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I finally received my Total Control, so here’s what you’ve all been waiting for …

A big brown box

Excellent isolation material, so whatever’s inside must be fabulous

The obligatory paperwork

Again, the big brown box, which illustrates the superior quality of the product

The big brown box contains a smaller brown box, among other things

The front of the smaller brown box, confirming the awesomeness

The side of the smaller brown box, revealing its origins

The back of the smaller brown box, which is somewhat identical to its front

Inside the smaller brown box is a shiny white box; feel the tension buildup?

This box is definitely the coolest of the three

Inside the aforementioned box, we mostly find polystyrene

A better view of the polystyrene and some cruft

Under the cruft, there’s a USB cable

A better view of the cruft

In a separate compartment, we discover an AC adapter

That about covers it.

I won’t deny that I was amused by Yves Leterme’s blunder. Whether or not the reporters provoked him is none of my concern; the fact remains that he made a fool of himself.

That being said, the whole thing became a lot more interesting when the international press heard about it, apparently. Google News lists about 30 related articles. My favorite of those would have to be The Sydney Morning Herald’s blog section quoting everybody’s favorite tsjeef:

“I have more important things to do than this crap. Those who are after me will pay for it sooner or later.”

Tony Soprano would be so proud. Seriously. Have them whacked.

It’s been a while since I released some new auditive material, so here goes, sweeties! Presenting … “A Room with a View”, my latest and greatest hit. Be warned: it’s different from anything I’ve created or played in the past. Feedback welcome, as always.

“Steve + Sky”: 8/10. It isn’t about much, but if you don’t pay too much attention to the actors’ accents—they’re all over the place—, you’ve got yourself a more than decent movie. Its best feature would have to be the cinematography in general: original and subtle transitions, with beautiful color filters, which are otherwise rare in Belgian cinema, for some reason. Doesn’t mean I liked the naked boobs and the sex scenes though, but they were mostly justified.

And the wait continues. I was supposed to get a shipping confirmation for the Total Control today, but they still don’t have it in stock. Any day now. Sigh.

Incidentally, Numark’s little brother Ion Audio seems to have reintroduced the iCUE, this time as a trimmed-down version of the Total Control. It looks pretty useless for anyone who’s the least bit serious about DJing, but I suppose there’s a market for it. A market consisting of people who shop at Lidl.

In case you’re wondering why this post is entitled “Rhubarb”, it’s a long story.

At first, I was going to call it “The Audience is Getting Restless”, but then I thought of Blokken host Ben Crabbé’s claim that a restless audience mutters the word rabarber over and over again. And that’s Dutch for rhubarb, so there you go.

Okay, so it wasn’t such a long story after all.

They don’t make them like this anymore. The keyboard player alone is genius.

You may be missing my annual 10 Days Off reviews. And rightly so. Everyone knows I am an undisputed expert when it comes to electronic music.

If you speak Dutch, however, this is your lucky day, as I wrote a review of day 5 for Gentblogt—which isn’t a blog as much as a webzine, but what’s in a name? If you don’t speak Dutch, try Babel Fish for a dadaist interpretation.

I missed a specific situation back when I hacked at Markdown.

Because Markdown syntax allows HTML in code blocks, encoding every < as < would also affect those in code blocks. This resulted in double encoding, i.e. <, which is rendered by the browser as <—not pretty.

After discovering this during a related discussion with Sander on #foxymonkies, someone there—I believe it was sdwilsh—pointed me to Safe Markdown. Unfortunately, when I finally got that working, it didn’t seem to solve my problem at all.

Determined to find a solution, I dug into Markdown a bit deeper and found that all the encoding of code happens in Markdown_Parser’s encodeCode() function, rather unsurprisingly. Consequently, if I changed that function to return its input unchanged and did all the escaping in advance—which I was already doing—, I’d be home free.

Obviously, I could easily achieve this by extending the Markdown_Parser class. I ended up throwing everything related to comment formatting in there, including emoticons. The result is in Pwnt_Blog_CommentFormatter.

Once again, feel free to hunt for any shortcomings I may have overlooked.

Update: Actually, it’s better to put the emoticon stuff in a separate class, so Markdown and SmartyPants don’t get loaded for no reason.

I can’t help but wonder what possessed the developers of PHP when they came up with the original implementation of the microtime() function. When are you ever going to need the current time represented as a string composed of the milliseconds part and the integer part, separated by a space? Preposterous.

Now, I’ll be the last to deny that PHP is full of these little mind-boggling “features”, but this one is just too crazy for words. If you’re going to be doing an explode() anyway, why can’t they just incorporate that into the damn command?

Also, explode() and implode() are terrible function names. I realize split() is a regex split, but about every other naming convention would have been better.

I’m going to shut up now, but the list goes on. PHP is a semantical nightmare on speed.

Incidentally, I just typed ’ in an IM conversation—literally, the character sequence ’, not a right single quote. I’m taking this proper apostrophe thing a bit far. I guess I should at least go with Alt-0146.

I’ve blogged about Taskbar Shuffle before. Since I discovered this little program, it’s quickly become one of my must-haves.

Taskbar Shuffle is a free utility that implements a feature that should have been there by default, and does so quite elegantly as well: ordering Windows’s taskbar buttons.

You may still be wondering what the use of this sort of thing is. Well, personally, I hate the way taskbar buttons are in “chronological” order by default. I don’t like Windows’s feature that groups similar taskbar buttons—having to click two times to get to a window is just too tedious—, yet I like to keep open windows somewhat organized. As a web developer, you quickly find yourself with a text editor, several imaging applications and a couple of web browsers open, and you really don’t want to start those in a particular order just to be able to perform some routines blindly.

Now, in addition, Taskbar Shuffle’s author recently implemented a similar feature. You can now perform the same sort of ordering with system tray icons. This is achieved by holding a hotkey of your choice and dragging the icons around. Beautiful.

In case you hadn’t noticed—the title, stupid—, this post’s raison d’être is, for the most part, to move my previous post and its emotional baggage down.