/dev/random

Must be a slow news day
What the custodians at Glenwood Middle School were shoveling Wednesday wasn’t snow.
It was taco salad, chocolate pudding, milk and other items - the remnants of a massive eighth-grade food fight in the school cafeteria.
The extent of the mess was such that custodians used snow shovels to clear it away.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: [...]

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In Mac OS X, it’s NOT necessary to quit all running applications when installing an application like TurboTax, even if it does install its own private fonts. That’s just plain obnoxious. I wish software developers would get with it and stop doing things like that which annoy users.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Pet Peeve: Installers that quit all [...]

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Here’s a map of the states I’ve visited:

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Visited states”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/31/visited-states/” });

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I’m now running two PHP-Nuke based sites and one Drupal site. Both have their good and bad points, so here are my thoughts.
With PHP-Nuke, Francisco Burzi runs the whole show and he usually seems to ignore suggestions. PHP-Nuke is a big, complex package with lots of source files. Modifying Nuke is tricky, but it’s fairly [...]

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PHP-Nuke 7.0 has finally been released to the general public. I’ll take a look at it this weekend and see if it’s worth upgrading MacMegasite and WorldBeatPlanet.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “PHP-Nuke 7.0 Released”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/30/php-nuke-70-released/” });

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I decided it’s time for a new look for my weblog. Yes, that’s Midnight with a real snake in the picture. I took that picture about a month before Midnight moved in with me. He caught and killed a snake outside my building. I just think it’s a really cool picture
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “New Look”, [...]

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Today someone submitted an off-topic link for child car seats to MacMegasite, and a few days ago they submitted the same link to WorldBeatPlanet. Of course that’s completely off-topic for both sites. I removed their link and their user account from both sites.
Why the hell do they think a completely off-topic link like that which [...]

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MUDDA (Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists) is a new initiative by Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel to help transform the music business in such a way that artists are on level terms with record companies, receive fair payments and have new opportunities to be their own retailer when they choose.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “MUDDA is the [...]

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I just fixed a bug in my drupal tune module so registered users can now actually upload their tunes to shareyourmusic.com.
It turns out that I had the acccess hook declared as: function tune_access(), which is how it was in the original file module, when it should have been: function tune_access($op, $node)
The result of that [...]

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It looks like geek-hosting has been down for a few hours. They’ve had quite a bit of downtime, but they’re not nearly as bad as BounceWeb. I’m thinking of moving MacMegasite here to PEHosting.com if this continues. I’m very happy with PEHosting, although I’m a bit reluctant to have everything hosted in one place.
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(thanks to iPod Garage)
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Secret message discovered in winning iTunes bottlecaps?”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/26/secret-message-discovered-in-winning-itunes-bottlecaps/” });

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World Music Central: Under the banner “We Refuse to be Enemies,” several hundred Jews, Arabs, and
community members gathered on a rainy, snowy evening in December to eat, talk,
sing, and dance together. Sponsored by the Eugene Middle East Peace Group, the
event featured several speakers representing the Jewish and Muslim faiths. The
evening fell mid-way between Channukah and [...]

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World Music Central:

Q. What is the difference between a pizza and a Jazz musician?
A. A pizza can feed a family of four!
What is it about Jazz that makes a Jazz musician stick to a form of music that A&R managers have scientifically and suspiciously proven to be a musician’s surest route to death [...]

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Someone ported MacPuke to Mac OS X! For anyone who wasn’t around at the time, this was a very old hack that made a disgusting sound when a disk was ejected. It was an interesting trick to play on someone.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “It’s back!”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/25/its-back/” });

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I got my file upload/download module working, so I just opened ShareYourMusic.com.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “We’re open!”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/24/were-open/” });

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Dave Matthews Band has formed an agreement with Nugs.net, the company that operates the Live Phish Downloads service, New York Times reports. The band has not yet decided if they will sell the music in a format unencumbered by copy protection, as Phish does, or use some sort of DRM. In addition, Nugs.net has struck [...]

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drupal.org has an RSS feedfor their CVS commit messages. This makes it even easier to keep up with the latest project changes.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “YES! Drupal has RSS feeds for CVS checkins!”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/22/yes-drupal-has-rss-feeds-for-cvs-checkins/” });

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For the past few days I learned how to write a Drupal module so I can support file uploads & downloads at shareyourmusic.com. I finally figured out why it wasn’t working.
The _form hook changed at some point. According to the documentation, it should be
function my_form(&$node, &$help, &$error)
After looking through the source code, I determined [...]

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Until now I hadn’t bothered looking at LaunchBar, since I was satisfied with DragThing and I never liked any other launchers. I finally tried it a few days ago and loved it. I ended up buying it yesterday.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “LaunchBar”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/19/launchbar/” });

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This looks very cool. Too bad it runs Windows. It would be a lot cheaper to just use a PowerBook G4 with a decent MIDI keyboard. [via Slashdot]
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “MIDI Keyboard/Computer: Neko64″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/01/19/midi-keyboardcomputer-neko64/” });

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