WordPress.com is one of the latest entries into the field of hosted weblogs. I signed up for an invite awhile ago and received one sometime last week. My site over there probably won’t see too much action, but it’s useful for testing purposes.
Right now, the service lacks somewhat in customizability (mostly on the appearance front) but it does offer a preview of what WordPress 1.6 will have to offer on the administration side of things. It’s also an example of the WordPressMU (multiuser) install, although most people probably don’t care too much about that.
I have an invitation to the service to give away, figured may as well offer it up here. If you’re interested, just drop me a comment and let me know why it should be yours. I’d rather give it to someone who actually wants to start their own weblog or migrate from blogspot instead of someone who’ll use it sporadically like me.
It's Friday and my scifi fix will go unsated, I think it's time to go into hibernation. On the plus side, Serenity comes out today. ¶
The Corpse Bride Stripped Bare details some of the work and technology that went into Tim Burton's latest movie. The whole thing was shot with Canon digital SLR cameras and edited with Final Cut Pro. ¶
It's one of those internet memes you don't want to post, but you should really check out this trailer for the Shining. It shows you a little something about trailers and advertising. ¶
Check out this D&D ad against online role-playing games (via BB). If you're going to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, you should at least have some friends over to help. ¶
The new Harvey Danger album is available for free online via Bittorrent or direct download. They give a lengthy explanation for the rationale on the site. ¶
The $100 laptop is moving closer to reality. The article has some images of the device, it has a handcrank for locations with unreliable electricity. ¶
Marc has written up a WordPress plugin for Audioscrobbler/Last.fm that will display a listing of the last few songs played. ¶
The New Yorker on Intelligent Design -- “I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.” “What about a koala?” asked the Lord God. “Much better,” Zeus declared, cuddling the furry little animal. “I’m going to call him Buttons.” ¶
Rock, Paper, Scissors doesn't have enough variety for you? RPS-15 has more than a trillion permutations. The ambitious can also give RPS-25 a shot. ¶
You can use a beer can to make a padlock shim for opening locks. ¶
Hey boys and girls. Time to rip the site apart and redesign it. I’m talking pull the guts out and start again. The current layout is an evolution of an evolution of some metaphorical layered object. Actually, it’s based on a version of Kubrick from around December last year when I first installed WordPress. There’s a lot of legacy, there’s a lot of mess. I’ve been putting it off for awhile and may as well do it now.
If you were an adventurous soul that actually looked under the hood, I commend you. I have trouble keeping track of what I’ve done. Someone asked me about releasing this layout as a theme. After I get the new layout up and finish up some client work, I’ll try to clean up the style sheet and pags and release some semblence of a theme for WordPress.
I’ve been frustrated with the format of my own website. I need to make some bits of information more prevalent. The layout of the site will likely go towards something like one main entry and five quick posts on the main page, with a footer highlighting other content on the site. That footer would like appear in some shape or form on all pages.
Anyway, it’s going to be a live work in progress. Things might not work particularly well in the next few days. We’ll get through it. I’ll try to keep track of some updates in the Change Log.
Update: Templates are stripped down for the most part, working on structure and basic layout of the site right now. As far as design goes, I haven’t started anything in photoshop, so that will be coming later (11:22pm EST).
