Archives for the month of: January, 2008

CSS frustration.. a little anyway.. spare a guy some help?

January 28, 2008 //

I’ve decided I think I’m going to go to a fluid layout for my new blog theme. I happily started re-building my CSS to do just that but I’m running into a problem that seems a little weird involving CSS and div heights. I’ve approached it six ways from Sunday and still don’t understand it.

It’s probably something simple, but I’m really going nuts trying to figure out what the problem is. I’ve posted a message about it over on welovecss.com (complete with screenshots illustrating the problem and my php and css as well.). So if you’re at all capable in CSS and html and can give me a hand I’d really appreciate it.

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Categories blogging, design, technology, web

I’m no pop musicologist but…

January 25, 2008 //

Em is still well entrenched in her fascination with Elvis (a young Elvis thank god). We now own half a dozen Elvis movies. But she’s also into the oldies and is currently big into the Beach Boys. I hadn’t listened to their music in quite a long time, but was surpised (but maybe shouldn’t be) at how much this song sounded like Weezer and/or Blink 182:

Do You Wanna Dance (excerpt)

Categories Uncategorized

Six Year Olds and Parental Etiquette

January 25, 2008 //

Sometimes I think OmegaMom leads a life parallel to mine.

In her post Now we are six, OM can’t seem to come to grips that OmegaDotter is now six. (Happy Birthday Dotter!). Our daughter Em turned six at the end of December and I can’t believe it either. Clearly the pace of life is too quick. I’m constantly reminding myself to make the most of these years. Less griping, more hugging; less reprimanding, more laughing; less cleaning, more cartoon watching together. The dishes get done later. Priorities, priorities.

But also interesting is that because Em’s birthday happens between Christmas and New Years, we usually have a birthday party for her friends right around now. And in fact we’re having one on Sunday too! - eerie isn’t it. And as Omegamom laments the girly-girly, princess Barbie of Fairyland stage (I’ve worn far more than my fair share of hair clips, tiaras and lipgloss in the past year), she also mentions the fact that she’s only got 4 girls who are attending. We’ve got three so far. However I’m not so fair minded about the situation.

It’s not the number that gets me (hey.. I know everyone is busy), but the fact that we’ve got 3 who confirmed that they would attend and only ONE that has responded that they cannot make it, riles me up. There are about 8 others who’ve obviously decided that the RSVP part of the invitation was optional. Pfft!

I’ve long since held the belief that somehow our society - and I’m talking about parents, make no mistake - manages to take fine, young, socially healthy kids and turn them into anti-social, rude and self-centred adults. It’s truly miraculous.

Who holds the door for me when we’re rushing into school in the morning? It’s not little Johnny’s mom who holds the door, it’s little Johnny.

Who says ‘good morning’ or ‘hey, how ya doing’ passing by in the hallways? Not Shayla-Kylie-Ashley-Moonbeam’s daddy. It’s Shayla. Unless of course she’s already had that part of her naturally social demeanour already pressed out of her during her first 5 years of her life.

Parents. I beg of you. Park your big silly SUV’s where you’re clearly told not to park; Shove past me in the hallways without saying ‘excuse me’; Spend 10 minutes just inches from me while we fight with kiddie winter boots without saying a single word; But I beg of you, I plead with you. Just call and say you’re not coming. I don’t care if you have a good excuse or not, I don’t want an excuse, I just want some common courtesy!

Breathe.. breathe.. breathe..

Here’s some relief: Rabbit of Seville

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Categories family

RawStudio 0.7 is out!!

January 25, 2008 //

Woohoo! Congratulations to the RawStudio guys for getting 0.7 out today!

RawStudio is the application I use to convert my RAW photos (.CR2 files from my Canon Rebel XT) into jpegs. I love this application because of the way it streamlines the raw conversion workflow for me. It’s interface is logical and well thought out and perhaps most surprisingly, different from anything else I’ve tried. I love it.

