Monthly Archives: July 2009

Zoe Singing Herself to Sleep

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Don’t worry about the fact that you can’t see anything in the video – it was taken in Zoe’s room with the lights out, while Annie tried to put Zoe to bed one night.

For several nights in a row, I had been laughing while listening to Annie try to put Zoe to bed. She would lay Zoe down, and then sit next to the crib, rubbing her back and quietly singing songs.

Sounds great, except as you can hear, Zoe insisted on singing along. Finally, it got so funny that I asked Annie to sneak the camera in one night so we could record Zoe “singing herself to sleep.”

How to Become a General

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There was a brand-new second lieutenant who was very ambitious and wanted to be a general. So one night at the officer’s club the young officer spotted this old general sitting at the bar. So he went up and said, “How do I become a general?”

And the old general answered, “Son, you’ve got to work like a dog. You’ve got to have moral and physical courage. There may be days you’re tired, but you must never show fatigue. You’ll be afraid, but you can never show fear. You must always be the leader.”

The young officer was so excited by this advice. “Thank you, sir,” he said, “so is this how I become a general?”

“No,” said the general, “that’s how you become a first lieutenant, and then you keep doing it over and over and over.”
– Colin Powell, “The Best Advice I Ever Got“

XHTML 2 is Dead

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Wow, I didn’t see this coming. Zeldman reports that the W3C is not going to renew the XHTML 2 working group‘s charter this year. That effectively kills XHTML 2 in favor of devoting the resources to the HTML 5 working group.

This makes sense in that HTML 5 is already gaining traction, and we’ve seen lots of talk in the web community about switching back to HTML, but I never expected to see development halted like this.

“W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML.”

Nice to know that the W3C is clearly picking a side and throwing their support behind one product, though.

Note: This was originally posted on my work blog, and I’m re-posting it here for archival purposes.

How to Get Your Most Recent Twitter Posts Using PHP with Caching

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When we started redesigning the Pop Art blog, one of the chief requirements was to integrate everyone’s Twitter feeds into the site. In addition to the Pop Art Twitter feed in the sidebar, we wanted to add individual twitter feeds on the profile pages. The problem is that the javascript code that Twitter provides can only be called once in a single page, or it gets confused.

Since we were switching to WordPress, I checked out a bunch of Twitter plugins, but ultimately found them all to be unreliable or just missing features. In the end, I hacked together one of my own, based heavily on code by Ryan Barr. His PHP script was very nearly perfect, but I ran into three problems.

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