So I've posted a story on Slashdot that hasn't hit the front page yet, and I could use your help getting it there.  The story should open up discussion of the best Open Source alternatives to phpBB.  Is it Phorum?  Is it FluxBB?  Is it something else?

Please, log into Slashdot and then view my story.  There is a +/- graphic embedded in the title, and if you hit that "+" icon you'll give my story a boost.  I'd really appreciate opening a dialogue with all of Slashdot.  It may give me insight into products I don't even know about yet.  Thanks!

I don't know why I revised it, as it is not for the new phpBB 3.  But I don't care.  It was fun.  If you still use the phpBB 2 system, now is your chance to get a nice stable blogging system in place for your members.  Check it out.

I'll offer a translation of the song's lyrics below the video.

For the most part, we let that stand.  If he didn't want to earn money, he could miss out and that was fine.  However, there were some things on the list that were not optional, such as keeping their rooms clean.  When the rooms didn't get clean, I attached what I thought was a pretty serious consequence -- any toy not in its proper place gets thrown out.  Again, for my daughter, this was fairly effective.  Her room got mostly clean, and usually stayed that way.  But for my son, this was a wonderful negotiation.  "If I don't clean up, you throw these things away?"

I nodded somberly, "Yep."

"Okay," he replied.  And then he left his room a complete mess and went outside to play with the neighborhood kids instead.  Of course, I called his bluff.  I put a ton of his toys in a garbage bag.  Only it turns out he wasn't bluffing.  He saw the bag and shrugged it off.  It was almost as if this was a cost vs. benefit calculation for him -- the cost of a free afternoon was giving up some toys?  Yeah, worth it.  Done.  As a bonus, he got me to clean his room for him.

I did not see that one coming.

This is – I think – my first cup of awesomesauce, ever.  This code is beautiful.  I've had a lot of Open Source projects, yes.  But they were all done fast – in a weekend, when I could cram it in.  But this baby?  She's all curves.  Try clicking these table headers:

Yeah. Want a cup? It's yours, for free.

It does make a difference when upgrading.  For example, the revision A iMac can only use up to 384 megs of RAM, while the revision B iMac can take 512 megs of RAM.

It has been nine years since the original iMac arrived on the scene, so my assumption was that this is a solved problem.  I'd hop online, search for a hint, and discover an easy way to tell the difference between them.  But no, it's not solved.  However, it turns out that it can be solved, pretty easily.

The Player's Handbook is much better organized than the 3.5 edition book.  Everything makes sense.  Gameplay is better (as in, I can see how you could hustle it along with fewer pauses to consult the rules).  Having said that, wizards, warlocks, and even clerics are booooooorrrring. Fewer spells, and at least for clerics, their role as healer is much less interesting considering that everyone has healing surges (and yes, I did read that a cleric can trigger healing surges even after the other players hit their cap – I'm not suggesting that clerics are useless, merely that they no longer feel as special or interesting as before).

1. The MemoryFrame skews yellow and bright

The MemoryFrame doesn't have color fidelity on par with a typical computer monitor.  I've had two copies of the MF-8000, and both tend to add a touch of yellow.  Check it out:

MTAgain provides looping to Movable Type.  For example, say you want to list not only the previous blog entry, but the one before that and the one before that.  MTAgain lets you do that.  Essentially, what it can do is put a tag like MTEntryPrevious inside itself, and it can do that thousands of times if you're crazy enough to try it.

The MTAgain plugin for Movable Type is not my own creation.  Someone named Lummox JR wrote it years ago, and then disappeared.  In fact, I couldn't find his original plugin anywhere – even the Web Archive didn't have copies of his long-gone Web site!

What I did find was an article that mentioned the plugin and, when readers complained that the plugin didn't exist anymore, offered the code.  However, they never offered an instruction manual.  With the author's site gone and the manual missing, I had to do some sleuthing.  In particular, I couldn't really guess what the "any" feature did.  But I found an old forum post, learned the code, revised and expanded it, and now I offer it to you with a useful new feature.

I recently saw a few blogs that had photos by the author of each comment.  I thought, "Wow, those blogs must be very popular if people are willing to upload photos!"  But then I saw the same dude with the same photo on a couple different blogs, and the blogs were smaller than mine.  So I started looking into it, and I learned about gravatar.com.  That Web site allows you to associate a photo or icon with your email address, so that no matter where you post, your photo goes with you.

Of course, you wouldn't sign up if you want privacy.  But lots of people are signing up, and I want to show the icons they're using.  So I found an old Movable Type plugin from 2003 that does the job.  But it does it badly – it has a feature that no longer works (the border option), and it doesn't use any of the newer plugin features.  So I've revised it to use the newer Gravatar URL format as well as use the MT plugin interface.  However, I haven't revised it to work with MT 4.  No.  Instead, I've revised it for MT 3.

Why revise for MT 3?  Well, there are a lot of us still using it.  I won't be onto MT 4 for another 6 months or so.  But I want Gravatars now.  So here we go.

I hope that when my time comes, I can be half the man you were.

Thanks to Slashdot member nuzak for coming up with most of the CSS that is used.

-Tony

It turns out most people don't use just the A-Z characters, even people who write in English.  Lots of people want to use the Euro symbol, for example.  That isn't a "normal" letter, and so lots of Web sites just mangle it.  Part of the problem is the programming language used on these Web sites.  In particular, the PHP language has two main "modes" for handling characters.  The first, and the default, is basically to treat everything like ASCII.  ASCII is the A-Z standard.  Unfortunately, that severely damages the text that people type nowadays.  So PHP has a second major mode of operation, and that is to set itself to UTF-8.  UTF-8 includes lots and lots of characters, and it's backwards compatible with ASCII.  So pretty much every Web geek should use it. 

The problem?  The online PHP manual doesn't offer much of a warning any time you look up one of the old, bad ASCII functions.  I personally replaced some old, bad code with... you guessed it... more old bad code.  Why?  Because I looked up replacement functions and found what I thought would work, only to realize that the replacement functions were also bad and came with NO disclaimer!  And that leads us to my Greasemonkey script.  This script will add disclaimers to php.net, on any page containing a bad old function.  If possible it will also tell you a better way to do what you want to do.  It's basically code help for PHP developers.

You can get the script on userscripts.org.  Please install it and then view some of these pages to see the disclaimers it adds:

http://www.php.net/ucwords
http://www.php.net/strstr