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Starting the transition

December 3, 2010 By

For whatever reason, yesterday I woke up groggy. By suppertime I realized I wasn’t going to get into a groove and do a significant amount of programming. Instead of trying to plod away at that, I decided I would work on the color scheme & layout which I had talked about in my previous post. The theme I’m using is Prose. Because I work with nearly all the StudioPress Child themes doing the BuddyPress support, I usually grab the beta of a child theme as soon as it’s available. Prose wasn’t an exception.

Prose has a built-in designer that I added BP support for. I actually spent quite a bit more time working with Prose than I do with most child themes (as far as the BP support goes). While I was working with the beta, I decided I would use it on this site. Most of the time that went into the design was choosing the colors. The Prose designer makes it really easy and quick to implement.

I have plans to add more functionality via plugins. I’ve started those and hope to finish and have them live on the site by Christmas.

Filed Under: Site News

Changing things out

November 21, 2010 By

In two weeks, this theme (Atypical Christmas) will be 5 years old. One of the things that has made WordPress a popular publishing platform is the stability of the theme system. Even though this theme is 5 years old, it’s never needed an update (nor has any of the themes Andrea & I developed for WP 2.0). We did add tag support to the themes running on Homeschool Journal when tags were added to WordPress, but other than adding that functionality nearly all of the themes on HSJ are circa WP 2.0.

I haven’t developed a theme from scratch in over 4 years. Over the last year, I’ve been working extensively with Genesis and most of the Genesis child themes. We use Genesis on Ron & Andrea, WP e-books, WP MU tutorials and Premium BP Themes. So, the new theme will be a Genesis child theme.

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking that I really needed to refresh the site. I’d like to have that done for the fifth anniversary of the Atypical Christmas theme, but I don’t think I’m going to make that. However, the last two weeks of December is typically quite quiet for us, so I’m setting my goal at having the theme changed out before the end of the year. I do have some interesting plans, but will save talking about those until I get a little further along in the process. As with all of the themes I’ve developed for blogging, the color scheme will be based on an image. The image that I selected for the header is one I took while we were on a nature walk early last month.

Filed Under: wordpress

Quick Move

September 19, 2010 By

Yesterday, I was planning on starting migrating Homeschool Journal over to a new server. That had already been delayed by a couple weeks due to our quest to replace our defunct 10 year old Ford Focus. For moving sites from one server to another I always use SSH which gives me command line access on the server. With SSH you don’t have to download and upload content, backups, etc. You can do direct server to server transfers.

The original plan was that I would make some backups, start the transfer process and break for lunch while the transfer was running. But, when I went to connect to the old server, it wasn’t there. Due to long standing & recurring issues with the billing system (and company) for the old server, the outstanding credit in our account was not applied to our bill and the server had been shut down due to non payment.

Enough was enough. Whatever else I had in mind for yesterday, I had no intention of going to bed before Homeschool Journal was moved off the server & running on the new server. I already had a test account set up on the new server, so the main hurdles were getting the old server re-instated and waiting for the DNS to propagate.

Last night and today, Andrea & I put a few hours into cleaning up dead blogs (ones that had never really been used) and deactivating the themes that were unused or unpopular. Even though the priority of the migration & cleanup was cranked up by a hosting company that’s gone downhill over the last couple years, Andrea & I we glad to be finally getting to the tweaking, cleanup, etc. I’m going to try to set aside an hour a day for the next few weeks to see how much we can have done by the time Thanksgiving (the Canadian one) rolls around.

Filed Under: General

Workspace

July 31, 2010 By

When I bought this computer a couple years ago, I settled on Debian Etch for an OS. I tried both Gnome and KDE for session management/desktop UI. KDE seems to be better equipped for developers (or, at least, for a command line/terminal based developer like me). Over Christmas break I upgrade to Lenny and left it with Gnome as the session manager. Shortly after the New Year, I started working on WordPress 3.0.

One weekend in February I switched over to KDE, but found there were things I had set up in Gnome that I was going to have to recreate in KDE. I didn’t have the time to do it then, so I switched back to Gnome. After working with Gnome for seven months, I’m somewhat used to it. There are still some things that are faster/easier in KDE than in Gnome, but I can still do those in KDE (by choosing KDE when I log in) and use Gnome as my day to day session manager. Switching to KDE briefly only requires logging out and back in.

