Asymptomatic

I gotta get one of these buzzing teenager repellers to hang from my garage eves when The School of Rock reopens.

You can download the last Firefox release candidate, or you could just skip ahead to the full 1.5 version.

Ah, 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.

Of 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?

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:

Compare length lmeasurements, starting at the smallest significant measurement of length to the distance from here to the farthest known object in space.