S. Zachariah Sprackett

Blog has moved.

zsprackett — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:23:06 +0000

The blog is now here. RSS feeds are here. I promise to update a lot more now that I’ve changed formats.

-z

Testing… 1. 2. 3.

zsprackett — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:57:28 +0000

Just making sure this bad boy still works.

Flickr

zsprackett — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 04:52:10 +0000

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

VOiP Restrictions in UAE

zsprackett — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 01:18:22 +0000

Scary news out of the UAE today. The local monopoly telecom / cable / internet access provider has once again decided to clamp down on VoIP. It’s even better when you realize that they’re planning their own VoIP service. That’s one hell of a business model, just eliminate the competition to ensure your success.

I also found this link over at Motorola’s website that is a good walkthrough of their HFC Voice offerings for cable based VoIP providers. Having a private voice network sure makes providing a reliable VoIP offering a lot easier.

There’s a fascinating article over at voip-magazine.com posted today about the current state of E911 coverage in the United States.

Skype video conferencing on the Mac!

zsprackett — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:09:26 +0000

Skype today released Mac Beta 2.0 which just so happens to include video support. The binary is universal and the iSight is of course supported.

Long Time No Speak

zsprackett — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:50:26 +0000

I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while, but I am indeed still alive. I bought a Walden D351SB guitar from Song Bird about a week ago. Today I learned my first chords… G, E and D major. I tried an F as well, but my hand wasn’t interested. Apparently I’ve got enough to play Knocking on Heavens Door. Mark tells me that G D Am is the verse and G D C is the chorus.

A neat site I’m sure I’ll make more use of in the future is ChordFind.com.

Dexter Here I Come

zsprackett — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 01:15:12 +0000

I’m sitting at the airport here in Ottawa with a couple minutes to spare before my flight. I really messed up this morning. I looked at my itinerary and somehow managed to read 13:25 as 3:25… Luckily, I showed up at the airport a bit early and security was a ghost town…

I don’t have a network connection at the moment, so I’ll have to post this entry from my hotel room later. Ottawa International Airport (YOW) actually has reasonably good wireless access, but I’m not going to pay $10 for a few minutes of Internet usage. I’m flying through Toronto to Detroit and will be spending a couple of days with the OSTG guys. I’m pretty excited about this trip as it will give me a chance to work on some projects other than just SourceForge Explorer.

For anyone paying attention, I’ll be back in Ottawa on Thursday night. I arrive in Ottawa at 11:30PM (Yes I double checked) on AC470.

In other news, Tony managed to track down a track I thought I’d lost… I’ve been listening to Orbital – Halcyon (Live – Featuring Bon Jovi and Belinda Carlisle) for about two days straight. Best track ever. Have I mentioned lately how badly I would like an iPod shuffle? My birthday is in a month. 1 gigabyte model please… kthxbye.

I really should have synced my weblog over to my laptop for this trip. I would like to do some more work on my logging and statistics plugin for WordPress but unfortunately I’m dead in the water.

Boarding time… 13:45pm

Landed at Toronto Pearson (YYZ) about 10 minutes behind schedule due to rain delays. We arrived in terminal one, which meant a bus ride to terminal two. My connection was supposed to depart in 1:20 so I was little concerned. Arrived in terminal two to a customs line wrapped out the door and into the connecting passenger baggage claim room. This is the 5th of July, so I guess it’s probably the equivalent of a Monday travel schedule to the US due to the holiday. I’m getting impatient in line as it looks like I’m about to miss my flight. When I finally got through customs and raced through security I notice that my flight has been delayed by over an hour. At least I didn’t miss it. Another bus ride to the satellite terminal and I’m sitting in a corridor shaped room without wireless access and with horrible options for food.

I really enjoy being on the road. It’s nice to be face to face with coworkers for a while. Unfortunately being on the road seems to necessitate travel to get there. With decreased service on the airlines and the increased inconvenience of security, I definitely don’t enjoy travelling the way I used to. Perhaps I’m just getting old.

Finally got in to Detroit, found my car and drove my ass to the hotel in Ann Arbor. Got in around 8:30pm. Time to veg…

Integrating Planet With WordPress

zsprackett — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 07:08:14 +0000

I needed to Integrate Planet with WordPress for my site. I tried to figure out the best way possible to accomplish this. Planet is a nifty Python app that gets run from cron. It grabs a bunch of rss feeds and then writes them out to file in a format specified by a template.

My first integration approach was to take the template and manually configure the css, page header, sidebar and footer. This worked ok for a while. It got me off the ground without involving any braincells. Eventually I realized however that every time I added a new link, or changed a design element on my website, I would be forced to duplicate that change in the template. This is obviously error prone and less than ideal.

Another way to do this integration is to change the template to generate a PHP file. My template is available here: planet.php.tmpl. You’ll need to rename this file to planet.php.tmpl…

I then configured Planet to output the resulting PHP file in $SITE/wp-content/themes/$THEME/planet.php

To actually add this new template to your weblog, you will need to use the “Pages” feature of WordPress. From the Dashboard, chooose “Write” and then “Write Page”. Enter an appropriate title and page slug. If you’re using my template, you’ll also want to enter some text in the post. I use this so that I can have a sticky message at the top of the page telling people that these posts are not written by me.

Before you click create new page, there is one more important piece of the puzzle. You must select the template you created. In my case this template is called “Planet”. For obvious reasons, it won’t show up in the drop down list unless it has already been created. Once you’ve selected this file you can click “Create New Page” and you should be able to view your newly integrated Planet Page…

Please feel free to report both success and problems with this tutorial in the comments for this entry.

Tired…

zsprackett — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 21:42:07 +0000

My wife went out last night for Canada Day with thre3. My kids are both sick with a stomach flu so I got to stay home with them. Kieren was mostly ok, but Kaeli was up all night screaming. I ended up catching about an hour and half of sleep.

Julie came home this morning at about 10am and wanted to go to sleep. She spent the day in bed, and got up at 4. I’m pretty wiped now but it’s not worth going for a nap anymore…

Migrating Old Data

zsprackett — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 05:43:07 +0000

I decided to migrate my ancient Advogato weblog to my WordPress installation tonight. I used Frontier::Client and XML RPC to do it. It was surprisingly painless and only took me about 25 minutes. My only advice to anyone else considering this move is to make sure you set a title on all your entries, even if it’s just a placeholder. WordPress creates pretty awful URLs if you don’t have any title set.

I also gave the site a pretty major facelift today. I like the new look… Let me know what you think.