The family is taking it easy, staying at home today. Amy is under the weather, and it’s been pouring most of the day. Sam is more entertaining than any day out and about town, so we’re still having a grand old time. In the past week or so, it seems like more and more of those little synapses are firing – and hitting. Although we think his recent early AM wake-up calls may be the sign of another upper tooth coming in, he’s been most helpful lately using the simple sign language we’ve been showing him since he was about six months old. During a 4:30 AM cyring jag, he was standing in the crib, putting his fists together to say ‘I’m hungry’. Officially, that means ‘more,’ but who’s gonna argue with a 13-month old? He also knows how to say ‘all done’ by moving his hands, palms down, from side-to-side. And of course there is the plaintive lifting of both hands when he’s on the ground in a sign for ‘UP!’ All very cute, and frankly amazing for us first-time parents to watch.
Trotz.com Version 2.0
Greetings and salutations. I’ve been longing to redesign ye olde Trotz.com for a few months now, and found it so very simple to quickly install WordPress 2.0, pick a nice theme, and add a handful of enhancements during my lunch hour. I’m very pleased with the result – much cleaner, hopefully eaiser to use (note the font size control at the top of the right column). Shout-outs to Jerik One (developer of the Lush theme), PhotoMatt (creator of the Sidebar Widgets architecture), and the creators of all these fine widgets: Weather widget & Plugin, the FlickrRSS widget, Last.fm Covers, XboxLive Gamercard, Netflix widget and plugin, the Category Cloud widget. Please take advantage of the comments feature to tell me what you think!
Update: I’m aware of some problems with the navbar appearing in Internet
DestroyerExplorer. I’ll work on this after our evening out tonight – if the margaritas don’t do too strong a number on me.
‘C is for Cookies’ Patented
Microsoft has been awarded a patent they applied for in 2000 to extend the functionality of cookies and web beacons. Trouble is, I really can’t discern where the originality in this concept lies – thousands of web sites do this every day. Ars Technica (quote below) suggests the focus may be on the addition of an API to these ‘permanent cookies’ – of course how permanent can any file be on any computer device for a savvy user?
Provide developers with an Application Program Interface (API) which can be called from languages such as JavaScript, ASP, and VBScript. The permanent cookie can contain four data types consisting of bits, counters, dates, and strings. In the patent description, Microsoft also notes that the cookie is flexible enough to allow for new data types in the future.
M-Dollar: Microsoft patents the super cookie
The patent itself is lengthy and obtuse, but I wonder what’s really ‘new’ in here. The abstract suggests that it’s the application of the cookie info to what content a user is presented on subsequent visits; I believe that’s been done in many forms by many web sites using cookies and databases in the past.
Inman Park Festival 2006
While the day began cool and overcast, it warmed up to be a wonderful day last Saturday to head out, meet some friends and their kids (and shhh – dogs) at the festival. The parade was, as always, the highlight. And Sam had a great time on the kiddie slide. Check out the photo gallery here.
technorati tags: inman park festival, atlanta, photography, gallery, parade