Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Walkie Bits
November 29, 2005

Walkie BitsAh, the first of this year’s Christmas gifts has arrived. From China!

I saw these Walkie Bits on Time Magazine’s list of the best inventions of 2005, and I knew they would make perfect gifts for some of the kids I happen to know. So I set out to find them. The trouble is that they don’t sell them in the US yet.

Walkie Bits in caseOf course, the best solution to international trade boundaires is eBay. I ordered a handful of them and had them shipped by airmail from Hong Kong. (Is it weird that these toys are Japanese, but they originated in China?) I got a registered mail slip last week, and Nana has been bugging me about it ever since. So this afternoon, I went to pick them up.

Want to see a movie of it moving?

What's New in WordPress 2.0?
November 29, 2005

WordPress 2.0 isn’t out yet, but every day that I spend on the #wordpress IRC channel, I see this question go by at least once:

What is new in WordPress 2.0 from 1.5?

Wouldn’t you like to know?

One important note before we begin: Many of the changes in WordPress from 1.5 to 2.0 are under the hood. They are things that you’re not going to notice unless you are developer. There are some features that casual users will notice that are significant, but (in my opinion) most of the real change has happened where most people won’t see.

As a result, there is a fundamental thing to understand here. What often looks like catering to plugin developers is actually of benefit to common users, because with the enhanced capabilities of the underlying engine it becomes possible to make better extensions faster than we could before. The underlying engine has been made to work better. There have been times while doing contract work on 1.5.x installations where two days of work were necessary to accomplish something that I could have done in 1.6 (now 2.0) in about 10 minutes. Seriously.

There has been a lot of talk in the WP scene about feature bloat, and it’s my own opinion that certain aspects of 2.0 are wildly overrated for what they do, but from an underlying technology standpoint, WordPress 2.0 is incredibly superior to the 1.5 codebase.

So if you don’t want to upgrade because you don’t think that 2.0 offers you anything, just wait a couple months until the really fun plugins start appearing.

Enough said on that. On with the new features list, which is by no means comprehensive:

Copper the Morning
November 28, 2005

The Fuzz was all over everything this morning. At Wawa, the Smokies were getting coffee, and there was more than one cruiser in the lot.

On the way to work, I drive through a small residential area, and there was a township cop parked on a corner waiting for speeders on a parallel road. I noticed him because there was a stop sign at that intersection.

As I pulled around the corner farther up and onto the parallel road (but heading away from the cop), a couple of cars were headed the other direction. They weren’t really going fast, but you never know what is going to trigger the local cops to stop you. I flashed my lights at them in warning.

I heard a story, but I can’t remember from whom, about someone who had passed a cop car on a country road travelling at the lawful speed limit. He flashed his lights at an oncoming car, who certainly would not have seen the cop hiding behind some bushes. Apparently, the cop saw him flashing his lights, and tore out behind him, sirens wailing. He was cited for obstruction of justice, or some crazy thing.