News & Updates

Father grounds daughter, court overrules

Straight out of the “too weird to be true” files, it appears a female justice from the Quebec Superior Court has ruled that father really doesn’t know best.

The father banned his 12-year-old daughter from going online after she posted pictures of herself on a dating site. Then after fighting with her stepmother, the father told her she couldn’t go on a school trip. The girl took the matter to court and — be afraid — seems to have won her case.

Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday that the father couldn’t discipline his daughter by barring her from the school trip.
…
Lucie Fortin, the lawyer representing the 12-year-old, said the judge found that depriving the girl of the school trip was an excessive punishment.

She said the girl has already been forbidden to use the Internet and her father also punished her by canceling her participation in an extracurricular event.

Please, please don’t let this foolishness come to the States.

What a great father’s day!!!

Went on a 13-mile bike ride with my son, went to Academy and bought a badminton set and a Frisbee®, then played outside for nearly four more hours! Not to mention the fact that I got breakfast in bed (Eggos, milk and coffee!) and running shorts to boot! I am exhausted but it has been such a good day. I even took some of Kate’s brownies and cookies back to my dad.

Leopard stops connecting to Windows AFP Server

If your new OS X Leopard balks at making an AFP connection to a Windows 2000/2003 Server running File Services for Macintosh, that’s probably because Leopard no longer will allow sending passwords in clear text to a file server. And not only that, but the option to allow sending the password in clear text has been removed from the Connect to Server dialog box. Isn’t that convenient?

But thanks to an article on macosxhints.com I’ve found the fix: The simplest thing to do is enter two commands at a command/terminal prompt. The more in depth fix is to install the developer tools and edit the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient.plist file. The terminal commands are pretty painless:

defaults write com.apple.AppleShareClient "afp_cleartext_allow" -bool YES
defaults write com.apple.AppleShareClient "afp_cleartext_warn" -bool YES

That’s all you have to do. Now you can connect without a hitch again, so back to work!

Two down, three to go …

Slowly but surely, we’re knocking ‘em down. Kate graduated high school this afternoon and the ceremony was super. The student speakers were excellent and polished, and the main speaker, Kirk Meyers, gave a great charge to the kids. In spite of this being the largest homeschool graduation in the history of the Pulaski County home school organization (67 students graduated) the whole event went smoothly and didn’t seem to last forever. In fact, it really flew by!

Congratulations, Kate. You have certainly earned it! I am so proud of you, kiddo.

Running a WordPress blog in site root using IIS

Up until recently, I had never been able to setup a WordPress blog as the root of a web site under IIS. But I have discovered the secret and have recently changed my own site so that my content no longer shows up under a “/wordpress” directory but instead in the root.
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Fiddler2 and Bad Behavior

If you have ever had to debug HTTP traffic, you probably already know what a great tool Fiddler2 is. I was recently using it to debug some WordPress 2.5 issues I was having with a test blog and noticed I was getting an odd error returned from the web site: Error 403
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Change default paste behavior in Word

I have always wondered about how to change the default behavior for MS Word, because the default paste mode is to try to use the existing formatting of whatever text you have cut. If you cut and paste much from web sites, this can wreak havoc on your layout. I finally decided to Google it tonight and found the easy fix from MS Office Online.

You too can paste text without the formatting into a Word document, according to this Help and How-to from Microsoft Office Online.

WordPress 2.5 file uploader and IE7

So, you just upgraded your WordPress blog to 2.5 and you excitedly go to the admin screen to check out the new vaunted multi-file upload with progress bar. You click on the Write tab then click on any of the “Add Media” icons. The screen dims a bit then you are presented with … not the super-sexy, swfupload-based multi-file uploader but instead a dull, a simple, single file upload form and a script error. Why? It’s because you are running IE7. Fortunately, there is a pretty easy fix (that appears to be planned for 2.5.1) There are just two commas that need to be deleted, in two different files.

The first fix is in the file wp-admin/includes/media.php … down at line 817, delete the comma …

Change this:

To this:

The next file to edit is wp-includes/js/swfupload/handlers.js … down at line 99, delete the comma right after the number 36 …

Change this:

To this:

That’s it! The fancy multi-uploader now works in Internet Explorer 7!