Update 2: I’m getting there, header graphic is up now. Still a bit of old code to clean up. Have the comments to work on and start delving into some of the sub-pages. (Sep 27 - 1:45am EST)
Joen was looking for some sort of flash music player to play music samples. I found the XSPF player and a WordPress plugin for it. I'll probably give this a test-drive soon, I have a few plugin type things to get working on this site. ¶
The Shadow Percussion Project is an adaptation of a few tracks from DJ Shadow's Entroducing performed live by a high-school band. Worth checking out for Shadow fans and former band junkies alike. ¶
For those that took a peek under the hood at slashdot you remember the mess of tables and 2000-era code styling. It's gone. Everyone's favourite geek news site is now running on HTML 4.01 and CSS. It might save them some bandwidth. ¶
Extreme Ironing is the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt ¶
John Kerry and John Edwards have given addresses to the American public in the wake of Katrina, both remark "Na na na na poo poo." Coulda, woulda, shoulda; it's a little bit too late boys, your testicles should have descended earlier. ¶
A quick guide for catching a mouse without a trap (or cat to corner it). Basically, you use a cardboard tube with one side flattened, hang it over the edge of a table with bait inside and a bucket underneath. The mouse will go for the food and end up falling into the bucket. ¶
It doesn’t matter if you’re running a high-school yearbook, a indie zine, a campus humour newspaper or a national rag, you turn to your friends for help and stories. Omar and I did the CompSci thing at Queen’s, but neither of us was particularily enamored with the corporate culture that everyone seemed to be pimping. Now, he’s writing for Globe, I got a teaching degree and he’s decided to write an article about it.
The gist of the article is there were a lot of tech jobs, so a lot of people went into computer science. Then the tech industry blew up and there weren’t any jobs left. But the industry is bumpin’ again, and they can’t get monkeys to do the crap jobs.
The article is partially targetted at getting people interested in Computer Science again. However, the problem isn’t just a lack of enrollment at the university level, the roots go much deeper. Enrollment is down across the board, high-schools are dropping computer courses like rocks due to lack of interest, translating into very few teaching jobs for someone marketing themselves purely as a CS teacher.
Personally, I feel that a lot of the problems lie in the disconnect between the curriculum and how students actually use computers. The curriculum is very business and/or programming oriented, there isn’t a huge focus on the internet beyond research purposes. These kids use the internet for everything and have been using these machines for most of their lives. Telling to type up a form letter in Word excites them about as much as a fat man in a speedo.
That said, the internet creates a massive level of freak-out on the part of admistrators. “We can’t give these kids unrestricted access, they’ll be downloading bomb recipes, porno and rap-music.” Honestly, they’ll be doing that anyway and will end up more inclined to do so. Throwing up a big barrier just makes kids want to get around it. Besides, we all know there’s always a way to get around the human element of software configuration.
What can we do to get kids interested again? Teach them interesting stuff. And that goes for all levels. You can teach a 6 year-old to program, you can trust a teenager to build a website and you can actually teach something useful to university students.
Theory is great. Math is great. So are algorithms and logic and everything else that they teach us over the course of a CS degree. But where are the scripting languages? Where are the database-driven web applications? Where are the make files? Where are my CSS and web-standards? We don’t need ‘em all but it would be nice to have an introduction to some of these things. I knew people in their third or four year that didn’t know how to ftp/telnet into the lab server so they didn’t actually have to walk over to submit programs.
Anyway, I thought Omar’s article was going to be a bit more along the lines of, “People don’t want to work for the man” and less, “Hay guys! We need worker-bees”, which might help this quote make more sense:
“I see no need to get myself stuck in a grey box somewhere pounding out code that may or may not be used inside some whale of an application,” Mr. Kellam says.
It’s not so much that I don’t want a tech job, more that I’d rather spend time freelancing or on my own company than being an under-appreciated, underpaid codemonkey. Anyway, it got my name, picture and wonderful work ethic into a national newspaper, so I’m not complaining.