The first time I was a FTE (full time employee) was a little over 4 years ago. Prior to that, I spent the majority of my work time working on clients’ computers with a typical time range between one week and three months. So, I’ve gotten used to working with whatever is available. Even though I upgraded over seven months ago, I hadn’t taken the time to really settle in. I got the urge to do that this morning. Here is what I ended up with (if you click on it, you can see it at 50% scale):

My rearranged workspace August 2010

  • The background picture is of the rose bush that Andrea bought me for my birthday this year.
  • The yellow notes are a handy sticky note application that I found this morning. I often have bits of text I want to hang onto short term and these are pretty handy for that.
  • The system menus are the equivalent of the start menu in Windows. I’m not sure what the equivalent is called on a Mac.
  • The quick icons are single click quick launch icons. Four of the seven are different web browsers which I use for various things. The other three are an X terminal (bash shell), my mail client and NetBeans. One of the things I miss from KDE is that you can set it so everything is single click launch.
  • The workspaces are essentially virtual desktops. I started working with X Windows in the early 90s and this was one of the features that I really liked. I think both Macs and Windows have similar functionality although I’m not sure whether in Windows you need to run virtual machines to achieve the effect. Usually I run up to three applications in a virtual desktop. Each virtual desktop has its own Z-order and focus which allows switching desktops (and applications) without losing the focus in the one you are leaving.
  • I think everyone has a system tray. The last icon allows me to switch to any active application. The only time I really use that is when I have more than 10 apps running at the same time.
Filed Under: Articles

New York, New York

November 10, 2009 By

On Friday morning, Andrea & I will be driving to Bangor, Maine to get on a plane bound for NYC. We will both be speaking at WordCamp NYC (WCNYC) on Saturday morning. (If you click through the link you’ll see our sessions are listed under the BuddyPress/MU track.) Most of our blogs and Homeschool Journal run on WordPress MU.

This will be our first overnight trip away together from all the children in about six years and it’s only the second time in 10 years. While it is technically a business trip we will get to have some time together.

Planning for WordCamps usually start a few months in advance. If I remember correctly, in the early planning, WCNYC was expecting 200-300 attendees. The registered list topped 500 over the weekend and is 530+ now. Many of the people attending are people that we know online. So, we are both excited to have the chance to get to meet them. It’s a bonus that no one will look at us strange when talk extensively about techy stuff :D

We each have 3 sessions/presentations to prepare for. It is going to be a busy week for us, but a good busy.

Filed Under: Us, wordpress

Connecting Online

November 5, 2009 By

An online friend has set up a blog to ask people how they connect online. Andrea & I have known D’Arcy quite a while. He works with WordPress/WordPress MU at the University of Calgary. We’ve never met him IRL, so he qualifies as someone who we have connected with. So, the first way I connect with people is through working with and contributing to Open Source projects. The project I spend the most time on is WordPress MU.

Andrea & I have been accessing the Internet since the early 90′s. Over the years, we have used a wide variety of methods to connect to people. I remember doing things like connecting to a computer at a client’s site via the Internet with remote control software, firing up a text editor and using the text editor as a chat window.

Generally though, the way I’ve connected online with people over the last few years has been through writing in this blog, commenting in other blogs & posting in forums. Recently I’ve joined both facebook and twitter. For the most part, facebook provides an online connect to people that I know from somewhere else. I haven’t particularly seen it as a means to make new connections. On the other hand, I think that’s one of the main benefits of twitter.

One of the things that I don’t do is video & audio connecting. That’s because our Internet connection is via satellite and the latency is worse than dialup.

Anyway, thanks D’Arcy for giving me something to write about.

Filed Under: Articles

Social Media

November 2, 2009 By

It seems that people are writing in their blogs less. It’s been a gradual decline which I think has made it somewhat less noticeable. Perhaps it’s more along the lines that we’re aware of it, but set the issue aside for another day. This blog is an example of one with a declining number of posts.

To a degree we can blame services like facebook & twitter. I use twitter quite a bit because it allows me to keep up with and interact with a large number of people with relative ease. Generally, interaction on twitter provides more immediate response which makes it more appealing. For the people who use facebook daily, I can see how having everyone’s content aggregated together makes it convenient/appealing as well. Since I’ve been using a feed reader for years it’s less of a convenience for me.

I expect there is another side of it as well. Until the advent of the web, most people had no place to talk/write that wasn’t shared by others. I think most of us had built up a large reservoir of thoughts and ideas that had had no outlet. Now that we’ve had a few years to write, most of the ideas and values we hold have had some form of airing. In a sense, we have less to talk about. Many of the things that are important to us have been read and responded to.

Filed Under: Articles

Skipped a month

November 1, 2009 By

For the last long while I had been posting once or twice a month. On checking the date of my last post, I see it’s been almost 2 months. Today was Meaghan’s birthday and she turned 17. Wow, it’s been an amazing 17 years :)

Today is also the start of National Blog Writing Month. A note of thanks to the blogs I read that mentioned it. I won’t promise to write every day because I know that won’t happen. I will try to write though.

