Published on
December 30, 2006 .
It’s official, my theme will be called “ParadoX”, continuing my long term facination with that word. But anyways, here are some of the features I’ve added right now:
- The Infobar(lack of a better name) to give all unnesacary details about the site, like rss feeds, latest comments, etc, which are not completely important, and this is collapsible.
- The post toolkit. Called in firstpost.php (a new file I’ve added). The first post is given utmost importance. Full emphasis on content. Easy commenting without having to navigate to a deeper level. Comment from the frontpage. No sidebar in the beggining.
- Integrated with wp2pdf, allowing very fine control of getting your posts into pdf form. Very funky indeed.
- Post toolkit also has digg this/add to delicious, etc, and all similar crap.
- Rebuilt from k2. I’ve removed a lot of frills from k2, removed the out of the box support for several plugins. K2 works faster. But nybble’s sidebar modules which is a replacement to widgets are enabled, which work better than widgets.
- Prebuilt for adsense. First post occupies about 70% width of front page on 1024×768. Theme is fixed width.
- Header is made from flash.
- Icon Library will change, or the silk iconset can change.
Right now the ideas are pre-alpha. Please, if you can design themes and can work with photoshop/gimp, I need your help. Please mail me at prototype.angel [Attt] geemail [DAWT] caam
Screenshots:
Main Page. The gray area is simply firstpost.php
Infobar Open. I know it’s opened orkut inside the inline frame, but think of the possibilities what you can put in there with so little space required.
The Post toolkit. The screenshot must be self explanatory
A single Page
Post toolkit on a single page.
Published on
December 30, 2006 .
While building my theme I installed wordpress with lots of sample data and I realized I forgot my password and couldn’t recover it even with a “forgot password” link. So after playing around for 30 mins, I reset my password. This is how.
start mysql and login
SELECT ‘wordpress’ //this should be your database name
UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass = MD5( ‘password’ ) WHERE ID =1 LIMIT 1 ;
where password is your new password. Your password is reset, for the admin acount.
Enjoy
Published on
December 29, 2006 .
It’s among the newest things that’s been going on. It’s finally cool to switch to linux. Linux has started shedding it’s image of being hard to use and without applications or the right support, people are switching over everyday, and they are happy, but a lot of people I knew, including myself had difficulty, and now that I’m completely towards the light side of the force, I’ll give a couple of suggestions, more spiritual rather than technical.
- Motivate yourself: Though this is true for all goals, but more so for a challenging one like switching to linux. You need to convince yourself that the change is good and you want it. Watch beryl/compiz videos on youtube, go see a friend who has a fully pimped out linux desktop, make yourself want it desperately.
- Be patient: You can never switch over completely in the first boot. Dual boot initially and keep going back to windows whenever linux seems too overwhelming. Don’t ever remove one os completely, keep both in the beginning. You need to wait before you can understand the basics of a new OS and learn how to use it. You can take your time, but the shorter, the better.
- Be comfortable: When initially in linux, do something easy and familiar. For example, browse the net in linux, and then start using openoffice, then get your mail, and focus on getting comfortable with the new environment.
- Learn: Don’t do everything just to become a linux user, do all the instructions on the internet to learn how linux works. Installing beryl/compiz is no big deal if you follow the instructions, but learning something out of the process makes it an entirely new ballgame. Try something new every once in a while. Learn the command line.
- Don’t be afraid: Help is always there in the community. Look on the forums for help, search (google is your friend), or ask on irc. The best thing is to have a friend guide you through the initial steps if you’re afraid. And don’t be afraid to make mistakes, you learn more that way.
- Take risks: I know a lot of people who’re too afraid to install linux because it might ruin their system. As long as you’re a little bit careful nothing should happen, but you should take risks. If something goes horribly wrong, you can always reinstall. And the more you reinstall, the more you learn.
- Accept Change: Remember, you’re going to be using software that might’ve been new to you. Some may be better, some may not, but that doesen’t mean you cannot compromise. For example, openoffice might not have the ribbon interface of office 2007 but it will edit your documents for you. That’s what opensource programs are all about: simple, fast and effictive, and they get the job done.
- Do it with someone else: Find another friend and switch over together, this way you can help each other out and keep yourselves motivated.
And the last, but however the most important point is: The hardest part about switching to linux is not learning it, but unlearning windows. You can ask “Where’s my control panel” or “what happened to my drive letters”, and you may say that the interface is difficult or not easy to use, but remember, when you first started using windows, drive letters, control panel, and everything was as difficult as mounting drives or installing drivers. Keep at it and you’ll feel right at home with linux.
Now Playing: Dragonforce – Revolution Deathsquad
[tags]linux,spiritual, help, switching, ubuntu[/tags]
Published on
December 29, 2006 .
