Footnotes and Textpander

I’ve contemplated using footnotes here for years and have fleshed out all kinds of variations, but I always seem to abandon them rather quickly, opting instead to use long parentheticals because implementing footnotes in HTML is a bit of chore.

Technically, it’s pretty mindless. All you’re really doing is using anchors to specify a spot (i.e., the footnote) to move to within the HTML document — HTML 101. The thing is, to make everything look nice and function well, a bit more effort is required, and this effort, over time, can become quite burdensome.

That’s where Textpander swoops in to save the day. “Textpander listens to what you type and inserts predefined text snippets on the fly whenever you enter their corresponding abbreviations.” While there have been other programs that do this very thing, I’ve yet to find one that does it as well as Textpander; it’s fun to use and lends itself well to all kinds of applications, including hypertext footnotes, which I describe below.

I’ve ‘mapped’ both the footnote reference and the footnote itself. Whenever I type “rf” (in any application) the following automagically appears:

<sup id="r1-%m%d%y"><a href="#f1-%m%d%y">1</a></sup>

And when when I type “fn,” out pops:

<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="f1-%m%d%y">
<p>FOOTNOTE TEXT<a href="#r1-%m%d%y">&uarr</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>

As you can see, these little snippets of text are nothing more than footnote ‘templates’ that I created and all I’m required to do after they’ve been ‘called’ and inserted is add the footnote text; I went ahead and ‘mapped’ the 2nd and 3rd footnotes as well so that I don’t have to manually change the number at the beginning of the anchors that corresponds to the current footnote (see above examples).

Unique anchors

Obviously when you’re using anchors you need them to be unique, else, when visitors are on a large archive page (such as that for 2004), a footnote reference might bring them to a footnote meant for a post other than the one they’re currently reading. See the “%m%d%y” text in the examples above? I use these to produce the date in the form of “082905″ (for August 29, 2005), which, as it turns out, are perfectly suited to uniquely identify a particular point in the text.¹

You’ll also notice a little arrow at the end of each footnote. The links used for these arrows need to be unique as well because they bring the reader back to the footnote reference that brought them down to the footnote in the first place (hat tip Gruber).

Too serious?

I realize that some of you might think that by using footnotes I’m taking myself (and this site) a bit too seriously, and you might be right, but if at the end of the day the footnotes make the posts easier to read, then I don’t really care.

booq Vyper PowerBook sleeve

I’ve been slacking lately with “reviews” here and so I figured it was high time I talked about something that I’ve been using for a few months now, the booq Vyper PowerBook sleeve. From the website:

Simply put, Vyper has to be the coolest laptop sleeve. We sandwiched durable, semi-rigid high density foam between a layer of 1682D cross-weave ballistic nylon on the exterior and a super non-scratch lining on the interior - an effective blend. Virtually molded around your 15-inch laptop, Vyper M is the most compact sleeve for your 15-inch PowerBook.

That pretty much sums it up and I can’t say that I disagree with any of the claims. Find me a better sleeve and I’ll buy it. I’ve never been a big fan of sleeves because they always seemed to miss the point. Almost by definition a sleeve is handleless and doesn’t really allow the user much flexibility. But the Vyper changes all of that because it’s rugged (and thin) enough to be put into a regular bookbag, as if it were just another book, which is exactly how I use it (and why I purchased it in the first place¹). I’m incredibly careful with my “toys” (it’s kind of absurd actually) and so for me to be able to treat my favorite toy this way and not think twice about it is really saying a lot.

This is the paragraph where I’m supposed to complain about something, but I can’t come up with anything — it’s a great product.

Largest Mail.app mailbox size?

I mentioned a couple of months ago that my “personal” inbox had crossed the 20,000 e-mail mark; I’ve now just passed 22,000.¹ I’m fairly certain that the app itself doesn’t have an upper limit, and so I’m curious to know, what’s the largest usable Mail.app mailbox out there (and by “usable” I mean a mailbox that’s being hammered on a daily basis)?

I’ll keep updating this post with the largest number I receive.

Currently, the largest number is 283,686 (I required screenshot proof of this one).

The PowerBook Prank

The PowerBook Prank is a very entertaining account of one man’s attempt to scam the scammer. This is something that would normally get relegated to the bits (you can actually find it there as well), but I wanted to put it here too so that no one missed it.

Apple wallpaper

This picture is of the Apple store in San Francisco (the side facing Stockton street). As soon as I took this shot, I had a feeling I was going to be happy with it. It came out perfectly symmetrical (I didn’t crop it at all) and I thought the colors were awesome. In post-processing I bumped up the saturation a bit to bring out the gradient and wiped out a few artifacts that surfaced due to dust on the lens.