Most of our business revenue comes from or through the US and US currency. In March we were averaging about 25% exchange ($100US = $125CDN). The average over the last 6 months has been somewhere in the range of 5-7%. For most of our projects we’ve been quoting 2-3 months in advance which meant that we had a 3 month period with a 15-20% shortfall in revenue.

The only recourse was to take on more work. Other things had to be put on the back burner and this blog was one of them. I do have lots of things to talk about and I’ll see if I can cover some of that in small chunks over the next month.

Filed Under: Us

Why don’t Students like school

September 8, 2009 By

I’m not sure I could say it much better myself. The whole article is worth a read :)

I shouldn’t be too harsh on Willingham. He’s not the only one avoiding this particular elephant in the room. Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody says it. It’s not polite to say it. We all tiptoe around this truth, that school is prison, because telling the truth makes us all seem so mean. How could all these nice people be sending their children to prison for a good share of the first 18 years of their lives? How could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of their days in prison? It’s unthinkable, and so we try hard to avoid thinking it. Or, if we think it, we at least don’t say it. – Peter Gray

HT: Carlotta

Filed Under: Public Education

Facebook review

September 4, 2009 By

I’m currently working on a couple projects that involve connecting the site we are working on with Facebook (FB). Even though we have looked at FB over one of the girls’ shoulders, neither Andrea nor I had signed up.

For the most part it seems FB has taken functionality that exists elsewhere on the Internet and bundled that functionality together into a single site. On FB, you can share pictures like flickr or photobucket, you can post & comment like a blog and you can have friends and privacy filters like LiveJournal based sites.

As far as the privacy and filters part of it goes, if you put it on the Internet, it isn’t private. If it’s a picture it gets downloaded to every computer that shows it in a browser. So, I would not put anything on FB that I would not put either on my blog or flickr. If I wanted to say something to you privately, I’d send you an email or call you on the phone.

Now for the review:

I did sign up earlier this week so that I would have an account to test with. The signup went around in circles and kept coming back to the same screens until I clicked skip on all of them. Poking around my profile after I signed up, I found that it had collected all of the info I had provided. So, I had to delete all of the duplicate information. Strictly from a programmer’s perspective, a site reputed to have in excess of 100 million users ought to be able to get a simple signup process in place that works.

By about a day after I had signed up, I had received somewhere in the range of 30 to 50 email from FB. After the second batch of them showed up, I created a mail filter to dump the FB email into a folder so that it didn’t take over my inbox. When I had a few minutes, I went back and poked around some more to see if there was someplace where I could turn notices off. I was blown away to see that there were two screens worth of types of notices that FB sends. If you haven’t guessed already, I turned them all off.

The other annoyance I found with FB is the ads. Not that FB has ads, but the type of ads that I get. When I first noticed that I was getting dating site ads, I went through my profile to see where I could change the setting to say I was married (I did learn something about FB looking over the girls’ shoulders). Despite the fact that I’ve indicated I’m married, nearly every page view has at least one singles and/or dating site ad. Folks, it isn’t that hard to add a little logic to show people ads that reflect what they’ve told you about themselves.

The one positive note I have on the experience is that I did get to catch up with some folks that I haven’t seen in a few years.

A bit on the technology:

I haven’t used FB on dialup, but I expect that once you were actually in the site, it would work fairly well for you and be reasonably responsive. In fact, I suspect that they have put a fair amount of effort into making it so that it does work decently on dialup since a fair chunk of the world’s population doesn’t have ultra high speed connections.

One of the methods typically used to make sites more dynamic is called AJAX. The way AJAX increases the dynamic/interactive nature of a site is to send requests to the server and bring back small portions of updates to the screen that you are currently using. As long as it is done carefully, AJAX gets the most bang for the buck over dialup. The reason for that is that the main limiting factor in dialup is the volume of data. So, for small blocks of data, dialup is not that much slower than your typical high speed internet connection.

The place where AJAX kind of sucks is over satellite (which is what we have). Communicating over satellite involves a delay (called latency). The way that satellite technology compensates for that delay is by delivering data in large volume which works with most applications. If AJAX breaks updates to the page into several low volume requests, updating the page takes roughly the number of requests time longer to update than if you just requested a whole new page. Although I haven’t investigated to verify it, based on how painfully slow it is when using it, I suspect FB uses a lot of AJAX calls. So, FB isn’t going to get on my frequent use list.

Filed Under: Us
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