Easily Distracted

I signed up for Twitter. If you ever wanted to know what I had for breakfast, now you can! Yay. I also updated my blog’s sidebar with custom widgets; something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I broke up the standard “Meta” widget into a Subscribe and an Admin/Login widget, and shoved the admin/login right below the Pages. I also made a replacement tag cloud widget that can specify the maximum number of tags to include… I’m not sure why the standard widget (which defaults to 45, and gets quite big) wasn’t created with that option. Also, taking Twitter’s motto to heart, I added my new Twitter feed as “Sutff I’m Doing” using a standard RSS widget. I might have to modify that widget to strip off my username from every post, though… it bothers me. And I should do something with the search….. I just haven’t figured out what. Anyway, I think it looks much nicer now.

I’m sure widgets probably already exist to do what I want, but I wanted to play around with WordPress and PHP a little. ^.^ Being neither a WordPress nor a PHP person, How to Create WordPress Widgets and WordPress Widgets with Control Panels were very helpful.

One things that WordPress is sorely missing is basic image handling. Blogging with images should be fast. Previously, I had gone as far as writing a script that would take all images in a directory, resize them, create thumbnails, and output the required html that I would then paste into the editor. Before that, I used a plugin that would would automatically generate thumbs, and it was great for a while. Until I upgraded, and didn’t enable the plugin… if you go see those old pages, you’ll notice they’re broken. So WP either needs a plugin that doesn’t break when you don’t have it installed, or a default will-always-be-supported image plugin. Since the latter doesn’t exist, I looked for the former. I’ve been using Flexible Upload for a while now, and it’s made posting pictures WAY less painful. Un-installing the plugin won’t affect any pages, because it just generates static content. So that’s what I use and recommend for uploading a couple pictures to a personal WordPress blog. Any other suggestions?

Screenshots follow:

This plugin sits in the Upload area….

After uploading an image…

Clicking Send to editor

I know I said I’d try to blog every 2-3 days…. Well, does silently updating backend stuff count? Not much, but I set up Feedburner, Technorati, and upgraded to the latest WordPress (2.1.3). At this rate, maybe I’ll even hook into Facebook and other social sites. Look out 2001, here I come.

Also played with iGoogle a bit – Google’s answer to a personalized homepage. Since I use a few of Google’s online services, it may prove useful for me. Currently, I have Google Calendar, Gmail, a couple world clocks (Vancouver/Japan/Sao Paulo), the weather, Google Reader, and Google Docs.

Cool. The new WordPress auto-saves posts. 🙂 I’m tired. I sleep now.

Gatherings

Had a nice get-together with the gifu-crew, on Sunday. Chinese-Taiwanese-Japanese fusion hot-pot shabu shabu. 😮 The pot was courtesy of Shirley (thanks!), despite her not being able to make it. Unfortunately, I don’t think there were are any pictures captured in the digital medium to show. But it was good times!

Ubuntu Feisty

My Desktop PC was not able to complete a dist-upgrade of Ubuntu from Dapper to Feisty, and consequently has trouble booting. Yes, I tried skipping Edgy, and I advise you not to do the same. I’ve decided I’m just going to start with a fresh install, because my system was very cluttered with stuff I don’t use or need. So I started going about backing stuff up, from a live CD boot onto my external USB drive… it was becoming very apparent that this would be painfully time consuming, as I was quickly running out of space. Easiest solution? Get another hard drive. I did that and am now running Feisty. Most of my settings and everything have been transferred and I must say I’m very impressed with the latest Ubuntu. Videos seem to “just work” on Gstreamer Totem, and many things seem much snappier. It will be making its way to my laptop soon, as well.

goals

When my computers are all back and healthy, I plan on regulating a few short-term goals:

• Reading a chapter a day in my Python book, Dive into Python. I think I’m on Chapter 6 or something, at the moment.
• Blogging every 2-3 days. I don’t need to have earth shattering news to report (do I ever?), but if I can’t say a little something every few days, then I’m certainly not doing enough with my time.
• Update blog aesthetics. ’nuff said.
• Enjoy the sunshine, when it comes.

I was planning on making a nautilus extension for easy image resizing, but someone beat me to the punch. It uses ImageMagick, is pretty much what I had in mind, and seems to work great. 🙂 I just tested it out with my meal from the Cloud 9 rotating restaurant, on March 8th. (I went there to take advantage of their extended Dine out Vancouver with a couple friends.) I now demand that you become hungry, with pictures of FOOD!

links of the day

• Western Perspectives on Japanese Game Development – Interesting Gamasutra link John sent me.
• Family Guy vs Christianity – I swear, Family Guy is the Kevin Bacon of Youtube.

Ah right. Forgot about this. Okay fine, I knowingly neglected it. Not completely, though… I had a partially written post from a few months ago, but it never made the transition from Tomboy to WP. Things to report:

First thing’s first. January has come and gone (along with a few other months…):
me.age++;

I got a pretty sweet blazer from my brother. It’s a little big, and almost too warm to wear now, but I like it. Saw Children of Men with Kurt and Jesse. Great movie. Longest, craziest takes ever! Have also since been to a restaurant called the Foundation (on 6th and Main, I think). I had an awesome dish of beans and rice with papaya and lime sauce… so good, I must go again and try making it myself. We also went to an Ethiopian restaurant on Commercial and stuffed ourselves silly with our bare hands. Like men are meant to do. Food and service were really good. Price, ironically, was a little steep. Oh yeah, and now Kurt is in Brazil….

Speaking of travelling. I will not be going to Japan. I did not get accepted into JET. I had a bad feeling after the interview in February, so I’m not terribly surprised, but I am disappointed. I was looking forward to going to Japan again… even if I got stuck in some remote place. But more importantly, I must now decide what I will do. Do I look for a job? In Vancouver? 😮

I don’t really have any plans, at the moment, aside from enjoying my summer and learning up some computer stuff (in preparation for job interviews, i guess). I just finished my History exam, last night, so school’s pretty much behind me. Have a couple meetings left and that’s it! Felt kind of elated on the bus home, last night – I guess I’m happy to finally be finishing school. 😉 I plan on lots of rollerblading. Too bad the seawall will be closed. Really… that sucks. 🙁 I’ll have to go back and forth in English Bay or something.

I also meant to apply for Google’s Summer of Code. And, on the very last day, I had an idea and figured, “sure. why not?” So I put together an application as fast as I could not expecting to be chosen, and I wasn’t. My idea was really “out there” too. 🙂 Still, like JET, disappointed. That woulda been awesome. I’ll see if I can put together my idea for another post… and I may work on it anyways, this summer.

For some cheap amusement in Wii Weather channel, zoom into the Turks and Caicos Islands, to the north-east of Cuba. 🙂