Metaplanar Babel

Or..when geeks get bored:

I can’t even begin to imagine how long it must have taken to set this thing up. Pretty nifty though.

Who knew a one word post could get such a varied response. I especially like comment 739; it pretty much encapsulates (minus the world-changing part) what I do with the posts that I read.

To quote Shelley:
WindowsXP boots on a Macbook Pro!

For those with a more serious take on life:
Windows boots on Mac hardware

Personally, I like the first link better. Go figure.

The wizards at Wordpress have released a Widgets Plugin that sounds kind of interesting. It also sounds kind of complimacated, but I may play around with it some. It basically allows a theme developer to specify chunks of code (like a list of links, or a flickr badge, or a google search) that can be moved around in the sidebar by the user; users can also download other widgets to add in. I guess it’s really just a way of making things easier for folks who don’t know enough HTML/CSS/PHP to configure their own sidebars, but it’s definitely an interesting development.

I’m taking the plunge and attempting to upgrade to 2.0.2. Don’t be surprised if things look wonky for a little bit, until I get the plugins working and stuff.

Update: Somewhat to my surprise, the upgrade was as painless as most WP installs. All my plugins work, with the exception of the recent_posts one that I use down at the bottom. It’s not displaying the number of comments for anything except the first post listed, though it works otherwise. *shrug* I’ll look into finding an updated version of the plugin or figuring out what’s broken later. So far, so good.

Yes, you’re seeing correctly. Babel has a new look (yes, again). I’m pretty proud of this one, amazingly. As usual, the kinks in IE haven’t been worked out yet. One of these days I’ll actually do that rather than starting up a new design.

Anyway, this site was the major inspirational push that got this new design going. I don’t think I ripped it off overly much (I hope), I just really dig the wing silhouette idea. The wing graphic I used for the outline is borrowed from Exile Designs, because my graphics skills are minimal at best.

Other than the graphics and color scheme, not much has changed. I’m not sure this is really a step forward, from a coding standpoint, because I had to use a few not-quite-kosher (from a semantics standpoint) constructions to make things work, but overall, I find the look very pleasing. I’m not 100% sure that the asides column works, since I don’t tend to write massively long posts, but we’ll see. For now, we’re going to put two posts on the main page to see if that helps balance it a bit.

As always, opinions are welcome.

For those who care, there is a beta of Internet Explorer 7 available. The technical overview says the preview is to enable devs to test compatibility, but you aren’t prompted for an MSDN login to download, so I guess it’s really open to everyone. Have fun~

Unfortunately, it requires validating your windows install, so if you have any “issues” with that, you won’t be able to install the beta.

Looks like someone started up a contest to figure out how to dual boot Windows XP and OSX on an Intel Mac. The author of the site has started taking donations through Paypal for a pot of prize money to go to the first person or group to find a verifiable solution. As of this posting, the pot is up to $6702, which is a pretty nice prize! Hopefully that’ll inspire some hackers out there to figure out how to make the dual boot work.

Actually, that’s a bit excessive. However, the site for the new WD Raptor X SATA hard-drive certainly has that nice edgy feel to it. Hell, who *wouldn’t* want to watch their hard drive spin? Heh, explicit technology.. I know they say sex sells, but I don’t think this is quite what “they” had in mind.

I found a very interesting article approaching the idea of artificial intelligence from a few different perspectives. It’s written as a dialogue between three students: a physics student, a biology student, and a philosophy student. Very interesting to see the different reasonings for why AI can or can’t exist. Quite long, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. [via]