TopicExchange: Conversing via Trackbacks

Discovered this interesting website that takes Trackbacks to another level. TopicExchange.

The concept seems to be kind of similar to Usenet newsgroups, but not nearly as many newsgroups at the moment. To post to a topic channel as they’re called, you make an entry in your trackback-enabled blog, and ping the URL for the group. Or you can create a new topic channel. Each channel also has an RSS feed, making it easy to keep track of with your favourite RSS aggregator.

A very nifty concept. Shall have to keep track of this one.

Blood donation #16

Chalked up my 16th blood donation today since moving to SC. That means over the past 3 years or so, I’ve donated close to 8 liters (2 gallons) of blood. It also means I’ve made 48 or 49 donations since I started donating blood. And since each donation can be used up to 3 different ways, that means I have probably helped as many as 150 people!
Donate now So what are you waiting for? Click the button and make your appointment. You could potentially be helping out 3 other people with just an hour of your spare time. Starve a mosquito, give blood!
BTW, I nabbed the image from the givelife.org website…hope they don’t mind.

Battlestar Galactica on SciFi!

Woo hoo! SciFi has given the green light to a new Battlestar Galactica series!
via kadyellebee and SciFi Wire

No reprieve for Hubble Space Telescope

Well, this is disappointing. The BBC article (via Slashdot) reports NASA has decided Hubble is doomed to fall back to earth. No servicing mission to fix Hubble’s gyroscopes, no possibility of carting it back to display in a museum. NASA’s deemed a Hubble mission as too unsafe.
From the article,

Readdy, a former shuttle astronaut, said Nasa had already analysed the question of whether to send astronauts to fix Hubble, and determined that it was unsafe.
He added that Hubble offers no “safe haven” for astronauts seeking refuge from a damaged shuttle, while the ISS does.

Well, at least there’s still Herschel and the James Webb Telescope to look forward to..

Testing PHP in entries

Just testing MT to see if it will allow me to do code in entries.

Inspired by a thread on the MovableType support forum, I want to see if I can display a text string as an image inside a blog entry.

It works! Well, it used to work until something broke on the server…

Nothing terribly complicated, but the ability to use PHP inside a blog entry does have some interesting potential.

For those of you interested in seeing what I did, I just embedded the following in my entry

$text = date("F j, Y, g:i a");
echo "<p>Today's date: $text</p>\n";
// Set the image size based on the font size and text
$font = 8;
$width  = ImageFontWidth($font) * strlen($text);
$height = ImageFontHeight($font);
// Create the image object
$im = imagecreate($width,$height);
// white background and blue text
$bg = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 255);
// write the string at the top left
imagestring($im, 5, 0, 0, $text, $textcolor);
// output the image
// write the image to a file
// Change /path/to/image/dir/ to whatever path you're using
if (is_writable("/path/to/image/dir/")) {  // Check to see if the directory is writable
imagepng($im,"test.png",75);
echo "<p>Today's date as an image: <img src=\"test.png\"  height=\"$height\" width=\"$width\" /></p>\n";
}
else echo "<p>Don't have permission to write to the current directory</p>\n";
imagedestroy($im);