The single hitch with using RawStudio up until this point was the fact that when it converted one of my CR2 raw files, it generated a smaller than full size jpg. Plenty big for most print uses and definitely plenty large for web use, but not full size. It came down to a process referred to as demosaic’ing. Something so far above my head that I resigned myself to using UFRaw in those rare instances I wanted a single full size jpg conversion (UFRaw is good for single conversions but painful when you’ve got directories full of raw files).

But all that ends with version 0.7. They’ve got the demosaic thing sorted out. They’ve streamlined the interface even further with a quick exposure mask toggle and better zooming control. The exposure mask dynamically shows you which areas are over or underexposed as you make adjustments to your photo. What I noticed first is that it really highlights the lack of dynamic range in today’s digital cameras. I’m not going to get into a film vs digital comparison, but rest assured you will be amazed at how little dynamic range you can actually capture in a photo. Clearly using multiple raw conversions or multiple exposures to compose high dynamic range (HDR) images is something that could be used a lot more than it is.

So if you’re interested in a free-software RAW conversion utility to help your image workflow on Linux you should really give it a try. A lot of the major distros likely have Rawstudio in their repositories, but if you want version 0.7 right now, you’ll likely have to download the source files and compile it yourself. I’ve built it here on Gutsy so if you need help, let me know, it’s not that hard at all (heck, if I can do it, then surely you can!). Hubert Figuiere on the mailing list also posted a link to a pre-built 1 click installer for Rawstudio 0.7 for use on OpenSuse 10.3 which is:
http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:hfiguiere/openSUSE_10.3/rawstudio.ymp

Good job guys!!

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Categories linux, photography

Google Docs Slideshows now embeddable (sp?)

January 24, 2008 //

Back in September I posted about the fact that Google Docs supported uploading of Powerpoint presentations and the gave the ability to have a chat session through Gtalk at the same time.

I just found out that recently (I think as of the New Year) they’ve also provided an embed code when you publish a presentation. The reason I found this out was that I’m teaching another night course (a structures course this time) and I’m providing a wordpress.com blog with links to the slideshows for students who want to review things online.

Funny thing is that the embed code didn’t seem to work on my WordPress.com blog. But I’ve uploaded another one to post here just to test it out. Hopefully it’s not too wide for this theme, but what the hey.

So this is really just a test. Let me know if it barfs or anything. But if it works well, it would be a neat tool for people to publish pseudo-screencasts or even (gasp) entertaining slideshows - something I know absolutely nothing about - right in their blog posts.

I’m still waiting for the Openoffice Impress support but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Anyway, let’s see if this works or not:

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Categories blogging, technology, web

WordPress Theming Progress

January 23, 2008 //

I took a crack at my initial idea for an original WordPress theme. I did up some quick and dirty graphics using Inkscape and muddled my way through the CSS and came up with this:

I wasn’t impressed with it. I fiddled and diddled with it, but it didn’t look like anything too promising. But hey, you’ve got to start somewhere right? And better yet, as I sat staring at it, I came up with a couple of other ideas. I was adamant about keeping a nice clean and simple layout (for now) that would be light on the graphics and degrade nicely. Therefore I was determined not to go heavy-handed on the graphic treatment, but I figured a little drop shading might better achieve what I was looking for. Here is what I’ve got so far. I’m much happier with it:

I know a lot of you might look at that and say, “Whoa.. dude it’s very Apple-ish” or maybe “Whoa.. dude, it’s very antiseptic”. But there’s only one god-dang reflection on the whole page! And a few rounded corners never hurt anybody. You don’t see any gradients do you? Defensive.. I know. I actually played around with putting a staple on top of each post and even a crease in the upper right corner of each post (ah, the miracles of a desktop scanner) but neither looked right.

Whatever your feelings on it, please leave me a comment and let me know how retarded looking it actually is.

I’ve still got to generate the sub pages based on the rearranged markup (single.php, archive.php, search.php etc..), but that shouldn’t be much of a problem. Of course there will be problems popping up left and right once I decide to actually upload the theme, but that’s to be expected.

It actually hasn’t been too bad, although the CSS is a complete dog’s breakfast at this point.

