I Met The Walrus
Donkey Kong Awesomeness
I’ve been playing quite a bit of Donkey Kong on the virtual console, so this made my evening:
http://gizmodo.com/5035196/moving-lego-donkey-kong-people-lego-donkey-fcking-kong
Nas Delivers With “Sly Fox”
When I first heard the new Nas album last week, the song “Sly Fox” stood out to me as a great track. Turns out Nas is doing more about alerting people to the malignancy of Fox News and teamed up with colorofchange.org for a petition to “Demand Fox stop race baiting and fear mongering.”
read more…
iBot Delight!
A couple days ago Kate from Independence Technology gave Mom a demo of the iBot. She was a wonderful person and very adept at walking Mom through all of its functions.
If you’re unfamiliar with the iBot, it is a power chair that was invented by Dean Kamen (also the inventor of the Segway) that is capable of standing upright, climbing stairs and tackling rough terrain using sophisticated gyrometric sensors and computer power.
Below is some media from the demo. It may take some time for the videos to fully load.
10 Principles for Good Design
- Good design is innovative.
- Good design makes a product useful.
- Good design is aesthetic.
- Good design helps us to understand a product.
- Good design is unobtrusive.
- Good design is honest.
- Good design is durable.
- Good design is consequent to the last detail.
- Good design is concerned with the environment.
- Good design is as little design as possible.
True that, Dieter Rams.
Skype down … grrr
Dear Skype, you were so reliable up until today.
Seems as though Skype’s network is down and they say it’s a P2P software issue.
I first tried calling my ISP, Cox, to see if they had recently blocked ports required by Skype. Funny thing was, when I finally got to a human and explained the problem, the guy hung up on me! Coincidence? Not sure…
I checked Google News and the hits there showed the issue was on Skype’s end.
My Skype line isn’t crucial for my work, although I’m feeling some anxiety not being connected. I sure do feel sorry for companies that use Skype and are more phone-phocused.
Skype’s blog post says 12-24 hours … we’ll see.
No new mail! Yay!
Every 6 months or so I finally get around to clearing out my email inbox.
Tonight I was inspired by this video of blogger Merlin Mann discussing his technique for attaining “Inbox Zero” to a crowd of Googlers. Mann explains that it’s just no fun (and non-productive to boot) to be working out of the inbox all day, constantly refreshing like a mouse hitting a lever to get some cheese.
So 2 hours later, I reply to an old email from back in March before archiving it, and then … drumroll … no emails in my inbox! Instead, I’m greeted with this message:
Oh no, please no.
Using Google Reader to check my RSS feeds is my other vice. And I’d rather confront that another night.
Why Twitter?
Twitter is a way to post status messages to your friends and also receive them from your friends.
I just got on Twitter and although I only have one friend (my lovely lady), I’m really enjoying it and I think my friends would too.
Here’s why I like it:
Usability
With function over form, the main submit form to update your status is one textarea and one submit button. No rich text editing or any of that, just type your message and tweet your friends with it. No barriers to entry or distractions.
Web usability guru Jacob Nielson describes one aspect of a good user interface as an interface that isn’t there, meaning that it’s nice when you don’t need to use a specialized interface to use a service. Instead you can use interfaces that you are already familiar with and that you already use on a daily base. Although it’s nothing new, I think this is one of the most enticing things about Twitter. You can connect your phone number with your Twitter account and use SMS or a mobile browser to update your Twitter status. And then you can receive your friends’ tweets.
You can also connect your instant messaging account to your Twitter account and send and receive tweets right from your instant messaging client. The user ‘twitter’ shows up as a friend and will send you IMs when your friends update and you can update just by sending the ‘twitter’ user an IM.
Simplicity
It does what it does and nothing more. And if you want something more you can build applications using Twitter’s open API (i.e. check out Twittervision 3d).
Connectivity
For the most part, we all have friends and family living and working all over. One major reason that people use social networks like FaceBook and MySpace is to stay in touch with these people. The thing is, I think that Twitter provides something much more basic and satisfying in communicating with friends and family over long distances than traditional social networks do.
When you live (or work) with people, you share the little details of your day with each other. It’s easy to do that because you see them a lot. Or you are actually doing little things with them, like grabbing coffee, having dinner or listening to music.
When you are physically distant from someone, you rely on infrequent blog entries, social network messages, uploaded photos, phone calls or emails. I know that I have trouble touching base with a distant friend when ‘it has been awhile’, and I think a big part of that is because, although you’ve seen the photos and read the blog entries, you don’t really have a feel for how that person is doing on the day to day, and what they’re up to on an average day.
Twitter does get a lot of flack from non-believers that think that it’s a waste of time to get all little updates from people. But I think that these little updates are very much what makes us human and helps us connect to each other. Actually, the idea for Twitter came about after considering how much people enjoy reading away messages (you know you’re one of them!). There’s something special about a simple, real-time status message.
You can find me on Twitter here.
Linux Shell in Windows
Cygwin is a clever environment for Windows that emulates features of Unix.
My computer is setup to dual-boot, which let’s me load either Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux upon startup. Today though, while I was in Windows, I was itching to run some commands on the hard drive and first started with DOS commands. But it’s just not the same as running BASH commands (and also I have a lot less experience with Windows commands).
Enter Cygwin. With it I was up and running with a Linux shell in no time. It works by using POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) calls. POSIX is a collection of standards, which were setup in order to allow for software compatibility between Unix variants. Max OS X and Windows OS’s fully comply with POSIX.
I just have the Cygwin shell running now, but the neat thing is that you can extend Cygwin to run most Linux open source software, including gnome, x windows, and even a Linux version of apache. I’m not sure why someone would want to setup a Linux server environment within Windows, but it’s a neat concept nonetheless.
I wrote this plugin because there was no easy way to define a first and last class to the list of pages generated in WordPress with wp_list_pages. These classes are useful for tweaking the visual formatting of the page list with CSS.
I’ve tested this with WordPress 2.2 and it should behave nicely with other plugins as well as earlier versions. Though let me know if you find something buggy.
As always, I am not responsible if this plugin blows up your computer.
WHY WOULD I WANT THIS?
Let’s say you want to create a horizontal list of your pages in the footer of your page with pipes separating the page links.
The css might look something like this:
#footer ul { list-style-type: none; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 0px; } #footer li { float: left; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; } #footer li a { border-right: 1px solid #CCC; display: block; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; text-align: center; }
The border-right applied to the link css sets a gray ‘pipe’ that separates out the page links.
The code in your WordPress theme file ‘footer.php’ might look like this:
<div id="footer"> <ul> <?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?> </ul> </div>
So right now this would output in the browser as:
See that last pipe following “Contact”? We don’t want that.
But since we now have a separate class for that last list item, we can add this to the css, which will remove that last ‘pipe’:
#footer .last_item a { border-right: none; }
And now our list of pages in the footer will look like this:
HOW DO I INSTALL IT?
View/Download the plugin file and place it in your /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ folder. Then activate the plugin from your WordPress control panel.
HOW DO I USE THE PLUGIN?
When activated, the plugin will automatically apply the class “first_item” to the first li (for the first page) as well as the class “last_item” to the last li (for the last page) in the list that is generated with wp_list_pages.
