geekgrl.net

Back in California…

hannah — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 05:47:32 +0000

I came home to California to find eight barrels of wine in the garage. My folks give me the stink eye every time I so much as glance at the stash, and I think this may explain why my mother has switched to buying me only the half-size little red cocktail straws. (Little do they know I have aquarium tubing in my closet, muahahahaha!)

But no, really, as good as their wine generally comes out in the end, this stuff isn’t done yet. Just kinda wild to come home to EIGHT BARRELS of high quality grape. The wine from my folks’ co-op always used to be stored elsewhere - never got to witness the whole process before.

a new neighbor

hannah — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:47:56 +0000

Meet ‘Stumpy’ — the resident lizard. He lives somewhere around the condo and I routinely see him chillin’ out on my way to/from the car.

introductions, farewells

hannah — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:47:43 +0000

I’ve been putting off writing this entry for quite a while now, but, I think the time has come. In early July, Mango was hit and killed by a car in front of Rust Op Twist. It was the second time my mother has been the first to see a family cat along side the road, and the second time she has rushed out as I scrambled for my shoes (to avoid the inevitable). We buried Mango on the beach side of the house, and, appropriately, planted a mango tree to mark her burial spot. The mango tree is doing well, and should bare (bear?) fruit as soon as next year.

Following Mango’s death, Tigger appeared quite depressed, not his usual bouncy self. So… I decided to treat loss with distraction, and brought home a kitten from the shelter. I named her Mocko, as in Mocko Jumbie. The name means “protector.” She was just a little squirt when I got her, and she really hasn’t grown much. Tigger out-weighs her at least two-to-one, but that doesn’t stop the two from wrassling and racing around the house like a herd of elephants. Crazy beasts. Tigger seems to have taken to Mocko and visa versa. The two are usually not far apart. Mocko is a little snugglepuss, she likes to cuddle up in bed and is slowly training Tiggs to do the same. And she is on her way to becoming a well-seasoned flopper — she falls at my feet, often on my feet, multiple times a day. sudden bouts of weakness, only treatable with belly rubs. she has me well trained.

Visitors

hannah — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:54:37 +0000

Patrick (a family friend) and his buddy Kennith came to spend a week on island. Below are a sampling of pics.

We rented a bobcat to do some stump removals. Patrick knows how to operate heavy equipment, so we thought we would take advantage…

I had my fun with the bobcat too. I’m filling in the hole post-olive-tree-removal. This is also post-DPNR ’smack down’ where we got in trouble for moving some beach rocks without a permit. Crap. Potentially big fine. They had police men with guns and everything. pretty exciting…

For our rain-forest adventure, we took the windows off the jeep, safari style. Here’s Patrick posing as a tourist.

Then we paid a visit to the turtles up in the rain forest.

Happy turtles indeed.

Herds of them, in fact. Here they are stampeding.

Settling in

hannah — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 15:55:39 +0000

Nap Time

Mango is underneath there somewhere

They both like exploring the Gallery.

Believe it or not, they’re sleeping.

wow, I did that?

hannah — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:24:03 +0000

I just got a request recently to add some features to a PostNuke module I developed for a client about 2 years ago — my first PHP project ever… I was kindof dreading the whole process. But low and behold… I’m finding things like:

// HLG - REMOVING UNNECC FUNCTIONS
// include ‘modules/’.$modinfo['directory'].’/pnincludes/swtypes.php’;
// include ‘modules/’.$modinfo['directory'].’/pnincludes/manufacturers.php’;
// include ‘modules/’.$modinfo['directory'].’/pnincludes/software.php’;

Holy Cow! I commented the daylights out of this project. Yay for me.

Find Low Resolution Album Art - iTunes AppleScript

hannah — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 01:15:53 +0000

Brief Introduction:
iTunes 7’s Cover Flow makes low resolution, older album cover art stick out like a sore thumb. iTunes won’t search for high res artwork if the track already has artwork. SO… One needs to be able to sort out the albums with low res art and strip them in order to make their library look shiny in Cover Flow. This script finds tracks with low resolution art. You can then use a script like this one to strip the artwork, and then use the built in iTunes tool to search the iTunes store for better art.

Download Link:

Dowload Count: 1823
Last Updated: 01/06/2007

Is this plugin worth at least a buck?

Even a dollar goes a long way in allowing me to keep releasing plugins and updates for free. I really appreciate your support!

