blog instance for my wife’s choirs.  Since I could use widgets, it was OK, but the hypothetical ease and the reality were two separate things.  She wanted to have the main page only show one category of posts, so I had to go searching until I found out you have to edit the index.php in your theme, adding:

<?php query_posts ($query_string . '&cat=20'); ?>

before The Loop, and then that part worked.  Next, she wanted other categories to show as lists in the sidebar.  There’s a great plugin called ‘List Category Posts‘ that will do that on a page, post, or sidebar… sort of.  The widget implementation doesn’t update correctly, and it only allows one instance to be in the sidebar.  Of course, I needed more.  Thankfully, it also respects ShortCode… but I didn’t know what the f8#^*$ that was.  After a few quick Googles, I found that you can add shortcode in posts and pages… wheee!  I wanted it in the sidebar, so then found a tutorial on how to get shortcode working in the sidebar text widget.  Not bad, you just edit your theme’s functions.php and insert this line in a safe spot:

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

Then you add a text widget and it Just Works.  Brilliant.  Far better than completely hacking the theme, which was what I expected would be required.  Bravo, Wordpress!

Google’s new mobile gmail

Cloud computing portability

Google Voice – one number with voicemail transcription

Fancy Google Chrome Apps

Automating email filters – OtherInbox.  Of course, ClearContext currently does great stuff for me on that, and basic rules in Outlook or Mail or Zimbra do fine for vanilla patterns…

Multicore technology and how development is going to utilize them all…

Obama’s campaign technologies… how many of them could you or I use for business or pleasure?

A Bionic Eye… coming soon.

Femtocells – an interesting solution to being in the hills, away from wireless carriers’ nodes.  Now if only the carriers weren’t charging extra for them… they should really be paying people to install them.

Offline web applications – they’re coming, and AIR looks pretty slick.  Of course, it’s only one technology, but the idea is a good one.

Manipulating wearable computers without stopping your regular business

an interesting idea – instead of a big inverter, use micro-inverters at a panel level to make the panels independently useful and optimizable…

Using rsync over ssh

Linux, Clocks, and Time

Apache Module mod_rewrite

Apache Virtual Host documentation (version 1.3 doc)

Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND): /etc/named.conf

killer monitoring apps [infoworld.com]

slashdot discussion on blinkenlights

Sending Apache httpd Logs to Syslog

myqlBind2/iDNS

Capistrano

Comparison of issue tracking systems

New LinuxCOE helps admins customize distros

Management Tips: Gen X vs. Gen Y

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn | Guy Kawasaki

Bye-Bye, BPA
BPA/Phthalate-Free Shopping List
Now that we’re reading lots more about BPA and its low-level bad effects, we’re figuring out how to get our plastics to be non-BPA

sslstrip – transparently hijack HTTP traffic on a network, watch for HTTPS links and redirects, then map those links into either look-alike HTTP links or homograph-similar HTTPS links

How do you learn to be a Program Manager?

Mostly, becoming a program manager is about learning: learning about technology, learning about people, and learning how to be effective in a political organization. A good program manager combines an engineer’s approach to designing technology with a politician’s ability to build consensus and bring people together.

I haven’t updated my list of solar cell info recently, either…

Plastic solar cell advances