See the official 2.7 theme migration guide for more details.

If you use Analytics on your website(s) — particularly on very small sites such as this one, where your own visits can significantly skew any traffic measurements — you have probably wished you could reliably exclude your internal page views from your traffic reports. Google provides a filter system, but it falls a bit short if you aren’t visiting from a static IP address.

Aa great solution has just arrived in the form of Adblock Plus version 1.0.1, which finally provides the ability to restrict the domains to which its ad-blocking rules apply.

After installing the Adblock Plus extension, add a filter rule of the syntax

google-analytics.com$domain=zoombody.com

(replacing zoombody.com with your own domain). Now, when you visit your own site, you will remain completely hidden from Google Analytics.

You could undoubtedly apply this to other hit counters; Analytics just happens to be the service I use.

if not "%minimized%"=="" goto :minimized
set minimized=true
start /min cmd /C "%~dpnx0"
goto :EOF
:minimized
rem Anything after here will run in a minimized window

It works by having the script re-launch itself in a new minimized window. There are a few juicy batch scripting tricks in here that I recently picked up, like the %~dpnx0 syntax and the special :EOF label. And the overall flag/callback syntax is generally useful for creating self-contained batch scripts.

Other start switches besides /min can provide different parameters for the child window, such as adjusting the CPU priority of the resulting process.

[global]
   dos charset = CP850
   unix charset = iso8859-1
   display charset = LOCALE

I finally ran across an old mailing list posting that told me the secret: set my terminal to UTF-8 (to match the default character set of my Ubuntu server). Duh. I went into my PuTTY settings (yes, I was in Windows) and changed it from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Muuuch better. Forget that smb.conf stuff.

Smoking burns a large hole in the economy. Including direct health care expenditures ($96 billion) and productivity losses ($97 billion), the economic burden of smoking on the United States hit $193 billion per year, the CDC said.

On the plus side, the US smoking rate has dropped below 20%.

[via Reuters]

We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

Now there’s an example of data mining we can all feel good about.

Via The New York Times. See also blog.google.org.

In closing, Mr. Gore shares the following amazing, humbling thought:

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

=INDIRECT(ADDRESS(ROW(),COLUMN()))

You can then access other cells using the OFFSET function, e.g. one cell to the left would be

=OFFSET(Self,0,-1)

Ever wonder how to apply special styles to highlight WordPress comments written by the post author or another registered user? Good advice on this point is very rare. Most recommendations are to check against either an email address or a specific user ID. Both of these options are kludges, and both are fragile.

Here’s the right way to do it:

If you want to check whether a comment is by the page author, this is the condition you want to test:

$comment->user_id == $post->post_author

To see whether a comment is by a registered user, check this:

$comment->user_id > 0

I compiled these into a very simple plugin. It has three functions:

• zb_author_comment() — Returns true if the comment is by the post author. Use it conditionally:

  if ( zb_author_comment() )
  {
      // do author-specific stuff
  }
  

• zb_user_comment() — Returns true if the comment is by a registered user. Again, use it conditionally:

  if ( zb_user_comment() )
  {
      // do user-specific stuff
  }
  

• zb_comment_classes() — Outputs user and/or author, if applicable. Useful as CSS classes.

  For example:

  ...
  

  would output class names that could be styled with the following CSS selectors:

  .comment.user {}
  .comment.author {}
  .comment.author.user {}
  

Enjoy!

If there’s an even slicker way to do either of these checks, I’d love to hear about it — please post in the comments.

• during normal use, when using the joystick for navigation;
• when you’ve finished using the phone and stuck it in your pocket, but it hasn’t automatically locked yet (starting a data session prevents automatic locking, of course); or
• while on a call.

Unfortunately, Pantech and AT&T have decided that being able to change this button’s behavior is not a useful option to include on the phone. So much for the obvious answer.

I guess you get what you pay for.

Looks like we have to go to Plan B. Fortunately, there is a way to save the situation – Google to the rescue. This AT&T forum thread and this review’s comments tell the secret: create a new browsing profile with bogus settings, and the browser won’t go anywhere. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Navigate to Menu > MEdia Net > Profiles and select an empty slot.
2. Click Add to create a new profile and give it a name. (I called mine “Offline”.)
3. When you get back to the profile list, press OK to select the new profile as the default. A message will pop up confirming your selection, and the bullet next to the profile name will turn red.
4. Edit the new profile, and enter http://1 as the Home URL.
5. Enter 127.0.0.1 as the Proxy IP.

You really only need to perform steps 1-3 to get the desired effect; the last two are just optimization. The first time I tried steps 1-3, I didn’t have any luck – the phone still transferred 13KB each time. (Someone on the aforementioned AT&T forum seems to have had the same problem, but I can no longer reproduce it.) So when that didn’t work, I tried playing around with other URLs, including loopback IP addresses. An excessive amount of time experimenting with these settings unearthed a number of data-transfer-free combinations, and eventually led me to discover that it takes half as long to abort the browser session using the End key (five seconds instead of ten) if you set both an invalid URL and a loopback proxy, which makes the occasional accidental joystick press much less annoying. Other settings might achieve equal or better results; this is the best combination I found.