For the past few weeks, whenever I’ve got the time, and am not feeling lazy, I used to work on my theme. I was actually starting from scratch and building the theme around it. But I struck an awesome idea and took apart k2, and analyzed the structure, and I’ve made some significant progress in that area.
Few juicy details:
I had to actually change the complete internal structure. My theme will have the first post /main post occupying full space and no sidebar initially. But on the side will be a little area for adsense. The focus will be on the post and it’ll look best on a morderately large post with a picture in it perhaps.
There’s a collapsible “infobar”, a table with an inline frame inside from which you can access unnessacary shit like latest posts, archives, calendars, etc, and leave room on your sidebar for neat stuff. Also this will have rss details, technorati and all is curved corners.
The most exciting thing I did today was research and finalize a neat thing called the “post toolkit”, a small section that appears after the first post on the main page and on the single posts. The toolkit has a quick comment option, so you don’t have to navigate all the way down to comment, it also has “digg this”, a nifty tool to export your post to pdf, email this post(ajaxified) and more suggestions are welcome. Also stuff like the tags, date, etc are shown in this.
K2 has a gargantuan amount of features, in fact there are some amazing plugins that it has out of the box support for. In fact, since my theme is cored around k2, these will also be there. Even more fun is the livesearch and rolling archives. Lots more ajax can be expected in my theme.
I’ll be done with the theme sooner than I thought, suggestions are most welcome.
Published on
December 28, 2006 .
Well, with december nearing it’s end, the feelings of fear and uncertainty that I managed to put away so comfortably for a whole month is starting to kick in, but I’m not letting this get me yet. I’m gonna go into the next year happy and having fun. The first thing I said in 2006 was “Oh crap, I’m on a fu*ing train”, but then again, the first thing I’ll say next year will be “Oh crap, I’m gonna be late for my flight” or something of that effect.
But I’m not writing today to whine about my absurd inability to be somewhere on time or my pathetic resolutions. Blogspot (note to myself, write an article later about how much I hate blogspot) is getting overloaded with new year’s resolution posts. My resolutions are good and one of them is not to broadcast them to the world. I want to write good tech tips and articles on stuff I pretend to know about.
Anyways, I’ve been reading a lot of Ctrl+Alt+Del, the stuff is absolutely great, but I don’t want to waste my already-exceeded bandwidth. And I decided three major goals for the site.
- I’m gonna have one blog only for tech tips and articles on stuff I pretend to know about. And one more for the more interesting personal stuff. A late Christmas present from the folks here at Thought Outflux, the tech blog is gonna be called “Overclocked Vacuum tubes” and is basically independent original stuff about how to make your life easier, and not linking to all the news stories on digg one after the other.
- My theme, still not named properly, but going under the working name “Innuendo” is not even in alpha stage. I need to release a proof of concept, get some feedback on the usability and then add artwork and fine tune the css until I get a proper mockup. Then I’ll be mixing it with wordpress.
- Inspired by ctrlaltdel, I want to start a comic strip. I can’t draw for nuts, I really really really really can’t draw anything. I hated drawing things. I can’t even doodle. So you’ll have to settle for stick figures and some geekiness, with a little romance thrown in perhaps, but mostly it’s gonna be about icy cold put-me-out-of-my-misery sarcasm.
I plan to release the theme in jan end perhaps. I gotta work on missionmars(sorry robotix, I’m not offering a linkback) and some academic projects not to mention a lot of loose ends I have to tie up. The first few weeks will be hell on earth, but will keep people updated with
Published on
December 27, 2006 .
For the past few days I’ve been looking for some good comics and I stumbled across this: The Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic. It’s essentially a story about a bunch of friends into computer games. I spent quite a bit of time reading some of the archives. It’s basically oodles of sarcasm and a little geekishness. Infact, I found this comic via wikipedia, when I was reading about apple’s new “Get a mac” campaign, which I find absolutely revolting by the way, and I’ll write about it tommorow, oh I have so much to write.
anyways, more about the comic. It’s more than simply a comic of a few guys into video games. It’s centered around this character called ethan, a video game fanatic and a clerk at a game store. He’s engaged to the smart and hot Liliah (I’m such a sucker for hair bangs) and a few other characters including a robot seemingly made out of an xbox and a linux user with a pet penguin. The theme, though centered around video games, rarely gets technical or boring, and a lot of focus is given to sarcasm, humour and relationships.
this comic seems to have a huge fan following. More on this later.
[TAGS]comics, cad, me, funny, gaming, web[/TAGS]
Published on
December 26, 2006 .
Following my previous post on what you can do with keystrokes I began playing around with the windows key. And I discovered some rather new keystrokes that many may not have known about.
Windows Key + Tab: Cycle through the buttons in the Task Bar.
