Category: IT

I guess you could say I’m a nerd.

powerbook repair

I had a go at getting the stuck CD out, but it just seems to have got more stuck. So I’m going to take it to my local Apple dealer.

I rang them this morning just to see if I needed to make an appointment and I really didn’t get a good feeling from the call. All the guy said was just bring it in with your original system disks. I suppose it was just their stock response and doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to scrub the drive, but it gets me nervous. So I’m backing up before I go.

Thank God the stuck CD’s not too embarrassing . . .

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Data Retention in the EU

I don’t consider myself to be particularly political – I’ve only recently begun voting and my short attention span means I find it difficult to keep up with political arguments. But the proposed Directive on mandatory data retention really strikes me as a worrying development.

Here’s a good article on the issues surrounding the directive that the UK, France, Ireland and Sweden are proposing. I agree with the conclusions of the piece. I think that this directive is an illegal and unworkable overreaction to the present perceived terrorist threats. I would go so far as to say it’s morally wrong. I’ve signed the petition and hope that it will influence those involved in debating it.

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yes! we are now xhtml strict!!

Well that kind of said it all, really.

I decided to make the move over to strict xhtml, from transitional. In the process I removed the del.icio.us bookmark link that I’d added a while back and was causing the page to fail the validation. I probably could have fixed it, but I wasn’t in the mood, and it was pretty useless for my site anyway. If you used del.icio.us you’d more than likely have the bookmark to hand anyway.

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horizontal calendar

I’ve spent the evening hacking the hell out of the the WordPress get_calendar() function to give me a horizontal calendar in the header to replace the tabular version in the sidebar.

I’ve converted it from a table into an unordered list (to match the rest of the rows in the header) and rearranged things so that you have the previous and next months at either end. Stylistically, each day with a post is bold and days without posts are faded out; today’s date is highlighted in the yellow; hovering over the post days gives you a short piece of text giving the full date and the titles of the posts made on that day.

While it was certainly not as difficult to put together as I had thought — the bulk of the work has come from the get_calendar() function — I went through many, many tweaks to get it to this stage, but as always I spend a lot of time over the tiniest, most inconsequential details.

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Posted on by escdotdot 1