The Cult of The Cool Mac

So far, about half the old stories are back up and accessible from the Archive link or using the Search tool.

Once that's done, the next step will be fixing some of the aesthetics on the site. The current layout is mostly for utility. I like the color-scheme. 'Probably going to keep that much.

'Sorry I had to change the Shout-Out to add user-verification. I was getting a lot of spam from spambots and attempts to merely obfuscate the text-fields weren't fruitful.  Anyone can still login and leave a message or even use the Shout-Out for a chat-session -- It live-updates! I'd like to see it pick up again. Some of the Shout-Outs were pretty cool.  :)

You know how you're supposed to use 2 different kinds of sugars to avoid recrystalization and lumpiness while melting and caramelizing sugar? Well, if you didn't know before then you know now.

Anyway, I made caramel for my popcorn this evening with honey as the second sugar and added a pinch of sea salt, using just a tiny bit of butter and milk to keep it liquid.

It totally ruled.

Somebody is going to read this and say, "Duh." :)

This week, I installed Windows XP Pro via Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro with a new 500GB hard drive. I encountered some interesting trouble, but successfully got Windows going on the laptop and I'm passing on some of what I've learned to you.

The goal was to create a drive with 3 partitions: a boot volume, a Time Machine and secondary boot volume and a Windows volume. In real-world terms, there's about 465GB to divvy up among the partitions and I figured it this way:

Boot vol: 313GB
Time Machine and Secondary Boot vol: 120GB
Boot Camp: 32GB

Initially, I erased the drive, installed the OS and did some basic setup stuff, then made a clone of the boot drive (you'll see why when I get to the end), ran the Boot Camp Assistant, which repartitioned the drive for me and restarted from the Windows XP installer CD. I went through a normal-seeming installation, but then hit a roadblock.

Lesson 1: You can start up from a Windows boot disc by holding down the "C" key during startup or by holding down the Option key and selecting the Windows CD as the boot volume.

Hey! Just like with a Mac disc! But unlike a Mac disc, the software just wouldn't seem to install properly. I got a little ways into the Windows boot process, but then it stopped with a hal.dll is corrupt or missing error. There's advice on Apple's forums that those errors require a reinstall. Two reinstalls later, I went looking for better advice. Most fixes that I found for this error involved running the Recovery Console from the Windows installer CD. Okay, where's the Recovery Console? 'Turns out that there was no Recovery Console on my installer disc. Ouch!

Lesson 2: Buy a full retail version of the Windows install CD... (continued)

As yet, we have not found a way to move old articles over en masse. The only way to preserve the date, formatting, links, images, authorship and comments is to copy them one at a time and fix them where necessary to conform to the new blog platform.

This is a royal PITA. It's also not our first priority.

As a result, old articles are only going to be trickling back to the site a few at a time. They will, however, be indexed and therefore will become searchable as they are entered.

 ...

Also, comments are working for the iMacquarium.com site again!

Old comments are preserved. New comments can take advantage of BBCode just like the comments on this page... because it's based on the same engine. 

The black theme and layout are going to be around for awhile. I think they strike a decent balance between legibility and presentation of the material.

Joomla continues to confound me with amazingly stupid things that they've done on top of an otherwise very solid system. Case in point: Favicons. Those little icons that appear to the left of "http://" in the address bar of a web browser.

This is gonna get a bit thick if you don't know anything about putting together a web site.

The preferred method for linking to favicons in Joomla is to replace the favicon from the default template-folder with your own favicon.ico file. The problem with this method is that there's an informal tradition of putting favicons at the root level of a site (/var/www/html/) or in an images folder (/var/www/html/images). There's much talk about this in the forums and in such cases where you'd want to link to a favicon that's not in the template folder, the recommendation is to add a standard <link> tag in the home page's index.php file that links to the preferred favicon file.

Since I already had a favicon at the root level of this site, I thought it simplest just to add that link in the index file. Afterwards, however, I observed that in WebKit-based browsers like Safari the default Joomla favicon was all that appeared and in Mozilla/Firefox the favicon would briefly show up as the Joomla icon and then blink and refresh to display my own favicon. (I didn't check using IE.) This was a real WTF observation.

With a lot of Googling, I discovered that in addition to the favicon referred to in a template's code and in the index page, there was one more place where favicons were referred to and it was injecting code into my page to display the default favicon from the template folder ahead of the <link> tag that I had added. The culprit was the html.php file in the /libraries/joomla/html/ folder.

The html.php code does a check for a favicon present in either the template folder or at the root level of the site and if it finds a favicon file in either place then it alters the transmitted header of the index.php file with the appropriate code to display that favicon file. It prefers the favicon file in the template folder, so the template-icon will always take precedence over the root icon.

The solution turned out to be easy: Delete the favicon from the template folder. Then the check for that icon failed and the root icon was be inserted by the html.php file. My <link> tag could then be removed as redundant. Piece of cake once I figured out what was going on.

It'd be nice if they documented it in the "getting started" docs.