Remember that clicking the photo will take you to its Flickr page where you can download the full image (3504×2336) and comment if you’d like.

Fried okra in Silicon Valley?

Where can a brother get some fried okra in Silicon Valley? I think I’ve asked this question of just about every person I know in California and have come up completely empty. It’s kind of funny the responses I get out here on the left coast; they range from “What the fuck is okra?” to “What the fuck is okra?” Having exhausted the people I know, I figured I’d ask here and see what trickled in.

100,000 words

I just received an e-mail alerting me to the fact that my weblog entries now contain more than 100,000 words (you can see the exact number at the top of the archives page). Wow. Of course I now want 1,000,000.  :)

When can I get off this damn thing?

While I was technically really happy with this picture, the “bored” look on the girl’s face took some of the wind out of my sails. Either way, I love the colors, which I brought out a bit in the post-processing stage.

Related Entries apostrophe error

As many of you have noticed and routinely bring to my attention, the Related Entries WordPress plugin (you can see it in use on the sidebar when looking at an individual archive) breaks any time the title of the post for which related entries are being sought, contains an apostrophe. I e-mailed the author a few months ago, but he couldn’t nail down the problem.

I came up with a pretty elaborate solution that I’ve been using for the past week or so, but have since abandoned. Basically, I split the title of the post, delimited by spaces, into its constituent words. I then cycled through the array of words and used preg_replace() to remove any apostrophes and letters that followed them. Finally, I cycled through the now-modified array of words and concatenated them with each other to form the title sans apostrophes.

After slapping myself for wasting so much time I came to my senses and remembered the addslashes() function; a single call to this function fixes the problem. Feel free to grab my hacked version of the plugin and do with it what you will. Be aware that my code has the find_keywords() function removed (I don’t use it and I doubt many of you do either).

You don’t need to worry about the possible double escaping of anything because the term being escaped (i.e., the title) is never inserted back into the database. It might also be prudent of me to mention that addslashes() is not needed if your web server’s PHP installation has magic_quotes_runtime enabled, but of course if that is the case you probably aren’t seeing the apostrophe error in the first place.

Comfortable

I took this shot last weekend while up in San Francisco. I didn’t like the colors too much and so I played around a lot with different black and white setups before deciding on what you see.

Justin, circa 2005

I figured I might as well go ahead and bring this whole pictures-of-Justin thing full circle by putting up a picture from earlier this year (see 1993, 1997, and 2003). While usually pretty reluctant to post pictures of myself, I seem to have gone a bit mad the last few days and said to hell with it; I assure you though, this will be the last photo of me for a while.

Justin, circa 2003

I can’t seem to stop myself from adding to this series (see 1993 and 1997).

Justin, circa 1997

As promised, here’s another scanned picture of myself from back in the day. That’s myself and Bonnie, a good friend in high school and the girl I was dating when this picture was taken.

Justin, circa 1993

While back home for my friend’s wedding, I scanned a couple of photos of myself from a few years ago; you can find the first of these below. That’s Wendy (a good friend of mine since 4th grade) and I getting ready to head into the 8th grade dance in 1993. I’ll put up another in a few days.

SBC Park is beautiful

Yesterday I went to my first San Francisco Giants game with a few friends. Though I’d been asked to make my way up to SBC Park a couple of times before, it just never worked itself out. Notwithstanding the fact that the Giants lost (as did the Oakland A’s when I visited the McAfee Coliseum for the first time last week; truth be told, I couldn’t care less about the outcome of either game), we had a good time and I managed to take a few pictures, some of which I’ve put up on Flickr.

Sony PSP

I finally caved and bought a Sony PSP a few days ago. I’m sure no one is surprised that I picked up one of these (have you seen it?!?), but I’m sure some (including me) are surprised that I held out so long.

Within minutes I had it booted up, connected to my wireless LAN, and downloading a firmware update. Shortly after installing the v1.52 firmware I remembered reading that the Japanese v2.0 firmware was floating around and that this version included a web browser (not the Wipeout Pure hack) and worked fine on “English” machines. Not wanting to buy yet another cable (you can’t move files from your computer to the PSP over Wi-Fi, though after the v2.0 update I’m assuming that you can probably download files through the browser), I couldn’t come up with a reason why the USB cable that came with my Canon 20D wouldn’t do the trick, so I tried it out and it worked flawlessly. After transferring the update to the PSP over USB and then rebooting, I was quickly browsing my site on the device. Unfortunately, v2.0 has not been “cracked” yet and so any emulators or other things I want to run will have to wait, but I’m sure it won’t be too long before the deed is done.

Playing games and hacking away at this thing will be the death of me. It’s not without reason that I’ve denied myself a gaming system for the past few years (save the Gameboy Advance SP).