Install:

Place “Find Low Res Art” in your iTunes script directory, usually ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts (where ~/ denotes your user’s ‘home’ or root directory)
Restart iTunes

Use:

Select the songs you want to scan for low resolution artwork.
Select “Find Low Res Art” from your scripts menu
Follow the Prompts
Sit back and relax. Scanning 6,000 songs on an Intel mac takes about 12 min using the script’s “fast” mode.

Background:
With the release of iTunes 7 we all got a nifty new music browsing shiny: Cover Flow. We can now flip through our music just as we would flip through CDs, complete with spiffy visual fade and perspective effects.

I, and (based on the number of album-art-fetching scripts available) many others have been obsessing over matching up songs with album art since the release of the iPod Photo a few years back. So the concept of viewing our album art within iTunes with shiny animation - Darned Cool. Thanks Apple.

Only one problem. Upon install of iTunes 7, I realized that my album art was Ugly. Hideous. Uncouth and Vulger. Well, maybe not all That bad… but it was still painfully obvious that 150×150 resolution art wasn’t making the grade in Cover Flow.

iTunes ever so kindly attempts to fetch Purdy art for us, BUT only when the track has NO art to begin with. And beyond manual sort and removal, there’s no way to filter or strip out the smallish art. So back in September of 2006, I created an AppleScript to do the filtering - the script looks at the artwork and moves the track to a “low res” playlist if it has low res artwork. Other people have already created stripping scripts to remove the artwork, so the next step is obviously to run one of those scripts on the low res playlist. Then let iTunes do its magic.

Took me a while to get around to releasing this… I hope it works for people. Feel free to comment if you have any questions!

media organization nightmares..

hannah — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 18:17:58 +0000

My photo-organization strategy works something like this: Drag off stick, plunk in /photos/year-month_activity — viola. At this point I have about 6,000 pics. about 60% of those are duplicates, evidence of my “Well if I take 6 pics of one of ‘em has gotta turn out” philosophy. And did I ever bother to go back and sort out the one good from each set of duplicates? nah…

So I need to be able to organize my photos. I’ve got to do some purging. it would be nice to catalogue by keyword and make things searchable. This requires an organizational photo tool.

Critera:

has to handle camera raw
not choke on big libraries
preferably hook up to Gallery2 and some photo printing gizmos
playing nice with mac shinies is a bonus

I tried iView Media Pro a while ago and was unimpressed by their proprietary tagging & buggy Intel/Universal release. Now they’ve been bought by those yahoos up in Redmond, WA and I’d really rather keep my media in better hands.

That leaves Lightroom Beta, iPhoto, and Aperture (am I missing anything?) - iPhoto does kinda handles RAW and it plays nice w/all the mac-happy gizmos, but it lacks the versioning and export abilities, editing and stacking that I’ve come to like in Aperture. Lightroom has a learning curve, promises to be spendy, and doesn’t integrate with other macish shinies. Aperture is horribly expensive at $300.00 for a licensed copy, it integrates with Some mac gizmos, and it pretty much does what I need (or will do whenever they get around to releasing a camera raw patch for the D40…). Oh, and the learning curve was pretty tame. We like that. But $300… ouch. Would be nice if some selfless soul would develop a gimp media manager open source coolie. Likely too good to be true though. *sigh*

Addendum:
After reading Martin Paling’s notes about iPhoto Alternatives, I may check out Picture Arena

jQuery vs Prototype - WordPress Gone Astray?

hannah — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:41:35 +0000

WordPress 2.0 essentially marked the final leap of the WP team in joining the Web 2.0 bandwagon… We have a big friendly typeset, drag-and-drop widgets, AJAXified posting and moderating tools. And with 2.1, we will be getting a JavaScript framework.

This doesn’t mean much to the average WP user, but to developers, its huge. Every time a WordPress blog loads, the viewer is now downloading a 48kb nugget of JS - the Prototype Framework. So as a developer - if I want to make a shiny 2.0′ish plugin, I’ve got to use Prototype as a backend. Or I have to force everyone to use something else, of questionable compatibility, which will add yet more bulk to WP. Alex King has embraced Prototype with his Share This plugin. I’m sure others are soon to follow. But to be honest, I can’t see why the whole community isn’t throwing a colossal fit and threatening to dunk the WP dev team in a nice cold lake.