I don’t know what the Globe archiving policy is like, so here’s a pdf copy of the article:
PDF: Where jobs are and students aren’t (online)
JPG: Where jobs are and students aren’t (print)
Esuvee is weird campaign targeting SUV safety. Why is it weird? Probably something to do with their portrayal of the vehicle as a large, hairy thing that resembles a cross between a buffalo and a tiger. ¶
Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain in Italian countryside. It's over 200ft long and hikers can climb up the sides and lay on the belly. They expect it to last at least 20 years. ¶
Here's a list of famous unsolved codes and cyphers. Some I've heard of, some I haven't. The Oak Island cypher is a new one for me. ¶
The GP2X is a linux powered handheld. It's has two 200mhz processors, can play divx/mp3/ogg, mame, quake and it's powered by two AA batteries. I want one. ¶
Here are the hundred greatest theorems in mathematics, sure it's subjective but so are the movie lists. The Irrationality of the Square Root of 2 comes out on top. ¶
Canada and Denmark are on the verge of declaring a truce over the Hans Island dispute. Essentially no one gets it and they agree to disagree on ownership. Sounds perfectly diplomatic. ¶
Remember that tomorrow (Sept 19) is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrr. ¶
The Newdream Arthub, also kicking it old-school. ¶
Ever wanted to know what a butt fit is? What about a densitometer? How about a recto or wire o? This Glossary of Printing Terms and Definitions should help you out. ¶
Casino Royale is set to become an actual James Bond movie, they want a younger feel for the role with less support from fancy gadgets. They will also only be casting one Mr. Bond this time. ¶
According to Hugo Chavez, the U.S. is planning to invade Venezuela. In other unrelated news, the president of a foreign nation jumped up and down screaming, "Look at me! Look at me! Over here! Hey! Look at me!" ¶
Shopper's Drug Mart will be selling sex toys in the near future. See that Mr. Intellectual Rag? That's what you get for moving Omar to national news. I used to run Canada's other national newspaper and know about the filth he spews forth. ¶
A few people have been asking about how I style the images in the sidebar and I’ve been lazy in replying. Basically, we just need a list of images and then apply a few css style to it.
For the flickrRSS crowd, go into the options panel and set before image to <li> and after image to </li>. In your sidebar code/template/whatever wrap your flickrRSS function in a list. We also want to add a <div> so we can style the list. It will end up looking something like this:
<div id="flickr">
<ul><?php get_flickrrss(); ?></ul>
</div>
That’s it on the html front. It’s the styling that’s left. There are two essential things that we want to do, remove the bullets and remove the breaks. These two bits of css should take care of that:
#flickr ul { list-style: none; }
#flickr ul li { display: inline; }
Everything beyond that is gravy. Personally, I take all the margins and padding off the list and then style the images with a thing border and a bit of padding. My code looks something along the lines of:
#flickr ul, #flickr ul li { padding: 0; margin: 0; border: 0; }
#flickr a img { border: 1px #ccc solid; padding: 3px; margin: 5px 3px 0px; }
#flickr a:hover img { border: 1px #999 solid; }
That’s pretty much it. You could start doing fancy things like backgrounds, fading the picture on hover, etc. But we’ll leave that as an exercise in Google research. There may be better ways to do it, you’re welcome to comment.
Caught the Kid Koala show at the Elixir last night. He’s pretty sick. You watch him standing up there mixing, he’ll put something on, smile to himself and turn around to grab something else. Thirty seconds later you know why he’s smiling. It’s the bits of Radiohead or Monty Python’s Holy Grail or whatever.
My camera was being a bit flakey, but I grabbed a few decent photos. I also caught a bit of video footage of him doing his trumpet thing, it’s about 24 seconds long. Here it is for download:
Google circa 1998. Kickin it old-school, Stanford style. ¶
Nintendo has revealed the design of the controller for the new Revolution console. It's designed to be one handed -- essentially a remote with tilt-sensors that allows for a wide variety of interaction. All I can say is wow. ¶
Kurt Vonnegut's list of "Liberal Crap I Never Want to Hear Again" from his appearance on the Daily Show. The episode is one of the funniest I've seen; Helms' helper monkey is great. ¶
Why do bodies float facedown in the water? Looks like the end is near for Katrina coverage. We will soon return to your regularly scheduled political squabbles and faceless foreign wars. ¶
Microsoft has introduced Gadgets, their forray into the world of desktop widgets. I’m not claiming that Apple has the most original thing in the world going with the Dashboard (see Konfabulator) but at least they both call them widgets. For some reason, Microsoft has chosen a name that is 70% similar but not quite the same.
