June 2005 – Urban Giraffe

WordPress Theme: Giraffe

After the (almost) complete restoration of my system I can now get back to finishing off the things I was working on. The result of this is I’ve now made the theme for this website available for download.

I’ve tried to tidy it up as much as possible, although it’s still not perfect. There is also one small issue with Firefox 1.0.4. Sometimes, on a wide screen (1400 pixels on mine), FireFox will incorrectly add a 1 pixel gap between a border in the comments section. I’m not sure what the cause of this is, and it only occurs on FireFox – all other browsers display it perfectly. I know it’s a browser inconsistency because resizing the screen causes the gap to disappear. Until I can figure out a fix, or if anyone else knows the reason, then I will put it down as an acceptable problem that will hopefully disappear in the next FireFox release.

Anyway, the theme can be found in the themes section. I’m looking forward to any feedback and suggestions!

Freedom from wires

With the onset of summer, and the unavoidable high humidity, I decided to try and get rid of the pile of cable under my desk by taking another crack at setting up a wireless connection. I’d tried several months back but because of the strange internet connection I have (an ethernet connection to a building-wide Internet hub) I just couldn’t make it work with a standard wireless router. Until today when click click click and it magically started working. I guess the lesson learnt here is that computers sometimes fix themselves (except when it involves hard drive).

Anyway, the upshot is that now I no longer need such a big tangle of cable strewn across the room. Hurrah for modern technology.

Planes, trains, and computer failure

My last post was June 6th, and today it’s June 21st. In the time since then my hard drive had a spasm of identity, and I went back to England for a short holiday. Actually, both happened at the same time, which has left my computer pretty much incapacitated until I got back to Prague. Now I have the fun task of restoring its former glory. And they say computers are designed to make our lives easier.

While most of my work and emails were backed up, I had 10’s of gigs of photos and videos that were not, and not all of them survived. It’s quite disheartening really, as some were the only copies I had.

What was more disturbing was that after re-installing Windows, and before I could download a firewall and update Windows from Windows Update, my computer was infected with four different viruses/trojans. Now that’s scary, and makes me wonder at the state of the vast majority of the computer population.

InScript

I’ve been tinkering away on a WordPress plugin idea I’ve had, and it’s now finished and available for download.

It’s a bit of a complicated plugin to explain fully, but the core effect is very simple: it is an expandable pattern matching script engine. Phew, what a mouthful!

Basically it means that you can insert patterns into posts, or have patterns applied to dates, titles, even the whole blog. These patterns can contain variables and functions that, when InScript processes them, will insert or manipulate the data as the page is being generated.