Monthly Archives: December 2007

My week on the web

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Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account last week:

The unnoticeable redesign

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A few months ago I read a very intriguing article on typography and vertical alignment (Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid). I am not a designer and I have always found very hard to understand why certain elements and composition are pleasing, and other are not. The article in question explains that it has got a lot to do with mathematics and proportions.

I have recently had a chance to implement the tips from that article on Bitful. If you are curious and are reading this via an RSS reader, go and read this post at lucabelletti.com.

Are you there? Good.

Now, assuming you are familiar with my un-design of the last few months, nothing much has changed. Except that everything aligns vertically in multiples of 18 pixels. Compare the following two links:

and you will probably be able to appreciate the difference. If you don’t, I will have spent a fun day anyway.

As usual, please let me know if you notice anything going very wrong, or if there are any display glitches (I was lazy and only tested the design in Firefox 2, IE 7 and Opera 9).

Sunday lunch: Xató

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A typical salad from Cataluña. I had it several months ago on the last day in Sitges before leaving for the airport, but it is best eaten during the colder winter months (January and February in Cataluña).

Xató recipe at massrecipes.com

Serves 6.

Ingredients

  • 2 Heads Curly endive
  • 3 Garlic cloves
  • 8 Almonds; peeled and toasted
  • 1 Or more Sharp chili peppers (or powdered cayenne pepper)
  • 1/2 c Olive oil
  • 1/4 c Wine vinegar
  • 3/4 ts Salt

Preparation

  1. Blend all the ingredients except the endives to make the sauce
  2. Wash the endives
  3. Separate the leaves
  4. Soak the leaves in the sauce for at least one hour
  5. Serve with cured ham, cold sausages, anchovies, marinated fish

7 things I did not know last week

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  1. The original advocaat (creamy egg and brandy liqueur) is thick and often eaten with a spoon, and the liquid version in a bottle is sold as an export. It used to be made with avocados by the Dutch in Suriname and Recife, then with egg yolk in the Netherlands where avocados were not availiable.
  2. Windows Mobile IE supports CSS and insists on loading the main stylesheet and ignoring media=”handheld”. Workaround: link to the main stylesheet as media=”Screen” (upper-case S) and Windows Mobile will ignore it.
  3. The pretzel pictured on the arms of Staffordshire is called a Stafford knot.
  4. Faraday cages (enclosures that block out electrical fields) are everywhere: in microwave ovens, coaxial cables, some passport and credit card protecting sleeves and elevators.
  5. Five-year-olds today can still believe in Santa (a friend of mine is taking her daughter to Lapland to meet him). I wished that when I was that age I had not found the presents mum and dad had hidden away weeks before Christmas. Of course, I pretended not to have seen them and acted all surprised on Christmas day, believing that if I had given my parents’ game away I would have stopped receiving presents. Which incidentally is what happened when I did challenge them about the fact that a) we did not have a fireplace, b) there’s no way a fat man can travel down a chimney anyway (let alone each and every good child’s chimney around the world in a single night), and c) I never bought into that Catholic nonsense, and you want me to believe that reindeer can fly? Bah!
  6. The awards handed out by the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences are nicknamed ‘the Mackies’. Red vs Blue (machinima produced with footage from Halo and Halo 2) won three in 2004 and one in 2005.
  7. Eating a whole 195g box of liqueur-filled chocolates in one very quick go on an empty stomach while opening presents early on Christmas morning gives you a bit of a buzz. However, since the chocolates in question contained only 2.3% liqueur (a very sober total of 4.5 grams) I must have been jittery on chocolate and the fact that Santa! He left them for ME!

Instant Upgrade WordPress plugin

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WordPress is great. However, upgrading to the latest version can be a bit of a struggle. There are quite a few thinks to keep track of (especially if you are a heavy customiser) and do in the right sequence.

If you have more than one installation, you can spend the best part of an evening doing something that should not be so painful.

That is why a while ago I installed a very promising WordPress plugin called Instant Upgrade. One click to upgrade to the latest version, that’s what it promises. At the same time, it states very clearly that you have to give up ownership of files, and set permissions to 777 (read-write-execute), which I am not too keen on.

One word of advice: if you try it, then decide to drop it, you must be very careful to follow a very important procedure instead of the usual ‘disactivate-delete files’ standard one. You absolutely must follow the instructions via manage > InstantUpgrade and click on Change file modes (so that you have full access to them). This is because once you successfully upgrade once using the plugin, your WordPress files belong to the webserver.

This plugin is a stunning piece of work. Not for control freaks like me though.

Google Reader shared items have become more shared

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I am a perfecly happy Google Reader user and have very little to say about it that is negative. Feeds are my main source of information and I have tried many readers (Kinja, Netvibes, Attensa, Bloglines) before settling on Google’s product.

For a brief period, I used the ‘share’ feature in Google Reader with some items that I deemed interesting. The advantage: one-click sharing from within Google Reader. The inconvenience: having to copy them into del.icio.us to keep all my bookmarks together, nicely tagged and in sync with Firefox.

I was perfectly aware that those were items I was willing to share; this made it a bit too limiting for me and I quickly decided to stop using that feature.

So I was not surprised in the least when on 14 December Google announced that it was going to make your shared items very visible to all your friends in Google Talk.

Many people complained, as there is no way to hide items from people (some of my del.icio.us bookmarks are set to ‘private’, for instance). Google’s answer, for now, is (in my own words) ‘remove people you don’t want to share with from your contacts’ (!), or ‘delete all your shared items and start afresh with stuff you do want to share’.

I don’t know where to stand on this one. It’s a nice feature that may suit many people. I understand some can be annoyed, but I guess the word ‘shared’ sort of gave it away from the start really.

