28 Nov

bastardised use of the english language

Journalists should not be allowed away with this. I was reading through the morning news, and came across the word “burglarized” in an NY Journal News article. After looking at it in disbelief, I checked it out – it’s an actual accepted word!

What annoys me is that there is a perfectly efficient word “burgled” to use here instead of “burglarized”. The latter is a bastardisation of the English language.

To put it in perspective, I imagine that at some point in the future, some person may alert the police the the fact that they have been “burglarizidated”.

I blame George Bush.

20 Nov

some photos of Jareth

Jareth was being a little quiet, so I went into the sitting-room to see what he was up to. This is what I saw:

Jareth sleeping in his armchair

And this was him at Halloween – dressed as a witch/warlock/wizard. Not clearly visible is the cape – made from an old cloth trenchcoat that I had.

10 Nov

livesearch

This is cool. It’s a live search box. As you type, it requests results from a search engine (in that case, a blog-search), and presents the results in real-time.

09 Nov

xmlhttprequest calendar

Update: This is a very old entry. The project has a new home at jonabad.com.

Okay! Here’s a trick.

I was reading about xmlhttprequest and xml-rpc recently, and it got me all fired up – full of bright ideas.

Here’s my first practical use – the calendar on this site now uses an xmlhttprequest method to determine what posts appear on what date – give it a try – go back a few months using the calendar.

All you need to do is extract these files to your /wp-includes/ directory, then stick the following line in your template:

 <script src="/wp-includes/kcalendar.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

That’s it! *

And, in the interest of accessibility, when JavaScript is not enabled, the original calendar appears.

The current script works in Firefox, but probably not IE. If you want it to also work in IE, then load up this library as well as my one – it makes up for some of IE’s inadequacies.

update – 2004-11-10 – I linked to the xmlhttprequest script to give it IE compatibility. As far as I know, though, a creative commons license can’t be used for commercial purposes, though – so if you use this script for your work, then you’ll have to write your own IE compatibility layer.
update – 2004-11-11 – I just noticed that Dean Edwards’ IE compatibility layer has been updated with a new xml objects module which can emulate Mozilla’s xmlhttprequest functionality.
update – 2004-12-21 – the script was designed to work with a fairly fresh CVS install of wordpress. If you have edited your template at all, make sure that the calendar is contained in an element which has id="calendar" to identify it.
update – 2005-07-14 – noticed this page is still getting a few hits. Please go here to get the most recent work on this project.