wiredfool

Archive for February, 2001

Esoteric Settings Plugin

I’ve just released the Esoteric Settings plugin for Manila (the about page). This plugin allows managing editors to control a few settings that were previously only availiable to the admin mucking about on the server and twiddling individual settings.
It allows you to: Set your site to require membership to view any page, disable the syndication formats individually, change your signup prefs wizard, set the site to index discussion group messages, and index the whole site now.

Download from updates.wiredfool.com: .root or .sit.

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No More Snow

First garden day of the spring. Did the season’s first outdoor Home Depot run for implements of destruction. It’s 50 ish out, and it’s time to start killing the noxious weed invaders that own the south side of my house. It’s false morning glory, and it started in the compost pile that the previous owners left.
Two years ago this stuff ruled the south side. Last year, I spent days getting it out of the garden, but left the front of half of the house for this year.

morning glory root

This year is here. I’ve disposed of the compost pile. It’s a shame to get rid of it; there’s some wonderful dirt in there. But there are also hundreds of little pieces of vine root big enough to sprout a full grown infestation. Some of the bits I dug up were half an inch in diameter. Lots of it was already growing, one week after the snow storm. It sort of looks like Udon noodles gone bad. I’m beginning to respect the survival capability that comes from the combination of weak, prolific roots and being able to sprout a whole plant from less than an inch of root.

The cover crop

The garden’s cover crop is still going nuts, gathering nitrogen that it will release when it gets turned under in another month or so. In the mean time, it’s crowding out all of the other weeds that I’d have to rip out before planting. And most importantly, it’s not going to go to seed or spread, so it’s contained to where I plant it.

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Esoteric Settings Updates

Updates are once again availiable through the normal root updates process from updates.wiredfool.com.

Latest Changes

10/25/01
Fix for the couldn’t compile this script error that Clark Venable found. This is essentially the same bug as was fixed in picsPicker.

5-31-2001 — Finally got around to removing the double title on the settings pages. It requires a disable/reenable cycle, since it changes the stub in the website.

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About the Esoteric Settings Plugin

The Esoteric Settings plugin allows access to manila settings that are not normally availiable to the editor over the web. (But are still safe to privide for hosting providers). Download from updates.wiredfool.com: .root or .sit. the plugin allows you to edit the following settings over the web.

Membership:
Allows you to set your site to require membership to view anything in the site. This also sets the “disable membership” setting, since that setting allows people to sign up for your site, defeating the purpose of requiring everything to be members only. The editor can still add members on the admin page.

When setting a site back to open access, it does not reset the “disable membership” setting.

Searching:
Index Discussion Group Messages allows you to index all of the messages in the discussion group, instead of just the stories, and home pages.
Index Now kicks off an indexing run over the whole site. This is not exactly nice to either the hosting or search engine server, so use it with care.

Syndication:
Allows you to turn off either rss or the scriptingNews2 feed individually. I’m not sure why you’d want to turn off the scriptingNews2 feed, since it accurately portrays the front page of your site. The RSS feed is less accurate if you’re not using the news item home page feature.

Signup Questions:
Allows you to edit the signup questions on your site. Be somewhat careful and don’t remove the password, email, or name fields, as I’m not sure what that will do to manila.
There’s also a button that restores you to the default signup wizard.

Fine Print:
There are no rpc handlers or macros associated with this plugin. It was written using the prefs suite wizard framework for the user interface. The basic structure was created with the plugin factory. See the updates page for information on updates. This plugin is copyright © Eric Soroos, 2001 and released for use under the Gnu Public License. Released with the permission of Socialecology Inc.

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Snow at night

Sitting here, at night with the lights off. The lights outside are reflecting off the falling snow, giving it the color of industrial sodium, intense white mercury, or just some yellow brown mixture of the two.

Backyard in snow
There’s something peaceful of snow at night. I miss that here. I spent 5 winters in upstate NY, were snow fell every day for months. There was also less light outside my window, so the snow reflected the night, and not the city lights.

Snow, on the street. Color Balanced

It would almost be better if the colors weren’t even close to reality.

Don't eat the purple snow: Mini Rose Bush

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NEAR Eros

“We have no fuel on board, plus or minus 8 kilograms,” said one NEAR scientist

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Evil Cat

I am evil hear me meow
I am evil, hear me meow

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No Merchandising?

Went to see ‘Chocolat’ last night. It was a neat movie, somewhat predictable, but very nice.

My biggest complaint?

No merchandising. No Truffles in the Lobby. No unprocessed cocoa with chile powder. No Venus’ Nipples anywhere!

I mean, there are action figures for all the little kid movies, who not Chocolate for adults! I’m ready to consume!

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Nostalgia …

… or delayed gratification.

Technology is a wonderful thing. A month ago, I was poking around the net looking for CDs from a singing group (Cayuga’s Waiters) at Cornell (my alma mater). One of their songs has been stuck in my head, and listening to the tape in the car just wasn’t cutting it. Turns out that they have a webpage, they have rereleases of their albums. A credit card number later, and the 2 albums from my time on the hill are on their way.

Almost. Apparently e-commerce goes home for winter break. But yesterday the cds arrived, fresh off of the cd burner and the inkjet printer.

It’s neat that a decent personal computer can make it economically feasible to produce these cds. They don’t need to go to a production house, they don’t need inventory. So if one alumni a month wants them, it’s still a profit center. Of course, it would have been really cool if I could have sent them a cc# and have them give me access to 150 megs of mp3s.

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