Windows Key + D: Minimize or restore all windows
Windows Key + E: Launch Windows Explorer
Windows Key + F: Launch Search for Files
Windows Key + Ctrl + F: Launch Search for Computers
Windows Key + F1: Launch the Help and Support Center
Windows Key + R: Launch the Run dialog box
Windows Key + Pause/Break: Launch System Properties dialog box
Windows Key + M: Minimizes all open windows.
Windows Key + Shift + M: Undo minimize all windows
Windows Key + L: Locks the workstation
Windows Key + U: Launch the Utility Manager
Published on
December 26, 2006 .
One thing that I’m not too happy about with linux is the dearth of desktop blog editors for linux. Seasoned bloggers won’t be caught unawares when I through words like ecto or qumana or w.bloggar or thingamablog. I’ve tried every and I mean EVERY(maybe not the mac ones) desktop blog editor out there. The most innovative and a personal favorite was for me, Windows Live Writer, the only Microsoft software I liked apart from VCExpress. The most feature loaded was post2blog, a rather unheard of. But this is about linux blog editors. There is a little bit of choice so you don’t have to fire up firefox everytime you need to write away (unless you’re using performancing. but then again)
The First editor I tried came with a default
gnome install for me. It was
bloGTK, a rather full featured editor with no frills, but with all the basics. It looks like a decent gnome application, with the standard gnome icons and the smooth and easy gtk feel. I posted successfully and this is a great light editor for everyone.
BloGTK is written using Python and PyGTK, and is designed to be fast and simple to use.
BloGTK is open-source software released under the BSD license, which means that it is completely free for use.
There’s another application, the kde alternative but it’s a rather simple one lacking even the simpler features. It’s called kblogger and it’s nothing but a kicker applet, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
There’s one newer one available that I happened to see today, this one client called bleezer, that seems to be extremely promising and offers linux support and I can’t wait to try it out when I get back to kgp. It’s right now in version 0.9.7 as detailed in this post with more features being added
And then we have the all great performancing. This is what I use sometimes and am using it right now. This comes in very handy for tech blog writers, and rebloggers as there’s a very easy drag and drop feature from right within firefox. I hardly need to write something about performancing. I like it and it’s loaded with features but a small quirk is that I found the image alignment is a little annoying, but I like the notes thing, and the image alignment can be fixed by editing the html but I prefer livewriter’s image editing features.
I’ll write more about windows desktop editors, and a couple of neat links
Mark Evans’ Blog publishing tool round up
The qumana chaps write about wlw vs qumana
Published on
December 26, 2006 .
Ever wanted to add certain cool characters like ç in the middle of your text it’s easy. Windows users, go to console or run charmap, and check the bottom left corner. Quite a few characters will have a keystroke. Holding alt down while entering the number in during the keystroke will put the character in any text box with a font that supports that character. I haven’t tried this in linux, and I’ve been seperated from debian for quite a while, but there’s gcharmap for all you gnome users out there. (kubuntu/kde-debian users, apt-get install gcharmap should do the trick)
If someone’s using linux, please let me know if this works. Thanks. Windows people, enjoy away.
Another tip from ?hø???? Ø??fl?×
Published on
December 25, 2006 .
It was that time of the year again. Yup. I had to get my hair cut. Now I’ve always had a thing about hair cuts, I didn’t like them, mainly because they shortened my hair, and this, is something I’m not too fond of. I’m not really into getting the hair thing exactly right andam generally on neutral terms with my hair, but this time I walk into this new and rather swanky salon I discover. I walk in and ask for the usual, but this barber seemed rather adventurous and suggested I’d try something. He claimed he had lots of past experience in bombay and the likes and suggested getting my hair ahem…spiked. I thought of the typical gel based punk rock look which I did use once in a while but he said no…
He’d cut the hair everywhere super short and leave the front part rather long and it’d look good. I thought to myself that I really should be trying something a little more adventurous. I’ve been using the same hairdo for the past eighteen years. So I gave him the go ahead, sat down and closed my eyes as i always do.
I just innocently pondered about most efficient ways of mass extermination of puppies and tried not to think about this guy separating me from my precious keratin. And in the middle I heard the guy utter the most dangerous word “OOPS. What the sodding hell does he mean “OOPS?”, I mean if a surgeon said “oops” or something like that I’d understand. Apparently he doesen’t want to cut it any shorter and the look he prescribed would really not suit me. So, that explained the “oops” but the fact remains I am left with exceptionally short hair.
I got back with a twisted scowl on my face and my little sister almost laughed at me, it’s not that funny, but then again, what is? I went out looking for big baseball caps and other headgear and hope my hair grows back within a couple of weeks. Otherwise I’m very depressed right now.
More on my little vacation along with birdwatching pics later. Also tommorow I might upload my wordpress theme’s proof of concept. ie. a simple html file to prove my concept works.
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