Lazarus Graveyard

I have defended Vista against many detractors however lately I’m beginning to see their point…My laptop booted upto a windows update screen that read “configuring updates 3 of 3 – 0%” then rebooted and this loop continued ad infinitum till I intervened. I checked the MS KB and it said that I should reboot in safe mode and use system restore, use a repair disc or delete a system file and edit the registry. I haven’t been able to find much else online.. Read more »

I’ve been self studying for a couple of years now. I’ve never laid any money down to actually complete a certification and I’ve never really been too sure what area to focus on. Mainly I’ve been using the exam objectives of various certifications to provide me with a ’structure’ of thing I should be learning about (otherwise you can waste a lot of time in futile research as you have no focus or boundaries). I’ve looked at a lot of Comptia, Cisco and Microsoft material. My original and 1^st love was networking and comms so I’ve spent most of my time reading up on these areas and playing with Cisco home labs etc… Vocationally I’ve gained experience with networks, application support, pc hardware, and some server 2003 knowledge about active directory etc. The other thread in my work experience has been web design. Read more »

If you have a spare 5 minutes ad feel like making a tiny amount of money from completing some online surveys then YouGov is a good site. You have to register and supply an email address so I would advise you use an online account (such as yahoo/google). Its very secure and easy to use and the surveys have thus far been quite short and straightforward. An easy way to make some pocket money in your lunch break I suppose..

To mark the anniversary of the moon landings bbc4 have been showing a lot of very cool and interesting programs. My favourite is “For all mankind” which is a collection of colour video footage from the Apollo missions compiled with narration from the astronauts themselves against a backdrop of Brian Eno sounds – truly inspirational stuff..

You can view it on the BBC Iplayer (streaming media) for a limited time and I suggest you do as it reminds you there’s more to life then concrete, tv and yes = even wordpress!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lkvtr/For_All_Mankind/

Any fans of the Orb will also recognise that they used a lot of samples from this movie – “we’re on the backside of the moon they’ll never know”

Amazing video by Yahoo! dude Nate Koechley – so much useful information here especially interesting ideas about Best practices, CSS filters and Hacks and good semantic markup..

I particularly agree with his views on removing links and replacing them with Javascript  thus causing anyone who doesn’t have the script enabled (perhaps by group policy!) from being able to interact with links on a site.

front end engineering

Well I was looking for tips on coding the underlying php for the Bespin theme when I stumbled upon Ian Stewart’s tutorial at Themeshaper. Suffice to say, having perused his site a little more, his site is now set as my homepage. While I still fully intend to learn how to hand code themes in a text editor my next project will be looking at child themes with Thematic or Sandbox. I will also be looking at setting up a style switcher so I can show off designs and people can view this site with a style of their choosing as I’m aware the current vogue for blogs is minimalism and not everybody will like to look at white text on brown panels against a blue background

Basically if you think of wordpress as the unseen engine that drives the dynamic nature of the site then a theme framework such as Thematic or Sandbox is the interface theme that present functionality to the user (so you get posts and search and comments functions) and child themes are essentially ’skins’ that you can use to dress your site in CSS.

The look and layout of the site will then be utterly disconnected from content and function – these framework themes are designed for this purpose and their markup includes tons of class and id ‘coat hangars’ for you to hang css instructions on.

Awesome..

This is something I change my mind about constantly but for today I have been mostly eating;

1. “Canyons of your mind” by the Bonzo Dog Doo Daa band: I got all my soloing techniques from this track
2. “Sleeping village/Warning” by Black Sabbath: listed as 2 songs but basically the same song – if I could play in any style and have any tone it would be Tony Iommi’s stuff on this track..
3. “Stairway to heaven” by Led Zeppelin: A little cliché and I’m not the songs greatest fan but the reason its voted number 1 so often is because the solo is killer!
4. “The shortest straw” by Metallica: Kirk Hammet’s most exciting piece of work IMO.
5. “Wasted Sunsets” by Deep Purple: everything Richie Blackmoore does is magic but I really like this one.
6. “Black Magic Woman” by Fleetwood Mac: Peter Green = Genius!!
7. “The thrill is gone” by BB king: The master.
8. “Voodoo Chile” by Jimi Hendrix: the whole track is mindblowing.
9. “My Generation” by the Who: Ok so it’s a bass solo but it’s still insanely awesome.
10. “Extract from Incantations” by Mike Oldfield: I had this on a b side of ‘Guilty’ when I was like 5 years old – I can’t find the edit anywhere only the full track – all I know is that Mike Oldfield’s guitar solos made a big impression..