UPDATE (26 Dec 2007 at 5:58am): Steve Rubel has a workaround to mark shared items as private with tags, and so has Google.

Mobile Admin and Simplelife do not play nicely together

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I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out why I could not access WordPress from my mobile any longer. Well, it’s the holidays and I can waste a day like that if I want to.

It turned out that Mobile Admin (the plugin that streamlines the WordPress admin interface for easy access from smartphones and PDAs) had stopped working when I installed SimpleLife (WordPress plugin to generate lifestreams).

[Update: Kieran has fixed this issue and Mobile Admin now works eeven when SimpleLife is activated. They were using the same function internally - more info in comments for this post]

Even if I don’t blog much on the go (I don’t blog much at all these days) I like to approve the occasional comment straight away, and clicking on the email link to do so kept sending me to a blank page until I disactivated SimpleLife.

SimpleLife sounds very promising but it is admittedly still in Alpha. I’ll stick to my own existing data stream and wait for further developments.

Today’s little project will be finding out why every time my phone connects to WordPress it downloads over 300k of stuff. Oh, and of course opening presents and having Christmas lunch and nodding off in an Advocaat-induced haze in front of Queenie or catch her on her new YouTube channel instead).

Merry Christmas to you all, whatever rocks your boat.

My week on the web

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Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account last week:

Sunday lunch: Icelandic pepper cookies

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I love these cookies. They are very spicy (among the ingredients are black pepper and cayenne pepper) and gingery. Last year I used some as Christmas tree decorations.

Icelandic pepper cookies recipe at allrecipes.com

Ingredients

  • 1 1/4 cups butter, softened
  • 1 1/4 cups white sugar
  • 3/4 cup light corn syrup
  • 2 small eggs
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  • 2 teaspoons ground cloves
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preparation

  1. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Stir in corn syrup and eggs; cream well. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and pepper. Add dry ingredients to the butter mixture and mix until smooth. Refrigerate dough over night.
  2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
  3. Roll out dough to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut out cookies with a 2 inch round cookie cutter. Place at least 1 inch apart on cookie sheet and bake for 8 to 10 minutes in preheated oven.

Having a bit of a deserved rest

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Yesterday morning we drove from London to Birmingham to spend Christmas with Dr B.’s parents.

I have been doing absolutely nothing for exactly thirty hours and loving every minute of it. Right now Dr B. is sleeping off the lurgy in his old bedroom, his parents are out, and I’m sitting watching telly.

The last few months have been intense, busy and terribly exciting. A lot to do with work, I’m afraid, so I shan’t really bore you with it. Except for one detail that makes me very proud: I found out on Friday that I did not get the job that I was interviewed for at the beginning of the week.

I am very proud indeed, because I was not even going to apply: the job in question is within my team, one level before my current one, and I was highly encouraged to apply by my colleagues even if I’d only been in my current position for exactly one year.

I am also very proud because I have been marked as equally suitable as the chosen candidate, and this is something that I was not expecting. I had some feedback from the panel and what played against me was the lack of experience in the advertised role, which I am determined to acquire during the next month or so, as I am temporarily filling in until the person who was recruited is free to join us.

So a few days’ rest for me. Doing nothing is a rare pleasure that I intend to enjoy fully. And yes, of course I’m all laptopped and mobiled up, connecting to the world via the in-laws wireless network, with the Xbox 360 we brought from London and tentimillion channels courtesy of Sky.

And that’s exactly what relaxing means to me.

7 things I did not know last week

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  1. If your album tracks play in the wrong order on your iPod (but in the correct one in iTunes) and no amount of syncing will fix it, it most likely is because the ‘Disc Number’ info is not the same for all tracks.
  2. You can put a knocked out tooth back in. Don’t clean it or touch it, keep it in the mouth or in a cup of milk and run to the dentist or hospital.
  3. Claret is a purely English, mostly British term that indicates wine from the Bordeaux region. Although the word comes from the French ‘clairet’, pronouncing the word as if it was French is a type of overcorrection.
  4. The maximum number of friends you can have in Facebook is 5000. Not a good thing if you use Facebook in other, more sophisticated ways than a simple social network tool.
  5. Dr B. used to sing in the school choir. We went into the village church yesterday (I wanted to have a look), chatted at length to the vicar and ended up being bullied by a devout woman into going to midnight mass (“I’ll be looking out for you two guys!”).
  6. Tony Blair had been planning to convert to Catholicism for a long time. I don’t approve, but it’s none of my business any longer, and finally I admire his impartiality during his office on issues like abortion and gay rights.
  7. I weigh exactly the same at home and on Dr B.’s parents’ bathroom scales. I tested them both yesterday three hours apart, so that this year we will not fool ourselves into thinking they are broken. That post-Christmas extra half stone is entirely made of mince(meat) pies.

7 things I did not know last week

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  1. Noise cancelling headphones that use active noise control work by recording outside sounds and creating an exactly opposite wave to the “noise” waves, which effectively cancels out all the ambient noise.
  2. The 13th root of a 200-digit number always begins with 2, always has 16 digits, and the last digit number is always the same as the final number of the 200-digit number.
  3. Capacitive touchscreens can be touched either with a bare finger or with a conductive device held by a bare hand.
  4. Some muscle worshippers spend thousands of pounds a year in expensive gifts and headscissors sessions with their favourite female bodybuilders.
  5. Will Baker (Kylie Minogue’s artistic director and best friend) is a big Dr Who fan. Baker went to see the writer and producers to let them know that Kylie would be interested to guest-star.
  6. My teeth show evidence of grinding and I will have to wear a mouthguard when I sleep. Will it stop me snoring too?
  7. We have 80 Christmas cards left over from the past five years. We are sending 79. Send me your address if you want the spare one.