Since the last post on Custom Filtering in the Manage Posts Screen, WordPress 2.5 has been released to the world. While the techniques discussed in that article are still valid, due to the big admin interface rewrite, the results don’t look as pretty as they could. In this post, I’ll discuss updating the code from the previous post so that it works and looks good through all modern WordPress versions.
Welcome to the first post in a series of posts on how to take control of the WP-Cron system using WP-Crontrol. WP-Cron is a tangle of black magic that allows a plugin developer or a user to schedule commands to be executed. WP-Crontrol is a plugin that lets a blog owner see through that magic and figure out what’s actually going on. In this post, I’ll discuss using WP-Crontrol to add a new cron schedule that can be used by WP Database Backup. This means backups when you want them.
This is the most recent post my series on customizing the Manage Posts/Pages screen. The first couple posts dealt with adding custom columns to the Manage Posts and Manage Pages screens and this post will demonstrate how one can add custom filtering to the Manage Posts screen using the restrict_manage_posts action.
Another year in Würzburg, another International Film Weekend. As I did last year, I bought a 10-pack of tickets a couple weeks before the festival took place. Unfortunately, I was only able to find time to use 5 of the tickets to actually see films, but I was happy with my choices. Here’s a quick run-down of what I saw and what I thought about them. There are probably some spoilers.
An essay written as part of the application to the Bringing the World Home summit.
Bringing the world home is important to me because I think there is a great disconnect between what the American people are like and what the world thinks the American people are like. This disconnect was exemplified when the 2004 Election played out. Polls of foreign citizens clearly showed a desire to remove George Bush from office, but when the results came in, they were shocked to see that America had reelected him. I think this shows the strong difference in goals and values of the two groups. It is obvious that there will be a difference, but I think that neither group even understands from where the other is coming.
Like any relationship counselor will tell you, the key is communication. The key to bridging this divide is to get citizens of different countries talking and exploring their differences. This need not be something formal; these connections happen spontaneously every time people get together. The challenge is to get these people together so the dialog can start flowing. That’s what bringing the world home means to me.
The benefits of increased communication are many. The immediate result, as I mentioned previously, is that understanding between Americans and the rest of the world is increased. This understanding spreads among friends and from child to parent and leads to a much broader segment of the population having less trepidation regarding foreigners. Less fear leads to more travel, which leads to more communication. Bringing the world home means to me giving this cycle a helping hand.
Updated Nov 14 - Didn’t make the cut. Maybe next year.
This part is my notes and commentary from the presentation given by Dr. Brigitte Boisselier.
This part is my notes and commentary from the presentation given by Rael.
This part details some of my initial impressions and commentary on the introduction part of the presentation. Any people references are to a couple Raelians who set the stage and introduced the main speakers.
I just got back from seeing the second movie of the Tibetan Film Festival at Filmhouse Cinema. This film, “Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion” was a straight-up documentary about the history of the Tibetan struggle, as opposed to the first one, “Kundun“, which was more of a docu-drama. Being a documentary, it provided much of the background to the situation and gave context to the first one. In this aspect, it may have been more useful to show them in reverse order.
The documentary had numerous very powerful scenes, most of which concerned the torture of the Tibetan people. Many times, the term genocide was mentioned. Either because of my own ignorance, or lack of media attention, I was not aware the attrocities were on this scale. The number of deaths that were quoted were somewhat confusing. At some point, 30 million was stated and compared to the relatively few murders committed by Hitler and other ethnic cleansers of recent past. A little while later, 1.5 million was stated as a number of deaths. I must have missed something. A point that was emphasized at the end of the film, by the Dalai Lama himself, was the importance of non-agressive resistance against the Chinese. To have X million of your followers killed and maintain this policy is asounding and one of the main things that draw me toward the religion/philosphy/idea of Buddhism. More on this later.
A quick summary of the first film of the festival “Kundun” is that is follows the current Dalai Lama’s life from being discovered in a small village to making the choice to leave his country in order to better serve it. Of the ciriticisms I’ve read of this film, the most prominent one is that because the Dalai Lama consulted, it is somewhat one-sided in its retelling of the facts. This may be true, but in light of the horrible images displayed by the second film, is somewhat inconsequential. It might even be said that it isn’t as one-sided as it could have been considering its lack of such images.
Related topics for future writing:
