Valhalla Island

In the last three days all three of my themes have recieved updates. This has happened because I thought I’d be working all week, I get myself in a working frame of mind, worked one day and then got sent home. I was motivated and thought I should make the best of my time off.

It was also in preparation for making some themes in collaboration with Randy Walker and starting a theme for the theme competition. Wow, making themes seems to really be becoming my thing. On top of all that, Sunburn (previously Black Sun) and Chewy weren’t at acceptable levels to be out there with my name on them.

Day Dream 1.4.1

Good ol’ Day Dream, everybody loves it. I don’t blame them though, it’s a great theme. With this update came support for making an archives page from the options panel and more importantly support for the Ultimate Tag Warrior. It was the first time I’d ever played with tags and I have to say it went pretty smoothly. You can even make a tag cloud page from the Day Dream options panel now.

UTW was so good that I’m considering switching to tags, I have the feeling that it might be supported out of the box in Wordpress 2.1 though. I don’t like using plugins here so I’ll probably wait. The one thing I couldn’t get to work was the tag search page. I’ll save it for another day.

The next update planned for Day Dream is Extended Live Archives support. I could almost say that except for AJAX commenting Day Dream is as feature packed as K2.

Sunburn 1.0

Previoulsy Black Sun, a name that I never liked. Black Sun was always so half done, it had potential though. People were always complimenting me on it when I didn’t think it was deserved. Unlike some others and despite it’s unfinishedness Black Sun never had a bad word said against it.

Sunburn is the finished version of Black Sun. I thought it would never get to this point but recently I’ve had the urge to get it to an acceptable level. It went through some pretty big changes and took a long time to fix some pretty shocking code. The end result is something I really really like, which probably means everyone else will start to hate it.

Sunburn doesn’t have an options page but it does support Widgets now and also has some pretty AJAX commenting, very similar to here. In fact, the whole thing is very similar to fightingfriends, just with a different colour scheme.

Chewy 1.1

The ugly duckling, the one nobody loved. With a lowly 16 downloads in two weeks nobody ever liked Chewy. I didn’t get one nice word about it. The general response was “ewww” or “my eyes!!” I put this down to the default colour scheme which was a bit like that. Just like Black Sun, it was very unfinished too.

I tidied up around the place and I switched the default back to grey scale to go with it’s very generic layout. The options panel was also tidied up a fair bit. It still seems a little much when you look at it but at least now it feels finished.

I’ll have to email Undersigned to get these three updated in the theme viewer but for now here are the links to their homes on the theme viewer. It’d be nice if you could go there, make a comment and give them all 5 stars =).

• Day Dream
• Sunburn
• Chewy

As I was updating all these I came accross a brilliant plugin that fixes something that has annoyed me since I started using Wordpress. Mark Jaquith’s Conversational Categories has now been built into all three themes. By default categories list “category 1, category 2, category 3″ with this plugin they list “category 1, category 2 and category 3″. Brilliant.

Infinity is a pretty big number. It’s hard to get your head around just how big it is. Some people say that our universe is infinitely big. Using probabiliy formula, if you have an upper limit of infinity, everything is certain. This leaves a lot of possibilties.

It’s hard to think about the chance of everything occuring somewhere in the universe as certain. It means that somewhere in the universe there is an identical planet to ours, with identical people with history repeated exactly the same way except in that world, you (that version of you) would have eaten Weetbix instead of toast for breakfast this morning or even had three pieces of toast instead of two. There is another world where you stayed in third gear for half a second longer before changing into fourth while driving to school. How different would your life be after that?

Of course, everything is certain within the boundaries of physics, if the entire universe is bound by the laws of physics that we know.

There’s another theory out there, that absolutely everything happens through paralell universes. The possible results of every decision everyone has to make creates a branching of a new universe where that was the decision made. That universe continues on for a few split seconds until another decision has to be made and the universe is split once again. How strange.
While I’m talking about such topics as infinity I’m going on a slightly related tangent, time travel. If we could build something that could travel the speed of light then time travel would be very easy. In fact, people inside a spaceship travelling at the speed of light would be outside time all together, time would stop outside the ship. The problem is that acceleration to the speed of light would take a fair bit of time itself.

It’s pretty simple to explain what the speed of light has to do with time travel. Imagine this. You’re standing in front of an analog clock with a seconds hand. You’re able to tell the time because your eyes receive the light from the clock’s image, that light is travelling from the clock to your eyes in about 0.000000003 seconds if you’re standing a metre from the clock. Now imagine if you travelled away from that clock at the speed of light, time would stop, a new time displayed on the clock would never be able to catch you.

The same thing goes for travelling almost the speed of light, unless you’re going the full blown speed of light then the light from the clock with catch you, albeit slowly and time will slow down.

Some people have trouble understanding that. If you can understand that everything you see is light being reflected into your eyes then it shouldn’t be too much trouble. It is true though, astronaut’s travelling in the space station for a few months, while it’s orbitting the earth at about 18,000 km/h, come back with watches up to four seconds ahead of time.

It always looked so tacky, it’s based on comic books afterall. Then I saw it, last night. What an amazing movie. It was nothing like I imagined it would be, it wasn’t even anything like the previews that may have put me off seeing it in the first place.

Marv (pictured above) was probably the coolest character I have ever seen in a movie. The next character was very cool too. The way they talked, their no shit attitude, their way with the ladies, I loved it. I loved it when Marv was getting beaten up by that boss prositute (I’ve forgotten her name) and then just pushes the ropes off him and walks away after it all. Another cool part was when he got the electric chair, they zapped him, turned it off, he coughed up some blood and said “is that the best you can do?” That’s how tough this guy was.

“The hell i sent him to must have felt like heaven after what i done to him” - Another Marv Quote.

The amazing way this film was shot. Half way between how you would see a comic book on paper and how a normal movie might be shot. It never felt real but was never too unreal either. The way certain parts looked drawn but were never blatant cartoons, the way the cars jumped through the air. The colours and the snow especially had me in a trance the whole time.

I didn’t like Bruce Willis’s character as much as the other two but maybe I was just jealous of Jessica Alba’s undying love for him. I haven’t loved a movie like this for a really long time. Sin City 2 cannot come fast enough. 10 out of 10 stars.

I came accross this on a post of Gordon Mclean’s. It’s called the Morale-O-Meter and it’s a log of five different factors and how they affect your morale. You’re supposed to fill it in every day for a little while and it will spit out a graph of how well you’re doing, pretty clever.

I was hoping it’d be a tiny little app that you could download but, of course, it’s web-based and requires a login. It says up the top that you can login using your 43 things account. I don’t use 43 things but thought that I may have made an account there one day, so I used my usual username and password and what do you know? It worked.

Filling out this thing each day is going to be fun. I’m a little worried that my routine holiday lifestyle is going to make it really boring. It may just make it more interesting, seeing what happens to my morale when every so often I drink a lot of alcohol or caffeine. I went there hoping you could add your own areas to rate, since I barely drink soft drink and don’t drink any coffee at all, that column is pretty useless. Oh well. I’ll be back in about a week with the first week of results.

This guy makes some seriously nice stuff.

He has a DeviantArt and his homepage is a work of art.

Two years of Wordpress and I love it as much as the day I first saw that hideous 1.2 default theme. It’s been so great to me that it is the only blogging software I have ever used despite many alternatives. I’ve never been disatisfied and never felt the need to leave. Here’s why I haven’t:

1. Installation

   The Famous 5 Minute Install is a complete lie. It doesn’t take 5 minutes at all. After the files have been uploaded (which doesn’t take long, Wordpress is light) it takes about 30 seconds, no, less, how long does it take to fill out two text fields and press a button? 10 seconds? That’s about right. If ever I need a new WP install for a theme or just for testing a new version I know it’s only 10 seconds away.

2. The Dashboard

   I initially ignored the dashboad and was annoyed that you weren’t taken directly to the write a post page after login. Since then I have slowly grown to love the dashboard. It tells you everything and gives you access to everything you’re most likely to want right from the start. It gets even better when plugins like Akismet add things like letting you know how much spam you have waiting for moderation.

   Tarski also uses it really well, adding a section telling you if there’s a new version available. I prefer checking the dashboard for any new activity over actually visiting my blog now.

3. Inline Everything

   Since the introduction of the 2.x series WP has included huge improvments to admin interface, particularly to writing. Inline category adding means if you realise there’s no category for what you’re writing about you can add it right then and there, it’s even automatically selected. Inline image uploading with drag and drop makes it easier to add an image to a post than it is to insert an image in MS Word.

   It’s things like these that make it so much easier to create good content. It makes blogging more enjoyable for the writer and the reader. It used to be too much of an inconvienience to add an image to a post, now I add them often and images add another depth to posts.

4. Management

   Everything in Wordpress is managed beautifully. From the catalog of uploaded images, to handling draft posts, to plugin and theme lists to comments, it’s all great. Links to drafts are displayed above a blank post, schduled entries are placed in the dashboard, themes are easy to navigate though. Everything’s where you’d expect it and want it to be. As opposed to some Microsoft products, things might be where you expect them but it’s not where you’d like them, Wordpress is different.

5. Theming

   It’s as simple as picking out one of the thousands of free, publically available themes, uploading and activating it to completely change the look of your blog. For novice users this could not be any simpler. For theme devolpers to create those themes it’s just as easy. A lot of work has gone into template tags and they make theme development a breeze. Other platforms can be extremely resitrictive when trying to theme. The Wordpress system makes it very simple to turn any design you could imagine into a theme.

   This is just another example of Wordpress being so usable that it makes people want to use it. There’s a reason there’s so many themes available for WP, it’s just easy.

6. Community.

   As I said a few days ago, I was lucky to be dropped into an open source project with a group of great people. I’ve found out since, that Wordpress is unique in this respect and nearly everywhere else is full of assholes. If you have a problem, help is only a question away in the #wordpress channel but I find everyone in there so friendly and so knowledgable that I would rather ask a question about php or mysql or about the best way to make a toasted sandwich in there over anywhere else. Your head isn’t bitten off for asking an unrelated question either, in fact, there’s probably more discussion about everything but Wordpress than there is about Wordpress but if a Wordpress question is asked, someone is always bending over backwards to help.

It’s a combination of all these things that make people want to give back to Wordpress. It’s why there’s so many people helping out in the forum, so many people writing plugins and themes to make Wordpress a better system. It’s so good it makes you want to give back and in turn creates a better piece of software on the whole.

My degree is of the dual type, IT and Multimedia. Multimedia is such a vague name and no one has any idea what you’re talking about when they ask, as they always do. They always assume it has something to do with newspapers or TV, multimedia, media, makes sense to me.

Anyway, because I do two degrees it means I get to pick two majors. The option of picking two majors is also there if you want to do a masters degree or the honors program I think. Although, I don’t really have two choices, the IT degree requires a major in Software Engineering. I don’t have a problem with that.

The Multimedia degree gives me a choice of:

• Design
• Interactive Entertainment
• Internet Computing
• Multimedia Screen Production
• Sound Production

There’s only two that really factor into the equation for me, Design and Internet Computing. It was always going to be Internet Computing for a little while there but for this semester I have a course at the Queensland College of Art and it looks really good. The Design major will send me to QCA full time and I have a feeling I’d like it there.

The huge majority of people at uni I’ve spoken to are doing Interactive Entertainment (aka Games). Everyone’s ambition is to own their own computer game company yet they think they’re going to pull it off by just playing games, instead of studying. People skip lectures to play computer games here. I’m glad I never developed an addiction to games. It’s always funny seeing their reaction when I tell them my graphics card is onboard, haha.

Anyway, back on topic. Design or Internet Computing? Which would complement my second major, Software Engineering the best? Internet Computing probably. I hate to think that I may be able to teach myself Internet Computing and couldn’t teach myself Design but that’s probably the case. Also, Design is another one of those vague titles, it could be about almost anything.

I can turn anything into a website, what I have trouble with is creating really nice looking graphics like those on Bartelme or Broken Kode.