Category: General Page 20 of 25

[:en]For news and blog related stuff, and everything else that doesn’t fit.[:de]Ein Sammelordner für alles, was irgendwo anders nicht untergebracht werden konnte.

Daily Links

By Fips

On 18th May 2008

In Daily Links

If it’s good enough for Shatner – Old school computer advertising, as dug out of the back issues of vintage computer magazines. William Shatner, Roger Moore, and the cast of M*A*S*H all offered their images to promote various relics of the golden era of computing.

Is black the new green? – Do websites with black backgrounds use less energy than bright ones? The team from Dialogue Box tackle the issue of green web design and attempt to explode the myths surrounding energy usage and website colours.

Smaller than mp3 – Not content with shrinking music down to mp3 size, researchers at the University of Rochester have formulated a solution to recreate sounds through recreation of the physical attributes of an instrument and its player to store the sounds in files 1,000 times smaller than current mp3 standards.

Ten stupid ideas that earned a million – From pixel advertising to vegetarian wishbones, through HIV-positive dating and glasses for dogs, here’s a list of some of the most stupid ideas to have earned a fortune for their creators. (Russian)

Strange Mouse Cursor Issues

By Fips

On 17th May 2008

In Asides, Technology

A friend of mine was having a strange problem with her Dell XPS system, whereby the active area of the mouse cursor would move with apparent randomness, occasionally being located as it should be at the arrow’s point, sometimes at its middle, other times half an inch below. This post led us to the solution that a simple graphics driver update was required, coincidentally for the same ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card.

Daily Links

By Fips

On 6th May 2008

In Daily Links

Plugoo – Talk with your site visitors through your favourite instant messenger with this blog plugin. The idea’s a nice one, though there would appear to be plenty of potential for abuse.

Spheers – Fancy downloading your brain? Alright, that’s not quite the idea, but spheers.com, currently in beta, seems to be offering a way of keeping tabs on all that digital information which passes our eyes so we can come back to it later.

Super Cook – A site which offers almost exactly what I wrote about in this post. A few features they could yet implement, but overall a pretty decent site for checking recipes and getting new ideas.

TypeRacer – Nice little game to improve your typing skills. Practice on your own or go head-to-head in a race with other players.

Relying on Plugins

By Fips

On 6th May 2008

In General

WordPress

Plugins can be a major boon. They can add variety to a site, integrate third party software, collect feedback, improve navigation, or add features. Occasionally they may become integral to the way a blog is run. But they can also become a burden or a major stumbling point. The recent WordPress 2.5 release made a large of plugins for the software incompatible, and outright broke a few. In those cases where plugins simply provide some added extraneous functionality, such breakages might not be a problem, but where they form an integral part of a blog the potential changes can bring a site to a halt.

Yet some downtime during a WordPress update is not the only worry when it comes to plugins. Whilst major updates often accentuate the problems, there is no guarantee that plugin authors will continue their work to cope with bugs and software changes. The small WPPA plugin currently used on this blog was recently broken by the WordPress update, but the author considered that the features introduced in the recent version might make his plugin obsolete, and only touched up the plugin to work with 2.5 (so far). Since I hardly post any photographs, such a change makes little difference to this site, but for many others migrating to another plugin could prove a major job if automated tools aren’t available. Others may have experienced such changes when moving between multilingual plugins as the features and support changed, from Language Picker, through Polyglot, to Language Switcher or WP_Multilingual. Such a migration might involve moving media around, altering themes, or having to change tags or syntax within WordPress posts.

How do you approach using plugins on WordPress? Do you consider WordPress should avoid leave extra features to the plugin authors rather than implementing features already well covered (e.g. tags, photos)? Should plugin authors attempt to implement migration tools or leave it to end-users to do the necessary conversions?

Krystyna Janda in Dublin

By Fips

On 21st April 2008

In General, Real Life™

Krystyna Janda

On Saturday I went to a meeting with Krystyna Janda presented by The National Creativity Centre Foundation, in the National Gallery in Dublin. The meeting principally took the form of a questions and answers session, conducted by the famous Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, ahead of the Irish première of Krystyna Janda’s monologue adaptation of Vedrana Rudan’s Ear, Throat, Knife.

Whilst the interview was pretty interesting, given Janda’s extremely busy and varied career, the translating at the event was a little under par. The predominance of Polish speakers in the audience meant that the poor translator didn’t always get a say until after a few questions had been asked or answered, and her pretty difficult task of translating her own shorthand wasn’t helped by Mr Zanussi interrupting occasionally to demonstrate his own knowledge of English, and I was frankly embarrassed for the poor translator. Most questions focused dealt with Janda’s career in acting, both on stage and on the silver screen, from her early roles in films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) or working alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto, to her more recent work with the Polonia Theatre in Warsaw. Many of the audience’s questions focused on her family life, work in politics and music, and just where she finds the energy to keep it all going. Not sure if she answered that sufficiently, but she did suggest that there would be more going on in her blog in the future.