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Going direct to heaven, going direct the other way

Month: November 2007

Autumn Happiness

By

On November 27, 2007

In Motorbike

This afternoon it wasn’t raining for a change, so I brought out the motorbike for a quick ride around the block. That proved to be so much fun that I went for a rather larger tour – which meant that I had all the wrong clothes, since it was several degrees centigrade below zero. When I came back home I was frozen blue, but it was worth it.

Brandenburg is not the best country to ride a motorbike – it can largely be described by the words “flat” (the country) and “straight” (the streets) and sometimes I find I miss the hills and small curved streets of southern Germany. But autumn in Brandenburg has it’s own kind of beauty, what whith the scarce landscape and the trees that extend their leaveless branches to the sky. And the autumn sun is fair and golden, even if it doesn’t warm you.

I suppose fun motorbiking is somewhat evil – I contribute to global warming and I do not even have the excuse that I urgently need to go somewhere. But man, do I feel alive now.

    Mod Place Here – Minor Updates

    By

    On November 18, 2007

    In Joomla, Programming

    I did some minor updates on the Place Here-module – partly just behind-the-scenes-bugfixing (including the issues in the comments 20 and 21 respectively) , but also two new parameters:

    • Link Titles – does of course what the name says and makes the title of an article a link if there is additional text (please note that articles displayed via the module will use the module settings, not the settings you make in the article edit view)
    • Hide current item – reads the article id from the url and hides the article with the corresponding id in the module, so you don’t have the same article twice

    Available at the Download page. This is still marked as alpha but apparently a number of people already use it without problems (the alpha status is more due to the fact that a number of features are still missing as compared to the contentitem module for 1.0.x).

    Edited to add: There are no special upgrade instructions. Simply overwrite existing files with the new ones.

      Chris Heilmann: Seven rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript

      By

      On November 13, 2007

      In Javascript

      Unobtrusive Javascript is Javascript that latches into a page without the need to mix javascript event handlers  and HTML.  Chris Heilmann has a good article about the “Seven rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript” – there is a short summary on his blog and an expanded version here.  If you are not familiar with unobtrusive javascript this is a good start, if you use it regularly and want to spread the gospel this is a good list to prepare for a presentation, so you should read it in any case.

        Sixty Days and Counting

        By

        On November 4, 2007

        In Books, Science, Science Fiction

        Kim Stanley Robinson is a man after my own heart, and the Science in the Capital-Series deals with one of the most important topics of our days, so it’s a bit of a pity that I cannot praise him without reservations. But while the writing here is competent it’s never compelling, and for a book it’s not enough to deal with an important topic (not in fiction anyway), yet I found it not particularly entertaining or inspiring.

        Sixty Days and Counting is the closing book in a trilogy about man-made global warming, after Fourty Days of Rain and Fifty Degrees below. The main story is about humanities (that is US-American with the Russians and Chinese on the sidelines) attempt to mitigate the consequences of global warming by large-scale carbon sequestration projects and other terraforming stuff. And then there are a few subplots that do not seem strictly necessary, like about rogue Black Ops and wisdom-dispensing Bhuddist immigrants.

        It might be that I missed some important parts though – the books violates quite gratitously what I’ll call for the moment “Eikes law of typesetting” which dicates that italics are strictly for emphasizing words, so don’t use them on whole chapters if you actually want somebody to read them – anybody who can read ten pages of 10 point italics has clearly better eyes than me.

        The whole shebang from 40 to 60 is not bad, it’s just that it’s boring, which might as well be a matter of taste, so you might give it a try. As for me I rather watch An Inconvenient Truth on DVD to learn about the global warming thing. But I’m still going to try Robinsons Mars-Trilogy because – did I mention it? – as far as his politics and general Weltanschauung are concerned he seems to be pretty much a man after my own heart.

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