A recent comment on one of my posts pointed out some “strange markup errors” in one of the <code> sections of one article. I took a quick look at some older posts and it looks like previous updates to either Wordpress, Syntax Highlighter Plus or the Markdown Plugin have conspired to cause this massive heap of FAIL.

It’s been a long time since I have touched, let alone looked at, PHP code. Recent assignments have eaten up a lot of my time and I don’t have the time to find and fix the issues that are causing these markup errors. So if you’re one of those rare, random souls who find their way here and notice a few HTML markup errors here and there, just leave a note in the article you are reading. That way, I can have something to get back to when I finally decide to fix this crap.

Just an aside for those who are also experiencing the same issue, it seems that Markdown Plugin the first one that needs to be fixed. It seems to be encoding embedded underscores in addition to underscores before and after a word. Second one that needs fixing is the Syntax Highlighter Plus, it needs to run before Markdown.

Unbelievable. 2009 just seemed to blow past me. Since July, I have been spending more and more time programming and less time doing other stuff. Not even time enough to spend upgrading my OS. I am still stuck with Ubuntu 8.10 since the kernel in the 9.10 release appears to be having issues with the proprietary drivers for my ATI graphics card among other issues. Just when I thought it could not get any worse with the fiasco that was “Jaunty Jackalope”. Hopefully the coming LTS release will be a good one.

Last week decided to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version 9.04, aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Although I knew from the start that there was nothing really groundbreaking in this new release, I upgraded in order to be prepared for the next release due out this October. I have read a couple of articles, here and here. The first one seems to be all worked up about about aesthetics saying Ubuntu is “now as slick and as beautiful as Mac OSX or Windows 7″. The second article seem to be more impressed with how fast 9.04 boots up and shuts down.

A quick search through Google and I find more articles talking about how slick the new release is or how fast it starts up and shuts down. If these articles are anything to go by, then the developers have clearly met one of the goals set by their BDFL, Mark Shuttleworth: Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. But I fear that the developers have focused on these goals too much that they lost focus on two of the most important things for (most) end users: system stability and seamless upgrades.

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Last night I watched the premiere of “Biblical Mysteries Explained” on the Discovery Channel. It was very interesting to say the least. I particularly liked episode 1 which tries to provide scientific explanations for the events that occurred during the Exodus. I liked the explanation for the burning bush, the 10 plagues, the pillar of fire and cloud (smoke) and the most probably location of Mount Sinai. I especially liked how they explained the 10 plagues in particular. The cascade of cause and effects that they used to explain the sequence of plagues makes very good sense. I am not going to spoil it here. The other events’ explanations really make sense if you think about it.

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