Week of 2006-12-16 17:00 to 2006-12-23 16:59

Here I am enjoying the MarsEdit experience (once I got the kinks worked out) when I vaguely remembered being able to blog within TextMate, using a blogging bundle. Lo and behold:

“Blogging From TextMate”

In short the blogging bundle allows you to post, retrieve, and update entries. It can also preview entries before posting, upload images to your blog by dragging them into your document, etc.

Might just be worth a try.

There’s a new post over at End Pavement talking about the Winter Solstice and why it’s a cool thing to mark, no matter what your religious beliefs happen to be.

Hopefully Santa will be able to pilot his sleigh through the crazy winds this weekend in SoCal. ;)

Way back in the day, I wrote a journal entry that eventually found its way to this site in the form of “How myths evolve”

One night over 10 years ago I was sitting in the living room of the apartment I had at the time. Outside I heard two little girls talking and laughing with an older woman (a neighbor in her sixties) about various everythings under the sun. Their conversation turned to things Christmas, which was upcoming. One of the girls asked if the woman and her husband were going to leave their door unlocked on Christmas Eve.

The woman asked why.

The child said, of course, how else would Santa Claus get in?

“Read more” to find out the answer.

After casting about for information on using the blog editor MarsEdit (from the makers of NetNewsWire), I finally amassed all of the necessary settings to successfully post Drupal stories, retrieve older stories, and assign categories.

Within Drupal

1. Obviously, your Drupal user account must have posting permissions.
2. In admin/modules turn on the blogapi module.
3. Under admin/settings/blogapi set the XML-RPC Engine to “Blogger” and turn on the blog types you want to use. I have “story” turned on.
4. Click the “Save Configuration” button.

Within MarsEdit

Creating a new Blog

Each “blog type” that you activated in Drupal (“page”, “story”, “bookmark”, etc.) is treated as a different weblog in MarsEdit — kind of a pain, but it does make sense.

1. In the Weblogs drawer, click on the + sign to create a new weblog.
2. Enter the blog’s name and URL, then click “Add Weblog”.
3. Click on the new blog’s name in the Weblogs list, then click the “Edit” button below.
4. Some info will already be filled in, but choose “Moveable Type” from the “Software” popup menu.
5. The RPC URL should be something like http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php — if blank, enter it here.
6. Enter the word story for “Blog ID.”
7. Click “OK”.

Repeat these steps for each of the “blog types” you set up before, substituting its type in step 5.

Posting to your site

1. In the main MarsEdit window, click on the “Refresh” button.
2. Assuming all has gone well, posts will begin to show up in the window. Categories might show up slower than the rest of the info, so give it a second.
3. Once everything’s loaded, just click on “New Post”, and that should do it.

You’ll notice that the categories listed in the drawer aren’t set up the same way as your hierarchical taxonomy, but everything is there. For example, this post will have the Drupal tag, but it’s actually at geek/programs/drupal in the taxonomy. In MarsEdit, this shows up under programs/drupal, since it seems to be showing only one hierarchical step per “category”. Same thing with the os/mac instead of geek/os/mac.

If you have a relatively complicated taxonomy like mine, or at least one that has a lot of nested terms, this will take a bit of getting used to. If yours is simple, then it shouldn’t pose a problem.

Not like anybody needs another excuse to quaff a few, but yet more research is appearing showing a correlation between moderate drinking and good health. Folks familiar with the Mediterranean Diet will not be surprised by this, nor anyone who has been paying attention to health articles, tv shows, or other publicity.

On MSNBC: “Want to live longer? Toss back a few cocktails”

According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol — up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women — reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent, the team reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Now, this does not mean everybody should start drinking four drinks a day. One person’s “moderate” is another’s “excessive.” Instead:

“Little amounts, preferably during meals, this appears to be the right way (to drink alcohol),” said Dr. Giovanni de Gaetano of Catholic University, another author on the study. “This is another feature of the Mediterranean diet, where alcohol, wine above all, is the ideal partner of a dinner or lunch, but that’s all: the rest of the day must be absolutely alcohol-free.”

Ah, there it is again — a mention of the Mediterranean Diet. But do you really suppose the good Dr. de Gaetano speaks like this in real life…

“The message carried by scientific studies like ours is simple,” Dr. de Gaetano continued. “Alcohol can be a respectful guest on our table, but it is good just when it goes with a healthy lifestyle, where moderation leads us toward a consumption inspired by quality not by quantity.”

So have a glass of wine or pint of beer with dinner — it does a body good. ;)

Mine

Some favorite Celsius1414 posts of 2006, in reverse chronological order.

Box Springs Mountain, Riverside County

My friends Otis and Alex, along with myself and the poodle, took a hike along the top of Box Springs Mountain today.

11-10

So last night was both Fleece Blanket Night and Chinese American Community Night at Dodger Stadium. There were some talented martial artists, reportedly monks straight from China, performing on top of the big LA logo. Singers sang and award ceremonies were held.

There was also a baseball game played. You might have heard about it.

Mediterranean Diet Menu?

