Dumpster Diving for Legal Software

Last week we ordered a copy of Macromedia Contribute 3 for a staff member. When it arrived, I put the box on his desk — in his overladen inbox actually. I walked away, and distinctly heard it slide out of the inbox and onto his desk true. He wasn’t in till Monday.

Today I asked him if he saw the software box on his desk — he hadn’t seen it. I told him it was a big white box. I got concerned that it might have fallen into his rubbish bin when it fell from the inbox — his desk wasn’t exactly tidy.

So we got concerned, and went and checked the rubbish bags downstairs. Luckily, we don’t actually have a dumpster, and there were only 5 rubbish bags, and 4 of them were translucent. Without committing to gutting each of the bags, sorting through the garbage, and repackaging it all, we assessed each of the bags unobtrusively, and lo, the box was located! Luckily, the bag was tied loosely, so we could retrieve said software from the bag quickly and efficiently.

The box had a few surface stains on it, and smelled a little like garbage.

“It’s just a little slimy. It’s still good, it’s still good!”

And the moral of the story is: Don’t have your waste paper basket “downhill” from your inbox…

Now excuse me… I have to go wash my hands… 😉

The end guy was hard. REALLY HARD.

I finally beat Doukutsu Monogatari (aka Cave Story). I beat the Sacred Grounds stage, and was rewarded with the best of the three endings of the game for the first time in my life. I got a time of 14’31″5; Not a record breaking time, but a memory I will most certainly cherish.

As mentioned in previous posts, I’m a huge fan of this game. It will probably go down as my most favorite video game of all time.

WordPress Plugin: Mycroft Search Plugin Generator

I was at work, and an idea hit me: Firefox search plugins are just text files. They also contain a lot of stuff that WordPress stores in it’s database. Why not make WordPress generate a search plugin for itself? Why not make a plugin that will work on any WordPress 1.5+ install? So I spent the rest of the day making the Mycroft Search Plugin Generator plugin!

Try it at the bottom of the sidebar on this site, or in the Meta section of the sidebar on Webfroot!

The ESV Online Edition

Colour me impressed with the ESV Online Edition… I’m still geeking out about it… They have put a lot of effort into the web development of this site.

The site is valid XHTML, they provide various RSS interfaces, including Bible in One Year feeds and various other daily devotionals, a Web service (SOAP and REST/HTTP-GET) interface for doing verse fetches), favelets, A Firefox search plugin, integration with OpenSearch initiatives such as A9.com, Javascript syndication, and even search-by-email! Talk about spreading the Word of God!

I also really enjoyed reading the Technical Introduction to the ESV Online Edition, which included a report of a usability study of their own and other bible search engines, expected behaviour and implemented behaviour, caveats of search ambiguity, how their whole bible is in XML and is transformed into XHTML, what they did for older browsers, popular bible book query patterns, and strangely enough, MySQL database definitions and PHP source code for viewing (not borrowing) of how their search works. I learnt a lot.

Wow… It’s so geeky, it almost makes me proud to be a Christian 😀

Oh, and the translation itself is good too 😀 They even have the entire audio version available to listen to, and if you search on something, you can listen to the results too 😀

Don’t mind the mess

As you well know, WordPress 1.5 was released today, so I’ve upgraded inner.geek. If there’s mess around in the next hour or so, don’t worry, I’m in the process of tidying up…