Nate Silver does what he does incredibly well:

The happenings:

• FiveThirtyEight.com is predicting that Obama will beat McCain 67% to 33% in electoral votes, and 52% to 46% in popular votes.
• According to IfTheWorldCouldVote.com, 87% of the world would vote for Obama. The countries in which McCain would get more votes than Obama are Albania (59%), Macedonia (84%) and Niue (100%, however Niue’s total is reflective of a single vote). That’s it.
• Out of 27 strategist, news hosts, consultants, statisticians and political scientists listed over at the Huffington Post, 26 predict Obama to win at anywhere between 57% to 72%. Included in those 26 is one Republican stategist and two Republican consultants. The one who predicts McCain to win - Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard, a clearly right-wing publication - estimates this at 53% to 47%. Fairly tight odds.

Update: Obama has won. I leave it to the words of Matt Good, simply because I can’t put it any better:

The historic importance of this night is beyond measure.

I have smiled a thousand smiles, and behind them all gritted teeth and a shaking to the core that is like lightning upon a rod. But you see only the smile, for that is the easiest thing to see. And so I smile, and remain silent otherwise.

– Matthew Good

I’ve been wanting to write in Japanese (as well as Korean, Chinese, etc) on here for a long time. The biggest problem for me has always been a very simple one - that the WordPress database, by default, doesn’t support Japanese. Or any other non-Latin script, for that matter. Interestingly enough, the default language for WordPress is Swedish. This means that if you want to type anything in a non-Latin script, it will come out looking like this:

????????

Not exactly readable.

After quite a bit of Google searching, I came across a cache of a page at JapanItUp.com. So full thanks go to Steve for the original instructions.

The following is what you need to do in order to be able to convert your WordPress Database to Unicode UTF8:

1. Backup your WordPress database. If you don’t know how to do this, WordPress has a tutorial available. I use WP-phpMyAdmin for this.
2. Open up your database within phpMyAdmin, or whatever else you may use.
3. Navigate into the ‘wp_posts’ table.
4. From here, you will see that the collation for all the fields will be set to ‘latin_swedish_ci’. This is the field that we want to change.
5. Click on change next to the field that you want to change the collation for.
6. Under the Collation header, scroll down to the very bottom of the list, and select ‘utf8_unicode_ci’.
7. Save.

This is the basis of what you want to do. In my database, I have converted the following fields from ‘latin_swedish_ci’ to ‘utf8_unicode_ci’:

• wp_comments
  • comment_author
  • comment_content
  • comment_approved
  • comment_type
• wp_links
  • link_name
  • link_description
• wp_postmeta
  • meta_value
• wp_posts
  • post_content
  • post_title
  • post_excerpt
  • post_status
  • comment_status
  • ping_status
  • post_name
  • post_content_filtered
  • post_type
  • post_mime_type

Once you’ve done this, any future posts you make within WordPress using non-Latin scripts will appear as they should. e.g.:

• これは日本語です。(Japanese)
• 이것은 한국어입니다. (Korean)
• 这是中文。(Chinese)

I hope this works for you! Please comment with any comments or queries you may have!

Site Update: v2.1.2

Changes in this update:

• All in One SEO Pack v1.4.6.14 added.
• Last.fm for WordPress v1.3.1 replaced with Last.fm RPS v1.0.2.
• Calendar widget removed.
• Collation of various WordPress database table fields updated from ‘latin1_swedish_ci‘ to ‘utf8_unicode_ci‘.
• Header redesigned.
  
• WordPress Database Backup v2.2.1 added.
• WPtouch v1.3.5 added.

Site Update: v2.1.1

Changes in this update:

• WordPress updated from version 2.2.2 to version 2.6.2.

Own a Mac? Just downloaded iTunes 8? Hate that Apple has removed the option to “show iTunes Store links” from the preferences menu? Want to removed them? Here’s how.

JellyBeen over at the MacNN forums just gave me this tip:

To remove the iTunes store links, close iTunes, open Terminal, and copy and paste the following, then hit enter:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Close Terminal, start up iTunes again, and the iTunes Store links should be gone. Enjoy!

And it’s likely that I won’t be posting much, if at all, for the next few months. I’m trying to finish off my Masters thesis by the end of November, and I’m already busy enough writing that, I’m left with little time left to do other stuff. So updating my blog currently falls very low on my list.

So - don’t expect much from me until sometime in December.

In the meantime, having just bought a tripod (Jonathan’s was closing down, so I got it 1/3 off!), I went around and took some photos of the Otago campus. Enjoy:

When one of your best (and oldest!) friends directs a movie, the least you can do is blog about it right? So here we are:

White Red Panic is a short film by Ayz Waraich, and it’s beautiful. At only 8 minutes, White Red Panic isn’t about to drag you into detailed storylines, instead Ayz leaves it up to the viewer to fill in a lot of the gaps.  Which brings you in to the story a bit more, and ultimately, makes the final shot deliver much more of a punch.

I’m off to watch it again.

Available to download from the official site - Dimeworth.com:

HD 720p (401MB) - Download [Mirror] / Streaming

SD Quicktime (72MB) - Download [Mirror]

Trailer - Download / Streaming