I’ve been into web design since feb 09 and I’ve been using Wordpress for a month on this site. Yesterday afternoon I thought it was about time I made my own theme so I fired up xampp and created some text files in a new theme folder and the fun began!! I’d made a theme called ‘Bespin’ (because the colour scheme reminds me of the cloud city in the Empire strikes back and because the panels are designed to ‘float in the clouds’) when I was playing with Joomla in May

screenshot of the Bespin theme

and I figured it would be quicker to convert an existing theme than start from scratch working out div structures and creating gifs and jpg images.

Now it isn’t the greatest theme in the world and there are a ton of corrections that still need to be made (and a lot of waste css that isn’t doing anything) but my focus was on getting it up here as quickly as possible – partly because I wanted a unique look on my site and mainly because I figured it’s about time I took a look under the hood of Wordpress.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – what Browser are you using?

When I originally created the template for Joomla it had less stuff going on and the main panels had rounded corners created by placing background gifs with css and div tags. As I said – my interest was in speed and working out how to build Wordpress themes from scratch – so I haven’t bothered with the background gifs this time.

As a result if you are looking at this page in Internet explorer 7 or 8 you are looking at a very dull collection of square boxes. If you are looking at it in IE6….well good luck with that = I have set a conditional comment for IE6 to get it’s own style sheet but haven’t bothered to fix it up yet. Besides unless you are at work and aren’t allowed to = you REALLY need to upgrade your browser..

HOWEVER!!! If you are looking at it in Firefox – or even better: Safari 4.0 – then everything will have rounded corners and safari will even have drop shadows!! This is because I’ve recently learned about css commands supported by Mozilla, the Apple web kit and proposed CSS3 changes which mean you can add ROUNDED CORNERS USING CSS ONLY!!! HURRAH!!! Its a great and beautiful thing and I’m afraid I rather got carried away rounding everything to the point of overkill just the joy of it – so much less work involved = awesome…

SO! I know that internet exploder is the most popular browser in the world and you should always work hard to make stuff look good in IE – but in this case I was having way too much fun I’m afraid = sorry IE – my next theme will cater to you better.

Seriously – if you haven’t got Firefox or safari then do yourself a favour and download them – they’re free!!!

Wordpress php

I’m ok with flat XHTML and CSS pages now – making a Joomla template was a more of a stretch as it needs a lot of PHP and XML info to work and was my first exposure to PHP, but it was a walk in the park compared to building a Wordpress theme from scratch! I sat down yesterday afternoon and got quite far on my own until I started to run into problems like – “hmmm where are my comments?” So then I researched this and realised there was nooo waay I was going to be able to crowbar all the PHP magic into what id spent 6 hours building. I had to bite the bullet, RTFM and start from scratch. In the end I started working from this AMAZING TUTORIAL by Ian Stewart. I wanted to make it hard on myself so I used my own HTML markup and I’ve edited his code here and there – which means I’m prepared for unexpected surprises in this themes behaviour. Ive done my best to debug on xampp but If you do get any fatal php errors let me know via the contact form!!

Its been an invaluable experience and this stuff is so much fun even when you are frustrated to hell! Now I’ve got the workflow down its time to start work on the next one and incorporate some photoshop comp and slicing action

To understand other aspects of networking it’s necessary to have a understanding of the basic network topologies – this is a subject that can get as deep as you care to take it. The more you read the more you will learn. My intention here is to give a very simplistic overview as a starting point. Read more »

With the rise in summer temperatures often comes the drop in many people’s appetites. Most people can attest that in the middle of a hot summer day their appetite is not quite what it would normally be. Read more »