I admit, I’m biased. I’ve been developing sites with the JQuery framework for 4+ months now. Back in August of 2006 I realized that all this AJAX/2.0/Rails/Blah nonsense wasn’t going to fade away, so I best bite the bullet and learn what all the hype was about.

So I looked at Prototype, Scriptalicious, Ruby, Rails, read about AJAX… posted a forlorn “help me, i’m drowning…” message on the Apple web dev mailing list, and got one very short reply: “JQuery. I’ll see you on their dev list soon :)”

Prototype does some nice things for you, don’t get me wrong. But Prototype on its own still requires a lot of down-and-dirty javascripting PLUS a learning curve of Prototype syntax, functions and classes. Ick. JQuery, however, does many simple and not-so-simple tasks for you with only a line or two of code. Sure, there’s a learning curve, but at least there is a nice juicy carrot at the end. I don’t want to do loads of down-and-dirty scripting. This is why I looked for a framework in the first place.

There are a variety of examples of how JQuery uses cleaner, more logical, shorter code on the JQuery blog itself. These are a little technical though, and I wanted to provide a quick glimpse that might be more relevant to Plugin Developers:

So you want to hide and show a div, and you want it to slowly fade in and fade out when you toggle the hide/show.

JQuery (library weighing in at 20kb):

$(”#ohmy”).show(”slow”);

Prototype (48kb on its own) can’t do this. We need to add Scriptaculous + Prototype, which has a combined bulk of 228 kb!

Effect.toggle(’ohmy’,'appear’);

Okay… Other than the added size and extra includes, this doesn’t seem all that bad. But what if we don’t want to add an onclick=”javascript: blah” to every scripted element?

JQuery (20kb):

$(”.toggle”).click(function(){
$(#ohmy).hide(”slow”);
return false;
});

Prototype (48kb on its own) can’t do this. Scriptaculous + Prototype (228kb) can’t do this either. We need Scriptaculous + Prototype + Behaviour, weighing in at 236kb

var myrules = {
‘.toggle’ : function(element){
Effect.toggle(’ohmy’,'appear’);
}
}
};
Behaviour.register(myrules);

NOTE: As Nate pointed out, this is wrong. The $$(’.toggle’) function will work just fine. However, I’m leaving the Behaviour example up to illustrate what a fairly savy coder, new to ProtoType, was able to come up with in 2+ hours of research.

Doing something a little more advanced… odd/even ‘zebra’ tables without php overhead:

(this one was pulled from the JQuery blog)

JQuery (20kb):

$(”tr:nth-child(odd)”).addClass(”odd”);

Prototype (48kb):

$A(document.getElementsByTagName(”table”)).each(function(table){
$A(table.getElementsByTagName(”tr”)).each(function(row,i){
if ( i % 2 == 1 )
Element.addClassName( row, “odd” );
});
});

So… JQuery: Get stuff done with less code! For 1/11th the size of prototype+scriptaculous+behaviour, JQuery provides tons of USEFUL stuff built in, no need for additional overhead libraries.

That’s my perspective. I don’t *LOVE* to code for the sheer joy of it. I DO love to see my ideas and visions become reality. I like pretty gadgets, including those that are browser-based. I think this is where many of the WordPress plugin/extension developers are coming from - we want more shinys in our blogs! Thus far, WordPress has done a PHENOMENAL job of making plugin development simple, logical, and intuitive. I picked up WP Plugin syntax in about an hour. Why ruin the ease-of-extension movement now?

And if you want to try JQuery with WordPress… Head on over to Dan Atkinson’s site for his JQuery with WP Plugin

Profile Pics Plugin Release

hannah — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 19:10:05 +0000

This plugin has IE 7 issues - I’m insanely busy right now but I’ll fix and update the plugin ASAP. Until then, consider yourself warned

What It Does:
Profile Pics is a WordPress plugin which adds a photo upload utility to the user profile editing pane, and 4 template tags to place the picture in an author page or elsewhere — even as a comment avatar. Settings are highly configurable via GUI config page within WordPress. I designed this plugin for WordPress 2.x - it has not been tested on previous versions.

Example:
http://geekgrl.net/author/admin/

Download Link:

Dowload Count: 5914
Last Updated: 01/14/2007

Is this plugin worth at least a buck?

Even a dollar goes a long way in allowing me to keep releasing plugins and updates for free. I really appreciate your support!

