How come that (nearly) every single hotel / guest house / B & B nowadays displays a little note in the shower regarding “caring for the environment”? The note is pretty standard and asks guests for support in protecting the environment to the extent of re-using the towels if possible for an extra day so that the hotel won’t have to use detergent which then ultimately ends up in the sea. At first glance it might look to the untrained eye like a decent request; however, I dare challenging the truth behind this note: is it really the environment the hotel cares about or are they more concerned about their expenditure on water, electricity and detergent — all of these being used to wash the guests’ towels.
I mean, imagine a smallish hotel with 20 rooms; every day you can argue (for the periods of full occupancy) that the hotel has to wash at least 20 towels. (The truth is they would have to wash in fact 40 as there’s 2 towels per guest at least, and if you take into consideration things like double or twin rooms then you would have to double again that number so you end up with abotu 80 towels a day.) If all the guests chose to have their towels washed every other day (rather than each day), arguebly this would half the hotels expenditure for washing the towels each month. So the £200 a month (probably) becomes £100 per month. And so you simply save over 1000 per year without actually lifting a finger.
If you also take into consideration the fact that based on having to start the washing machine only every other day you could get rid of your normal staff and employ part-time staff, you would probably add another 5K a year on top of the previous savings. So about 6K saved straight-away. And the ones to pay for this saving are the guests on one hand and the poor guy who has to give up half of his/her shifts (and salary!) in doing the laundry!
But hey, they looove the environment and it’s all for a good cause, right?
So Firefox 2.0 has been out for a while. However, if you check out some of the release notes, the one that talks about updating extensions for Firefox 2 seems really interesting:
The first step — and, for most extensions, the only one that will be needed — is to update the install manifest file, install.rdf, to indicate compatibility with Firefox 2. Simply find the line indicating the maximum compatible version of Firefox (which, for Firefox 1.5, might look like this: <em:maxVersion>1.5.0.*</em:maxVersion> Change it to indicate compatibility with Firefox 2: <em:maxVersion>2.0.0.*</em:maxVersion> Then reinstall your extension.
All seems cool — after all that doesn’t seem too much to ask. However, having checked the extensions that I have currently on my Firefox 1.5, it turns out a lot of them have these value: <em:maxVersion>1.5+</em:maxVersion> !
Strangely enough that is not recognized by Firefox 2.0 as a valid version (even though it was recognized as such by Firefox 1.5!) so because of this Firefox 2.0 rejects the extension as incompatible and disables it. Well, since this is the case with a lot of the extensions I use, that means that simply upgrading my Firefox to 2.0 will render these extensions useless at least until the developer decides to update the description file and put it through QA with mozdev.org and it gets re-approved.
So word to all of you out there: if you rely a lot on your Firefox extensions, I’d give it a bit more time before upgrading to Firefox 2.0!
So, today at 8:34 am UTC Messenger has reaches Venus and it’s doing its first Venus flyby. Can’t wait for the first pictures to arrive.
The mission timeline shows that this flyby is scheduled at about 3000 km, but the second fly by (which is only due in July 2007) will be much much lower, reaching about 300km.
Long time till it reaches Mercury orbit (2011) but way to go, Messenger!
Found this plugin called WP-Amazon (check out the site here: http://manalang.com/wp-amazon/). Once configured it adds this button which allows you to search and insert content from Amazon into your post.
So just to try it out, in this post there should be an Amazon link to Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man CD.
Unfortunatelly it doesn’t work in Firefox — well it does, up to the point when you want to add the HTML code for the item in your post Don’t worry though, I’ve already notified the guy! Also it only generates simple links — rather than the whole IFRAME, which is really what I was looking for. One thing that would be good for this plugin is the possibility to wrap the HTML coming back from Amazon into a div class=… — which is what I do at the moment, just to make sure that the pictures don’t break the alignment in my post (I typically float the div either left or right). Again, I’ve notified the fellow so maybe there will be an updated version soon.
Still, it’s better than having to log into Amazon each time and generate the HTML by hand, huh?
Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 11:20 pm by liviu.tudor
Why can’t I copy and paste the code for an IFRAME in wordpress? If I go to the HTML dialog and copy and paste the IFRAME from say Amazon, Wordpress tries to be “clever” and, well, it does something really stupid and messes it all up! It basically shoves the content of the post inside an IFRAME while what I want is to have an IFRAME on the side of the post!
Is there a way to turn off such an annoying “feature”? So far my searches have rendered none
(6 votes, average: 4.83 out of 5)
Loading ...
Don’t worry though, I’ve already notified the guy! Also it only generates simple links — rather than the whole IFRAME, which is really what I was looking for. One thing that would be good for this plugin is the possibility to wrap the HTML coming back from Amazon into a div class=… — which is what I do at the moment, just to make sure that the pictures don’t break the alignment in my post (I typically float the div either left or right). Again, I’ve notified the fellow so maybe there will be an updated version soon.
