Gay Marriage Law Repealed in California
Nov 30, 2008
Just when we thought that the nation was finally headed in the right direction, California no longer supports gay marriage. California.
Apparently, while everyone else was focused on making sure that Obama got elected, the religious right used the shift in focus to as a sabotage opportunity:
"Yes side sent certified letters to major donors threatening to "out"
them in a press release unless they also contributed to the marriage
ban."
In retribution, the "No" side is fighting back, and they are slinging the "Yes" side's own tactics right back at them. I guess nobody told the fundamentalists anything about living in "glass houses" should they decide to throw stones...
Digital Convergence: Gaming Style
Nov 28, 2008
I found an incredibly cool graph illustrating the anticipated future trend of computing, gaming, movies and artificial intelligence. They graph things between Best, Worst and Base Case scenarios, showing a range of just how pleasant or unpleasant things could become. Regardless, it is all inspiring from a technology perspective. Some truly great ideas are listed across the graph; things that I had not previously considered and that the industries affected may not have either. Virtual cinema attendance was one idea that struck me as obvious in retrospect, but predicting the last human produced film and game on such short notice (10 years from now?) is not something that ever occurred to me.
No matter who you are, there is bound to be a few things that spark your interest. I will be using the graph as a repeated inspirational exercise going forward; it's just that cool.
Gas Heated Home? Make Sure...
Nov 21, 2008
If your home is heated by gas and it does not seem to be getting the job done very well as the winter months roll in, you may want to ensure that your hot water line into the heater is open (not to mention the line back into the hot water line, down-stream from the heater).
After being present at a neighbors while a leasing office rep came in to ensure the above was established correctly, I realized the reason that my apartment as been ice-fucking-cold over the past few weeks.
Oh, don't get me wrong, the "heater" was "running"; but that just means the fan was on. Lots of air has been recirculating in my unit for a while now, but absolutely nothing has been getting done to change it's temperature.
I opened the inlet immediately after witnessing the incident, but just now realized I'd left the outlet closed still and corrected THAT deficiency...
Maybe you like it cold, but I may as well be a lizard when it comes to maintaining body heat.
Good luck, and stay warm in there!
YouTube/Live Ad Kills YouTube Search On FireFox
Nov 18, 2008
FF3 FTW. Usually...
I was trying to look up the original video of Steve Ballmer going off about developers and sueting through his shirt in the process, but YouTube is featuring an ad for it's own new "Live" service that is poorly deployed and redirects my FF3 to a page with just that ad on it.
Way to go YouTube; I was looking for a reason to choose between you and Googles video search. Now I have one. =P
MS Office Hyperlinks And Secure Sites
Nov 18, 2008
After spending a great deal of time helping lock down file access for restricted areas of the Cobb County site, we began experiencing issues with pages that required login before accessing, even though the user was already shown as logged in. Troubleshooting narrowed down the problem to users of MS Office. It seems that MS Office doesn't carry cookies with it's links, according to this article by Lars Pind.
The workaround described by Lars Pind worked out rather well for us. I established a new webroot file to catch failed authentication attempts for the file system and redirect them back to the file system a second time to attempt getting the file, since the browser will carry the cookie that MS Office fails to pick up.
Due to the sensitive nature of the code in question, I cannot post snippets, but you should easily be able to discern your own workaround based on the above-linked article.
Getting Flash Into TinyMCE
Nov 16, 2008
While developing the PokerEnlightenment site, I was exposed to an issue with using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor to insert Flash when using IE. Apparently, IE likes to rip up OBJECT/EMBED/PARAM tag contents and restructure in funny ways. After some googling, I came across a post by Spocke, the main developer of TinyMCE. As specified in his post, I added the media plugin to TinyMCE in the advanced config and IE suddenly started to behave itself.