Screen Shots:

Picture on Profile Page

Picture Upload Tool

Plugin Options

Directions: (mirrored in readme)
Install Instructions:

Upload profile-picture.php to wp-content/plugins/
Upload folder “authors” to wp-content/uploads/
Set folder wp-content/uploads/authors to chmod 777
Activate Profile Pictures plugin from the plugins page in the WP admin area
Change settings if desired, from within the OPTIONS: page in the WP admin area
Add the following code to your theme’s author.php file, or use the included themes/my-theme/author.php as a template for creating your own author page template (more details below)

Author Template Code Example

if (isset($_GET['author_name'])){
$curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name);
$authid = $author_name;
} else {
$curauth = get_userdata(intval($author));
$authid = intval($author);
}
?>

px;”>

first_name); ?> last_name); ?>

E-Mail: user_email); ?>

Yahoo IM: yim); ?>

AIM: aim); ?>

Jabber: jabber); ?>

Web Page: user_url); ?>”>user_url); ?>

Registered Since: user_registered); ?>

Profile: description); ?>

Comments Avatar Code Example (add the following lines to wp-content/themes/my-themes/comments.php where you want the avatar to appear. set width in plugin options.)

if (function_exists(’author_gravatar_tag’)) {
$author_gravatar = author_gravatar_tag($comment->user_id,”class=’gravatar’”);
} else {
$author_gravatar = false;
}
if ($author_gravatar != false) {
echo ‘user_id.’”>’.$author_gravatar.’’;
}
?>

Implementation:
This plugin adds three template functions to display the author’s profile picture. These functions are designed to be used from within the Author Template. Theoretically, they can easily work from anywhere inside The Loop as well, although when used in the author template they can be placed outside The Loop. A sample author template is included with this plugin (see sample_template/author.php) — this needs to be placed in wp-content/themes/your-theme/ . To learn more about the author template, see: http://codex.wordpress.org/Author_Templates

Template Tag 1: Get Author Image Tag - makes a pretty tag for author’s picture.
USAGE: author_image_tag(’authorID’, ‘tags’, ‘display’)

FUNCTION: returns image for author wrapped in image tag, style accessable via id=”authorpic”
OPTIONS:
authorID: id number of author
tags: attributes to include in img tag (optional, defaults to no tags)
display: display results in html (ie. echo) or reuse in php? true or false (optional, defaults to true)
EXAMPLE:
Code:
Result (ex.):

Template Tag 2: Get Author Image Path - useful if you need to do something else with the path or url (link to it, stuff it into another function, make your own image tag, etc)

USAGE: author_image_path(’authorID’, ‘display’, ‘type’)
FUNCTION: returns url or absolute path to author’s picture
OPTIONS:
authorID: id number of author
display: display results in html (ie. echo) or reuse in php? (optional, defaults to false)
type: specify what kind of path requested: ‘url’ or ‘absolute’ (optional, defaults to url)
EXAMPLE:
code:
result: /home/jdoe/public_html/blog/wp-content/uploads/authors/1.jpg

Template Tag 3: Get Author’s Image’s Dimension - useful if you are making your own tag, or a div container for the img

USAGE: author_image_dimensions(’path’, ‘dimension’, ‘display’)
FUNCTION: returns requested dimension of author’s picture
OPTIONS:
path: absolute path to author’s picture from server root’,
dimension: the dimension you want, can be either ‘height’ or width’
display: display results in html (ie. echo) or reuse in php? true or false
EXAMPLES: to get picture width… (using author_image_path to get path to picture)
Code:
Result (Ex.): 200
to get picture height… (using author_image_path to get path to picture)
Code:
Result (Ex.): 199

Template Tag 4: Get Author’s Avatar - intended for use in the comments loop

USAGE: author_gravatar_tag($authorID, $tags = ”)
FUNCTION: returns image tag if authorID is a registered user of your blog, false if author is not
OPTIONS:
authorID: id number of author
tags: attributes to include in img tag (optional, defaults to no tags)
EXAMPLES:
Code: if (function_exists(’author_gravatar_tag’)) {
$author_gravatar = author_gravatar_tag($comment->user_id,”class=’gravatar’”);
} else {
$author_gravatar = false;
}
if ($author_gravatar != false) {
echo $author_gravatar;
}
?>
Result (Ex.):