And to heathenx, if you’re reading… doing all this crap has actually generated a decent Inkscape screencasting idea, so maybe, just maybe I’ll get one done this coming weekend. Wonder of wonders.

Categories blogging, design, graphics, inkscape

WordPress theming update

January 21, 2008 //

A few days ago, I managed to work through part 3 of wpdesigner.com’s WordPress theming tutorial. This left me with a locally installed copy of WordPress, a plethora of test posts (which are invaluable), and a rudimentary theme. And perhaps most important of all, I learned a lot about how a WordPress theme works (and a little bit about php along the way too!).

So now I’m mulling over how I want this blog to look. I’ve been following Lauren’s posts over at Creative Curio which have provided valuable discussion on the topics of design and layout. I’m probably going to go with something infinitely more pedestrian than Lauren. I’ve also been mulling over the huge amount of examples at Design Meltdown and I think I’m zeroing in on something closer to minimalistic. While I like these types of sites, I can’t deny that a minimalistic design might also be easier to code! It’s really the css part of things that scares me more than anything.

I’ve also finished reading Dan Cederholm’s book Bulletproof Web Design, and that has taught me that things may not be as difficult as they look. Most of the methods he uses for things like rounded corners and expandable boxes make common sense and are easy and clean to implement. That bodes well for a CSS simpleton like me.

So for now, I’ve come up with a very rudimentary layout. It’s pretty much a standard two-column layout but I’ve added a left column to hold the ‘header’ image. I decided to put in the side purposely just to avoid the header+2columns+footer monotony that seems to prevail in WordPress blog designs. Does shoving the header in vertical left side column change that? Likely not, but we’ll see where it goes. I’m not fixed on the layout, it’s likely to change, but it’s a starting point. I’m also determined to likely keep everything white -especially the posting area- since I’ve been stung by posting images and photos on top of a weird background color only to be disappointed that things look better when they show up in Google Reader than they do on the blog itself.

In the end, I want the design to be clean with a generous amount of whitespace. For now, I’m thinking of marking off the various areas with curved corner hatches, likely very thin and grey coloured to denote the different areas without loading up the page with images:

Categories blogging, design, drawing, technology, web

Ignoring Linux won’t make it go away

January 18, 2008 //

I’m all tapped out of Linux podcasts at the moment, and it’s always good to know thine enemy. So I listened to the Windows Weekly podcast on my commute home yesterday.

It’s amazing that after 10 minutes of talking about how many wrong moves Microsoft has made recently, another 10 minutes of Mac-centric talk, several positive comments about the Asus EEE PC (which runs linux) and finally the pimping of VLC (which is free software) as Paul Thurrott’s software pick, I don’t believe there was a single mention of the word “Linux” , “Free Software” or even “Open Source” in that whole conversation (please correct me if I’m wrong).

Hmmf. Ignore it all you like. Free software, open-source software and Linux are marching inexorably forward whether or not people pretend they aren’t there.

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Categories linux, podcasts, technology

Awesome Web Design Resource

January 18, 2008 //

Via the boagworld podcast, comes this huge, screenshot laden, web design resource by Patrick McNeil at Design Meltdown.

I’m currently working on a new WordPress blog theme from scratch and this site appears to have tons of good info and ideas that I can use.

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Categories design, technology, web

Pronto, Poste-Haste and Pray-Tell

January 17, 2008 //

Expressions can be a odd thing. I had someone at work ask me for something and they jokingly tacked on a word to make the point:

“Please send it to me.. Pronto.”

Pronto. Now there’s something I hadn’t heard in a while.

These days “ASAP”, undoubtedly pronounced “aye-sapp”, seems to be the most common (and maybe the most trite) ending to a request. I use it myself, but always give the person enough respect to spell or say it fully.

But back to the matter at hand. How in the world do you out-do ‘pronto’?

Here’s one,

“I want that thing. Post-haste.”

Get my smoking jacket and slippers Jeeves…

Do you have any odd, old or seldom-used expressions you like to trot out every now and then? Pray-tell?

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Categories humour