Tomorrow is Macworld Expo

Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld Expo in San Francisco is tomorrow morning. As is usual, the rumors sites are abuzz with speculation, rampantly contradicting each other. If previous years are any indication, they’ll be a little right and mostly wrong.

I won’t be at Macworld this year, since I’m in St. Louis. I attended the exhibits last year for the first time in a while (not the conferences), and that was fun. I also watched last year’s keynote on TechTV. I’m a little disappointed that they’re not going to broadcast it again this year (they didn’t for New York, either. Something about Apple being unhappy about TechTV inserting commercials). I guess I’ll have to watch it on QuickTime. But on the plus side, 11am Central time is not nearly as early as 9am Pacific time was last year.
Continue reading

Red!

Laura linked to my Web page this evening, so I decided to take this opportunity to update it, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. There’s still nothing there, but at least it matches my weblog now.

“Holding Out For a Hero”

The other week, I saw Footloose on DVD. One of the songs from the soundtrack is Bonnie Tyler‘s “Holding Out For a Hero.” I’m not sure I’d heard it before, but it sounded incredibly familiar, and I couldn’t place it. Yesterday, I listened to Amazon’s clip from the soundtrack, and I realized immediately: It sounds just like Meat Loaf.

It turns out that “Holding Out For a Hero” was written by Jim Steinman, who wrote the Bat Out of Hell albums. He also wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Bonnie Tyler’s other big hit from the 80’s, and which also sounds like Meat Loaf, at least now that I’m thinking about it.

Movable Type plugin: ResolveURLs

I noticed the other day that some of my RSS feeds did not validate, because they contained relative URLs. In fact, it occured to me that using relative URLs in weblog entries in general can be dangerous, because an entry can appear in multiple locations, each with a different base (using absolute paths fixes this, although not the RSS feeds, since those need absolute URLs).

So I wrote an MT plugin that adds a global filter resolve_urls. Enabling this in a template tag goes through and makes all links absolute, resolving any relative URLs against the site URL of your weblog. I’m using it now wherever <$MTEntryBody$> appears on my site, both in HTML and RSS.