John – Page 13 – Urban Giraffe

Icy Box IB-360 Review

A recent escapade in hard drive recovery made me realise that I wasn’t doing anywhere near enough to keep my system safe. Forget all about viruses and spyware and all the other computer-based threats; if your hard drive goes kaput then you are seriously screwed.

I looked into various backup software programs, but they all required me to spend considerable time burning DVDs. The best backup routine is one I don’t need to think about. My attention then moved on to a secondary, and larger, hard drive that could be used to make an exact copy of my primary drive. No hassle, no fuss, and painless recovery should anything go wrong. That’s the theory.

As I have a laptop my only option was to make this drive external. Most hard drive manufacturers make their own external drives, but they tend to be pricey. If you’re prepared to handle a few screws and bits of cable then you can get an identical device for a lot less money by purchasing a hard drive and hard drive casing, and putting it together yourself.

Learning Chinese

I’ve been trying to learn Chinese for over half a year now and, well, it’s kinda tough going. Not only do you need to learn a whole new way of speaking, but you also need to learn two written languages: pinyin (the English transliteration of Chinese words, so you can actually read anything), and Chinese characters themselves.

The spoken language is difficult in its own right due to tones. These are like the accents found in other languages, but more complicated and unfortunately much more important – getting the wrong tone in a word can change the meaning completely, to the extent that you could call your mother a horse by using the wrong inflection.

This is further complicated by different dialects. The majority of people in China speak Mandarin, while people in the South (and most of the Hong Kong expatriates around the world) speak Cantonese. They both use the same characters, but they are pronounced very differently. Actually, that’s not entirely true – Mandarin speakers use ‘simplified Chinese characters’, while Hong Kong and Taiwan use ‘traditional characters’. Sometimes they look similar, sometimes not.

Did I mention the other half-dozen regional variations? It’s enough to cause you to weep.

Giraffe in Italian and Spanish

A big thanks to Stefano Aglietti and Mario Núñez Molina for providing localizations of the Giraffe theme in Italian and Spanish. I’ve added a small localization selector in the sidebar so that people can change the theme language and see what it looks like. It doesn’t translate the posts, but it provides dates and other phrases in the chosen language, making for a better experience for non-English speakers.

Giraffe theme update

My Giraffe theme has now been updated. I’ve made some pretty major changes and these are summarised below:

The theme is fully localised! I don’t have any translations yet, but once I release the relevant parts then hopefully people can translate the theme into their own language – no more hacking the theme to bits.
Administrator interface. The support plugin now adds it’s own interface into the administration section. From here you can configure many aspects of theme’s appearance, such as colour scheme. More details in the themes section.
Extra information can be inserted into the sidebar by creating a file ‘sidebar-extra.php’ and filling it with whatever you want. This saves you having to modify the core theme files.
The layout can be configured to have the sidebar below the lead content, or to the side of it

Hopefully I’ve tracked down any problems already.

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.

A theme to call my own

So after all the articles about creating themes I finally got round to finishing my own. After much pulling of hair I also made it work in Internet Explorer. Really, the pain that browser puts people through is unreal. Roll on IE7.

Anyway, I’ve tried to rearrange the layout so as to make it not look like Kubrick. The front page has a full-width lead article, followed by three smaller articles, and finished off with a list of titles. A single page post uses the full-width of the page. This was all designed to give maximum space for long articles. The CSS is also print-friendly.

The comments have been filtered so all ‘real’ comments are grouped separately from pings and trackbacks. A little bit of JavaScript hides the pings until clicked open. I think having many pings on a page really puts people off from commenting, not to mention looks really ugly.

I’d really appreciate any feedback, especially with regards bugs and problems. I’ve tested it in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera, so I hope this means it will carry through to Mac browsers.

Oh, and there’s a giraffe at last!

Printable theme guide

A lot of people have asked for a printable version of my WordPress theme dissection and so I’ve been beavering away and have now released a PDF. This has been fully revised and expanded, and weighs-in at just over 1MB.

In a further fit of productivity I’ve also made a version available to buy from the online publisher Lulu. The guide is the same, so you can download the PDF and print it out yourself, but you also have the option of ordering a professionally printed and bound copy. As more of an incentive, the Lulu version has an extra chapter including my guide to installing WordPress on your own computer, as well as extra bookish things such as content pages etc. There’s also a full-colour durable cover – just like a real book!

Full details of this, and the PDF, can be found in the WordPress theme guide section.