I’ll give them the sidebar, I saw it demoed for my HCI class years ago and thought it was pretty cool. But they ditched it part way through Longhorn. This is called putting widgets into the OS and dressing them up with research that they’ve already done.
Also, start.com is kind of weird. Microsoft has added this statement at the bottom for clarity:
This site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.
An incubation experiment! Pod people! Yea. There’s also an Office 12 demo video, it’s over 400mb for the cautious.
Marc offers a quick rundown of websites to help with your colour picking needs. Especially useful if you're given a base-colour to start with and need to work around it. ¶
Linotype has released a new free font management tool called FontExplorerX. I never committed to a tool on mac and have maintained a pretty pathetic list of fonts over the last year. More speculation about the nature of the beast. ¶
If you were a fan of the old tvtome before it was absorbed into tv.com, you should check out the TV IV wiki ¶
I decided to buy Mint for eightface in the wee hours of the morning last night. It’s been out for awhile now, so I’m sure the post title is clever and original. For those living under rocks or those who don’t care about websites, it’s essentially a statistics package that allows you to see who is visiting your site.
Dreamhost includes Analog on all hosted domains, so it’s easy enough to get a rough daily statistics breakdown. It might not be enough, depends what your needs are though — the scope of analog is fairly broad and it’s a little on the cryptic side but it suits most people fine. If you’re one of the new-age blog freaks that lives on the 0-day edge and lusts after technorati and the like, Mint is right up your alley.
Like most web-apps these days, Mint is extensible with a plugin and api structure. If you offer up any files on your site, it’s probably worth getting the Pepper plugin download counter, which does pretty much what it says. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, check out the Pepper forum for more.
Developing websites? Don't fall victim to the teenage gear shift. Use your h1 tags people. ¶
The power went out in downtown LA today taking my webhost with it. The generators in their building decided not to kick in. If you're on Dreamhost it's worth knowing about their status page that is stored offsite. ¶
Cubeoban is a simple flash logic game. Easy pick up where you left off too. ¶
The iPod nano comes in 2gb and 4gb sizes, with a colour screen and click wheel. It looks like a great trade-off between capacity and form-factor. I'll likely get a nano or a shuffle in the fall. ¶
I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a number of different web projects and helping people move, so this site has been neglected a little bit. At some point, I need to clean up my mess of a stylesheet. I’ve also been meaning to overhaul flickrRSS for awhile. Hopefully, it’ll come up in the next little while. Marc has been messing around with the flickr api, it’s provided some inspiration to redo my plugin. Ideally, it needs to stay really simple — flickrRSS just works for most people as a simple badge.
I’ve also realized that it’s September. I don’t know how that happened or when summer disappeared. Regardless, I’ve been trying to enjoy the last vestiges of warmth and sunlight outdoors before the wonderful Canadian winter is upon us.
While I’m off on a personal entry, I’ll take this moment to endorse a few different objects for consumption: The Shield, Rome, Weeds, March of Penguins, The Editors, The Cribs. Three television shows, a movie and two bands. That will be all for now.
Conan Vs Bear. Late night legend. Wild animal beast. Who will win? ¶
Scientistists have been investigating a gene linked to breast development in hopes of finding links to cancer. The gene is called Scaramanga, after a James Bond villain with three nipples. The article also states that one in eighteen people have a third nipple that looks like a mole or freckle. ¶
Duplicate Scrabble is a version of the game that is played mostly in French speaking countries. Every player has their own board and uses the same tile set on each term, essentially eliminating luck and strategy. Try it out using the open-source JDuplicate. ¶
Here's a large satellite image of New Orleans taken on August 31st (before). The image is about 3mb, so it might take awhile on slower connections. This site has some comparative imagery of the city but at a lower resolution. ¶
Mazda's new concept car uses a USB key instead of a standard cylinder key lock to start the ignition. The key can also transfer driving instructions and music to the car's harddrive. ¶
Compare search engine results with Dogpile. Yeah, they're still around. It's a pretty cool visual representation of one search across google, yahoo and msn. ¶