I’m still researching and pondering the ins and outs of the Mediterranean Diet. One of the handiest visual representations I’ve found is at Oldways (in PDF or JPG format) which gives—much like the more-familiar, government-issue food pyramid—a sense of the proportions of various food types.

Baseball Batting Order

Constructing the lineup for a game is one of the traditions of baseball that is, if not arcane, then at least subject to much theory and contemplation. With the advent of sabermetrics, new conjecture has arisen with all sorts of mathematical ideas that, while potentially sound, will likely never see the light of day because of baseball’s resistance to change, no matter the ideas’ merits (or lack thereof).

Installing Ubuntu 6.06 on an iBook, first try

Attempting to install Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 on an older iBook 500 MHz, 256MB RAM, 15GB Hard Drive.

Car accident

Denyse and I were in a car accident on Sunday afternoon — no one was seriously hurt, but check out D’s car…

Fiddlesticks

Sometimes I wonder if this world is one of those really bad movies where politicians are blatantly evil. Then I realize, no, this isn’t a really bad movie — it’s just a really bad reality.

Most important meal of the day

In reading up on the cuisine of the Mediterranean, I’ve been looking recently into what is, as the cliché goes, the most important meal of the day — a cliché, but one that is consistently echoed by nutrionists and diet gurus. Unfortunately, it is also disappearing in much of Western society.

Honesty, cheating, and gamesmanship in sports

Although poorly constructed — and undoubtedly falling on deaf ears considering the audience — an article by Gregg Doyel over at CBS SportsLine makes a good case for equating the frustratingly (to American eyes) histrionic diving rampant among some soccer players, and the “advantages” taken by American players in baseball, football, and basketball (scuffed balls, uncalled holds, flopping, etc.).

When I say poor construction, it mostly has to do with the seemingly schizoid relationship between the two halves of the article. Actually, I think there are two good articles hiding inside a bad article — honesty vs cheating, and gamesmanship vs pushing the boundaries. Doyel should have picked amongst the four sides to the argument — usually one is sufficient. ;)

The pitcher’s box?

Ever notice that sometimes baseball announcers will say a ball is hit “back through the box,” but it went past or over the pitcher’s mound?

1414 curbside desktop picture

New 1414 desktop picture.

atom.module not formatting Markdown or Textile properly

There’s a known issue with the atom.module for Drupal, which creates an Atom syndication feed to accompanying the built-in RSS feed — the issue is that if you’re also using the Markdown or Textile modules, atom.module doesn’t convert the markup to proper HTML, instead showing the Markdown or Textile as is….

After a bit of investigation, I’ve come up with a temporary solution to the problem, at least for Markdown format. (I don’t have Textile installed, so someone else will have to confirm; given the nature of the fix, I imagine it would work.)

How to display a wordcount for Drupal nodes

If you are viewing the site in a browser rather than an aggregator, you’ll notice a wordcount displayed in the service links at the bottom of posts. There was a thread on drupal.org covering how to accomplish that sort of thing, but there were a couple of issues with the method. Here is my solution…

Ray to go, dorks

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays have been mulling changing their team name as part of a general overhauling scheme under new ownership. And also, you know, because people are freaked out by the whole “devil” thing…

Zen and the Nirvana of Cycling

In fact, with all respect to Pirsig, I believe you’re even more in your environment without the motor noise, not to mention how in touch you are with every rise and fall of the road.

Starship Troopers Board Game

I was up late last night reading and watching baseball replays when I happened across the 1997 Starship Troopers movie, the edited-for-TV version cutting out the nudity and worst bug-on-human violence — human-on-bug violence, naturally, was perfectly fine. Imagine the outcry if they showed a graphic representation of a bug cutting off some human dude’s most treasured appendage. Of course, if Denise Richards does it to a brain bug, the theater cheers. ;)

Umpire signs and signals

While researching baseball signs by catchers and base coaches, I stumbled across an informative article from The Amateur Umpire Home Page: Umpire Signs and Signals.

Spoem: “Lively Benefits of Creativity”

Poem constructed from the subject lines of spam email currently in my Junkmail folder…

Yours

Your favorite posts of 2006 are represented in the sidebar “Popular content” section, under “All time”, since the Drupal version of this site has basically been in existence for this year.

• Zen Pockets
• Potential MLB free agents, 2007 (Updated)
• PHPosxom
• Mini-Monitor
• Ubuntu Linux (Hoary) on an iBook
• Mail Sounds
• How to Roast Cashews
• anentry
• Halo
• Updated Dodgers rumors

Drupal

I’ve very much enjoyed using Drupal this year, and I’ll definitely keep it going for the foreseeable future. Drupal 5 is in the Release Candidate stage right now, promising some new geeky fun after the new year.

Looking back through the archive, I found the earliest post on the site — earliest in the sense of first posted in Drupal: Node #2 (don’t remember what happened to #1 :) — Drupal on its way, on March 16th, 2006.

I am looking into transitioning the entire 1414 site to the Drupal CMS package in the near future.

Thanks for visiting and reading, and here’s to many more posts to come in 2007!