A Sexier Mephisto

Mephisto is a fantastic CMS. I have really enjoyed using it, and love the way it is set up and organized.

However, I’ve always thought that it was missing a couple of key features.

First, there is no form of pagination for lists of articles, including the front page. Once you’re done with the front page, you must use the archives.

Second, it doesn’t provide a full listing of archives. Archives are only listed by month. There is no way to grab all of your posts, only a limited number of posts.

However, now there are two great plugins to add in these features.

First, Sven Fuchs has written a Paged Article Lists to give lists of posts (such as your front page) pagination links. You can see this in action at the bottom of my index page. I helped (read: was really irritating) in bugfixing it so it should work smoothly.

Next, there is now a great Full Archives plugin (also by Sven Fuchs) to allow your main archives page show a full listing of all of your posts. You can see this in action on my past page. It is called the tricky edition which is actually named after me because of all my suggestions and bugfixing (read: was really really irritating).

Baiscally a great way to manage content on the internet just got way better. Yay for Mephisto! Yay for plugins!

cmsmephistopluginsrailsruby

*Cinema -- Disturbia

Disturbia (2007)

• So I finally saw this.
  

  
  
  




• It was pretty good.
  
  

  
  
  




• I'd love to see Shia LaBeouf play a completely different character than the one he keeps playing. I guess he'll be able to when he gets older.
  

  
  
  




• Even so, he is still fun to watch.
  

  
  
  




• Where exactly was his mother the entire movie? I get that she worked all of the time, but really, umm..
  
  

  
  
  




• David Morse seems to play fantastic assholes (remember him in House?).
  

  
  
  




• Speaking of, whenever I see Matt Craven, I think of Indian Summer, in which he played a fantastic asshole.
  
  

  
  
  




• I just realized that Mike Binder wrote and directed Indian Summer, which kind of freaks me out, considering I just saw, reviewed, and really liked Reign Over Me.
  

  
  
  




• Back to Disturbia, I thought the suspense was very well done. Very well balanced.
  
  

  
  
  




• Shia LaBeouf is always getting super hot girls. Eh.
  

  
  
  




• Any teacher who can use the loss of a parent against a student, no matter how shitty the student is, should not be a teacher.
  

  
  
  

Trashy Television

We all know about the strike and how much it sucks. I personally support the WGA and (what little I know about) their stance. We also all know that because of the strike, we will have more reality TV. Now here is the thing…

I’m not sure I mind (yet).

I’ve mentioned before how I haven’t been that big a fan of many of this fall’s shows. I really only look forward to The Office, Psych, and Dexter. So what have I been watching? Tons of L & O: Criminal Intent, and a couple really bad reality shows: I Love NY 2, Shot of Love and Project Runway.

Of course I feel guilty. Of course I feel trashy.

But I love it anyway. I hate supporting such a terrible genre, but I can’t help it. I mean, at least this season New York doesn’t have a suitor with two lazy eyes (although she did have a midget).

[For the record though, I really do miss The Office. It needs to come back as soon as humanly possible.]

flufftv

Running Mephisto on Leopard

This is just a quick note incase anyone else has trouble installing the Mephisto svn locally on a clean copy of Leopard.

(This assumes you’re running Leopard and have a working install of MySQL. For that please see this wonderful guide. It also assumes you’ve set up Mephisto before.)

• The current Mephisto svn revision, 3037 works on Rails 2.0 PR. So to do this, you’d check out the svn of Mephisto:

  
  
  

  svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk your_directory





• Next you’d freeze Rails 2.0 PR, in terminal, cd to your local Mephisto directory, and run:

  
  
  

  rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-0_RC1





• Next you need to install the tzinfo gem and Action Web Service, with two terminal commands (while cd’d in your local Mephisto directory), running each separately:

  
  
  

  gem install tzinfo --remote

  
  
  

  And

  
  
  
  

  svn export http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk/actionwebservice/ vendor/rails/actionwebservice




• Ok! Next up you must create a Mephisto database with MySQL and properly configure your database settings in config/database.yml. Then you should be able to successfully run in terminal (in your Mephisto directory):

  
  
  

  rake db:bootstrap

  
  
  
  

  Or

  
  
  

  rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production

Start your favorite script/server for a lovely working copy of edge Mephisto on Leopard!

Many thanks to svenfuchs_ in #mephisto for the advice on a working Rails version!

cmsleopardmacmephistorailsruby

*Cinema -- Reign Over Me

Reign Over Me (2007)

• So well done.





• Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler do a great job. Seriously.




• I could never buy Liv Tyler as a psychiatrist, but I guess thats the point of her casting.




• For a movie mainly about profound loss, I didn’t cry too much nor did I come out of it feeling too sad.





• Its really refreshing to have a sad movie not abuse the emotion and force you to hurt the whole way through. I think its an art.




• Ms. Remar… you are a piece of work and are just fantastic.





• I knew I recognized Mike Binder (plays Sugarman). He wrote and directed the movie, too.




• I can’t remember the last scene. No idea why.





• Somehow manages to feel incredibly un-cheesy, even if it inherently is.




• A decent, realistic example of disassociation.

Gmail + Mail.app = Sexy

Gmail IMAP is really impressive when used with Leopard's Mail.app and an iPhone. It is about 100 times better when used with a couple plugins such as WideMail and Mail Act-On. Mail Act-On can make organizing mulitple Gmail IMAP accounts much simpler. This is going to be poorly explained, but I just thought it was so (geeky) cool I had to try.

Basically, I have three Gmail IMAP accounts set up in Mail.app. Each one of these has it's own respective "All Mail" folder. If you want to keep a piece of mail outside of your inbox but still save it, you must drag it to your All Mail folder. Anyway, doing this for three different All Mail folders is annoying. Luckily Mail Act-On is pretty smart. If you set up three different Act-On rules for moving messages, each with the same hot key:

Yet set each rule for a different account:

Mail Act-On is smart enough to move it to the right account's mailbox. I know this isn't that special, and I'm sure it's just due to the nature of Mail's rules, but it is still awesome. You just have to remember one hot key for an unlimited number of accounts! Yay!

fluffgmailmacmail

Ring of Death at Target

So I had a fantastic trip to Philly last weekend with Matty, Tim and Joanna!

More photos are coming, but I just wanted show you something Matty found at the Target in town... an ailing 360.


funnygamingtrip

*Cinema -- Hostel: Part II

Hostel: Part II (2007)

• Ehhh..





• I am a movie wimp. I never watch horror movies. I’ve probably seen three or four in total.




• However, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this was not a scary movie.





• It was violent. It was creepy due to the basic premise. But not scary.




• The plot was definitely lacking.




• I’ve never seen Hostel. I’ve heard its much better.





• Pretty much all of the characters are jerks.




• Yeah… I wouldn’t recommend this movie.