A Random Pattern

Courtesy of MacDailyNews, I was glad to see this report from Apple on their factory investigation. This is an example of a company taking something seriously, and this is the type of thing I’m really glad Apple takes seriously.

The conditions still seem a little shocking, but keep in mind for my American readers that life in different countries can be radically different than it is here.

I also read a reply from some director of human and trade union rights, but as far as I can tell it sounded like sour grapes, not responsible criticism. The person quoted is director of “human and trade union rights”, so I suspect that his viewpoint is slanted. Of course, though unions here have in some ways become what they sought to replace, perhaps they do have a useful role to play in other countries. I don’t know. Read the article and form your own opinion (again courtesy of MacDailyNews).

Update:  As usual, Ars provides a well-written editorial on the subject.

Fellow (Firefox) geeks, I need your help. I’m in way over my head here.

Although I’ve been blogging about Ubuntu, and am quite happy learning and using it, we also recently got a Mac Mini. My wife would be fine using it, except for one critical thing: one website doesn’t display pictures on Firefox on the Mac.

Tonight, I got around to digging into it more, and also used some tools that I know very little about. The site (and an example page) is www.babycenter.com boards. First I ran the Javascript Console, and discovered the site throws a ton of errors. The errors seemed to be similar and similar in number on both the Mac and Windows. I didn’t look too much into these, as I wouldn’t know what to do next anyways.

So I opened the DOM Inspector and inspected a specific item I knew was failing on the Mac. I looked at the first picture of our kitchen that my wife had posted, and happened to discover that “Moz-binding” was “none” on the Mac Firefox, but had the proper image address on Windows. If anyone can tell me where to go from here, or what this means, I’d appreciate it as I would like this to work.

I did discover that the same page works ‘properly’ in Safari, as well as in Ubuntu Firefox. So who do I feed this back to? Is there a fix possible? And what, exactly, did I find out (or not find out)?

UPDATE:  My wife says that the page displays fine on my Mac login, just not on hers.  I first installed Firefox on my account, so maybe that has something to do with it?  I don’t really know too much about how the Mac user accounts work as far as sharing applications.  Can anyone shed any light on this?

After we let Tessa down from the dinner table, she went over next to the kitchen cabinets and knelt down.

“Don’t go in the kitchen.” she repeated over and over.

“Don’t go in the kitchen, spider” as she shook her index finger at the little black insect.  After a few more admonitions the spider gave in and turned around, heading back out to the living room….

Here’s a screenshot from one of the games I tried when I first installed Ubuntu. The first thing you have to do is try the games, right?

“Simply remove all Bubbles by the creation of unicolor triplets.” (Snicker) That’s why I love geeks. My wife told me recently that my whole blog since I switched to Ubuntu sounds like that….I took the feedback to heart, though I’ll probably need continual reminding (I love you Honey!).

Here’s some screenshots of the new Blogger. I’ve also got a test bed beta blog up at schristopher.blogspot.com, if you’d like to see it. Enjoy.

I just migrate from Blogspot to my own domain, and what happens? Google finally introduces new features for Blogspot, that’s what! It’s not fair, I tell’ya!

Now, to be honest, the feature bump certainly wouldn’t have been enough to keep me there. I really like all the power and flexibility of having my own domain and (shared) server. Still, it does sting a little. And if you’re not into paying a bunch of money to have your own domain hosted somewhere, well, Blogspot (or better yet, WordPress.com) gives you an awful lot of value for FREE. And competition is always good.

Key features:

-For geeks, comment feeds.
-New templates, (presumably nicer ones).

-More control over where and what is on your page.

-Dynamic content, which means easier and faster publishing.

-An improved dashboard, or control panel, when you log in.

I still have to recommend WordPress.com over Google, though the Picasa integration with Blogspot makes that more tempting if you’re using the free Picasa tool to manage your photos. Picasa I can definitely recommend, though I haven’t yet tried it on Ubuntu.

More to follow on this, after I go experiment on my old blogspot account. Cheers!

Update: One more link, if you’re currently on Blogger and want to migrate it to your Google account login.

Update 2: Two big features I missed, Labels and Private.  You can now “tag” articles with different categories, so when your mom visits she can look at posts that have Pictures or Personal tags, and ignore the Ubuntu articles.  ;)  The Private feature lets you have a blog that only people you invite can see.  Perfect for a tight-knit family or group of friends.

This morning at church, my wife asked one of the little girls in our ‘Lil’K’ class “How do you talk to God?” The girl’s response:

“In Spanish.”

Not sure where that came from, but it’s always funny to get unfiltered answers from children. They have such a fresh outlook on life.

(note: I’ve got no idea whether the girl was bilingual, race, or anything like that. I don’t think it matters for the story, either. So don’t ask, please. )

You, my dear reader, may not have seen many changes yet.  But I assure you, things are coming along nicely.  DreamHost has twice supported me quickly (quickly enough for me, anyways – within a few hours).  I hope not to bother them too much more, at least not with any ‘newbie’ issues. 

One thing that is fixed: if you tried to subscribe before to my blog, and were unsuccessful, please try again.  The feed, as well as many other links, should all direct properly now.
Next up: actually getting different themes to work, a favicon up, and cleaning up the sidebar, since LESS IS MORE.  By the time you read this, I will have also tested post scheduling.
After that, I’ll return to my regularly scheduled posts, including some screencasts from Ubuntu.  Yay!

Thanks for reading!

The Regulus theme by Binary Moon seems nice, so I’ll try that out too.  Now if I could just figure out how to get my main address to redirect to my blog page….

I’ve imported all my old posts from Blogger, as well as my posts on WordPress.com. The importer for Blogger was…wow! Amazing! If you are using WordPress 2.0, ignore the links you’ll find from Google on using scripts, Justinsomnia, etc. Instead, just use the importer built into your WordPress (WP) dashboard.

I also found the theme I liked from WordPress.com, Rubrics. It took a little searching, but Tom Raftery updated it for WP 1.5 and it seems to work fine on my WP 2.0 installation. I don’t know that it will be my final theme, but it’s certainly way better than the default.

I also found HemingwayBright, which looks like it might be really nice, as well as a modified version called Hemmed (included by default with Dreamhost hosting, among other themes). Expect to see these themes tried out, but hopefully I’ll decide and clean one up pretty quickly.

Speaking of WP Themes, I’ve found some really good reading material for newbies on this wordpress site. Seems to be someone who writes a lot about WP, as far as I can tell.

Final thing: for now at least, I’m offering a nice discount on Dreamhost hosting. Use the promo code “randompattern” (without the quote marks) for a 10% discount (capped at $30). Why would I do that? Well, Dreamhost will give me money for referring people, and I’m just sharing it. So, good deal for you if you’re going to host anyways, and good deal for me because I’ll make some money – which will certainly help me to produce better content.

I’ll return to my regularly scheduled Ubuntu posts shortly.