Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Quantum Leap – The Complete Third Season In Stores Now

Posted on by

Quantum Leap - The Complete Third Season Browsing through Suncoast Video yesterday, we found that Quantum Leap – The Complete Third Season has been released to DVD.

This show, during the time that it was on, was my absolute favorite on TV. The third season includes the two part “The Leap Home” episodes, where Sam leaps back into himself when he is 16 in part one to win a basketball game. During this time he tries to save his father and brother from dying.

The second part of the episode, Sam leaps into a member of his brothers squad in Viet Nam, where he tries to prevent Toms death on April 8, 1969.

These are the two episodes we got through last night. I’m hoping to keep chipping away at the set through the rest of the week.

We found the set quite a bit cheaper over at Wal-mart, so you might want to check there before hitting the usual channels (unless of course you want to click one of the links above and give me a cut of your purchase). 😉

New Site Theme

Posted on by

I’m continuing to muck about with themes, because I’ve suddenly gotten tired of the way the site looks lately, which can be surprisingly unmotivating. The latest theme is a customized version of Mallow.

The theme is based on Kubrick for WordPress, but looks much nicer. We’ll see how long I keep this one. One thing I do like about it is the rollover menus at the top, which allows me to put some of the important areas right up top where they can be found easily. The first thing to go up there are the SVK Tutorials, which are getting quite a bit of traffic now that SVK has gone 1.0.

The header image is a subset of a picture of the sun setting over Holland that I found on Flickr. I just thought it looked really cool and worked well with the themes color scheme.

One thing notably missing are the Google Ads. I just can’t find a nice place to put them, so they’re being removed.

The DoJo Toolkit

Posted on by

There is a new project (currently in .01 status) called The Dojo Toolkit. From their site, the goal is to “create a UI toolkit that allows a larger number of web application authors to easily use the rich capabilities of modern browsers”.

There is also an Introduction to Dojo on the site that explains what they are trying to accomplish.

The project is in it’s really early stages, but it looks interesting.

Also interesting is that this is another project using Trac for their project management software, something I had written a note to myself about previously (3 months ago to be exact), but still haven’t made the time to get it installed.

SVK 1.00 and WordPress 1.5.1 releases.

Posted on by

Chia-liang Kao, author of the SVK source control tool, announced the release of SVK 1.0 final today.

And if that wasn’t enough for you, the WordPress folks have announced the release of WordPress 1.5.1. Download it now. Information on what has changed is available in the ChangeLog on the codex.

Update: 5/10/2005
A quick check of CPAN this morning finds SVK 1.0 out on the mirrors. Go ahead and install it with the following (as root):

perl -MCPAN -e 'install SVK'

FeedWordPress Plugin – Feed Your Website via RSS

Posted on by

This morning I ran across the FeedWordpress plugin by Charles Johnson. This plugin allows you to actually feed your WordPress site via RSS feeds.

Unfortunately for me, I had the wrong idea as to what the plugin did. I thought it actually just added links to articles to your blog in a specified category. What it actually does is feed your web site with posts from the RSS feeds, including creating new categories for you. This is great if you are creating a site specifically for aggregation, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

Again, unfortunate for me, I decided to experiment on the production site instead of my development site, using Tom the Architects site and Slashdot as feeds to try the plugin out, resulting in a ton of content being posted to the site without me realizing it. I think I’ve cleaned it all up.

One thing about WordPress is that it doesn’t facilitate cleaning up a mistake like this easily. It was a pretty laborous process to get everything cleaned up. One thing about me is that I have to learn to stop playing around with things on the main site and use the development site on my local server for these activities.

If you see anything goofy that you might have seen before on another site, let me know so that I can remove it. I’ve double checked to make sure I removed everything, but you know how that goes … you always miss something.

I really have to learn to do more reading before just installing things on the site. However, the plugin works REALLY, REALLY well. Grab it if you want to start an aggregation site.

Off The Rails – My Adventures in the Land of Ozz Available for Preorder

Posted on by

Dio and former Quiet Riot and Randy Rhoads era Ozzy Osbourne bassist Rudy Sarzo has a new book coming out called Off the Rails – My Adventures in the Land of Ozz, which is available for preorder from Amazon.com.

According to this article, the book is culled from Sarzo’s detailed diaries and journals that he kept while on tour. In it he also attempts to describe the details of what happened, from his perspective, on March 19, 1982 – the day of Randy’s death.

The book is due to be released in September 2005. Billboard.com has an article about the book as well.

Diary of an Axeman

Posted on by

Randy Rhoads Grave Site - CloserPiggybacking on yesterdays post, I found a great site called Diary of an Axeman that has rare audio and video downloads of Randy Rhoads.

The April video download is Mr. Crowley (rated #1 in my top 10 guitar songs last January). I have to say, it’s pretty damn cool actually watching him play.

The site also has some radio interviews in multiple segments which are pretty interesting to listen to.

They’ve had some bandwidth problems recently, and are limiting downloads to one video / audio clip per month.