Give Me Free Tech Support (Or Kill Me)

After I installed the Canon Powershot software on my Windows 2000 machine, I've been getting a weird problem on my flat-panel monitor. Certain shades of light gray are showing up a shimmering magenta-pink. The effect is invisible or all-but on most applications, but does bizarre things to many photographs.

I've downloaded updated drivers for my videocard and motherboard, and all the Windows auto-updates, and rebooted until my boots were worn through, with no effect.

Anyone seen something like this happen before?

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Old is New

I've been playing around with site archives over the last week or so. With some advice from Ion and some tinkering this afternoon, I've finally got them into a shape I'm pretty happy with. As a side effect, my syndication feed buttons should work better, and I have a much-enhanced respect for the work done by UI designers.

Any comments? Suggestions? If you've used the archives to find stuff (Hey, Stephanie!), was it relatively clear and easy-to-use? Any ideas how I can make it a little less hideously ugly?

Oh...and a note about comments on Livejournal: LJ comments have a bunch of nifty features, but Sebbofeed articles expire after a while and the comments disappear with them. That said, do what you like. I'm not the boss of you.

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Get 'Down, make love!

I'd seen references to John Gruber's Markdown plugin on the Blosxom mailing list, and I hadn't been too impressed. Woo-hoo, I thought, another "simplification" of HTML syntax.

His manifesto, Dive Into Markdown, though, made me interested enough to try it. To summarize: HTML source is easy to write, but it can be a pain in the ass to read. Markdown sets out to use traditional e-mail and Usenet formatting conventions for basic text markup functionality, allowing any web text--but particularly blog entries--to be edited as intuitively as e-mail, and to be stored and transmitted in an easy-to-read plaintext format. It's elegant, it's well thought-out, and it handles mixing HTML with Markdown gracefully. I'm particularly impressed with the cool and flexible syntax for hyperlinks

I've been using it for a few days now, and I'm now an eager convert. As of last night, the comments form also uses it, thanks to Greg Vario's miniscule patch. Feel free to play with it and try it out. You may want to start by viewing the source for this very post.

And yeah, Jarrett, you no longer have to do your own <p> tags.

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A little math game

This is actually rather over my head, but it is kind of interesting. As I mentioned the other day, Livejournal Free Users get 0.99 syndication points. Subscribing to a feed that no-one else subscribes to costs one point, which is why Free Users can't add feeds to Livejournal's watch list.

As the number of subscribers goes up, the cost per subscriber goes down. For example, sebbofeed currently has six users (down one from before yesterday's RSS slipup) and costs 0.473 points. Here's some more data: the point costs of the most popular LJ feeds and a range of feeds with small subscriber bases. Your mission: to figure out what formula is used to derive the cost of subscribing. I gave up and Googled to this thread which in turn led to the definitive answer. I was a little disappointed--the math turns out to be too heavy for me to understand. I'm sure most of you guys can handle it, though.

UPDATE: Andre has charted the formula, complete with instructions on how to replicate his results.

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Then why don't you marry it?

I failed, in my last post, to fully express just how much I love .htaccess. Partially because I had not yet fully realized how nifty it is. My LJ feed had a little problem....

Let's see--how far in do I need to go to explain this?...

I just deleted a lengthy description of Blosxom flavour settings (the author is British. I keep wanting to pronounce it flaw-VOORS). I'll try again.

The way I want present stuff on sebbo.org/main is different from the default way to present stuff. Since the Sebbofeed LJ user page now links straight to sebbo.main, this is a problem. I could have fixed this by moving, copying, and tweaking a lot of files. I couldn't just set up a redirect because that's the bare directory listing for my Blosxom root. If I did that, any attempt to access anything served by Blosxom would go into an infinite loop

Well, it turns out that .htaccess supports Regular Expressions! I added the line: RedirectMatch permanent /main/$ http://sebbo.org/main/index.htm (translation: redirect if /main/ is the end of the line) and all worked as it should.

And the dragon and the prince lived happily ever after to the end of their days, even though the President wouldn't let them get married. The End.

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