• Jamestown
• Bit.Trip Runner
• Super Meat Boy
• Shank
• NightSky HD

Pay more than the current average to get Gratuitous Space Battles and Cave Story+!

Cave Story+ and Super Meat Boy are seriously good games, and each on their own is worth the price of admission. And you get to decide that price! I’m not kidding. Go buy these great video games NOW, even if you don’t have time to play them right now. Support some really good charities while you do.

UPDATE: five extra games were added this morning: VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves, Hammerfight, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and Cogs. And every game in the bundle also now comes with its soundtrack for you to add to your music collection. Only seven days left!

Honesty time. I suck at staying focused. In my life I’m never far away from an internet-capable device, so distraction is a big time sink for me. Twitter, IM, RSS feeds, iPhone games, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, so much will drain away my time.

When I am on task, it’s usually because I’ve set myself crystal-clear goals for the next few hours. If I can see the desired result and I know exactly how I can get to it, that’d be a good clear goal.

I try to rock the Getting Things Done methodology, using Cultured Code’s Things, with good results: I know exactly what it is I should be working towards. Where I currently let myself down is not doing my regular/weekly reviews, and sometimes slacking on writing good next actions.

Maybe I should mix in the Pomodoro technique to build focus. Anyone out there tried this, or something similar?

EDGE – NZ$6.49

EDGE is an platformer where you are a cube trying to navigate an isometric landscape in search of the tiny glowing cubes. Some levels are really easy, some require timing, some have cubes hidden away in secret areas. Here though, the music shines, so much that Mobigame released the soundtrack for free! KAKKOI!

Canabalt – NZ$4.19

Canabalt is a free flash game gone iPhone: a one-button ‘daring escape’ platformer. No story up front, but the game has one to tell! Addictive, try the free web version first.

Hook Champ – NZ$4.19

You’re a Jake T. Hooker, an Indiana Jones style tomb-raider stealing idols from dangerous caves and escaping with your amazing grappling hook styles! Easy to learn, hard to master, harder to put down! Try the lite version first, and then buy the full version with more maps and achievements!

Zen Bound – NZ$4.19

A strange game in which you are to bind up a wooden figurine with string. This is meditative gaming at its best: no time limit, but you do eventually run out of string. Again, amazing soundtrack here, with a free download when you buy the game! Get the lite version first to try it out.

Eliss – NZ$4.19

Eliss is a multi-touch puzzler. Gather same coloured circles together, enough so they fit into the ‘squeezars’ to score points. Don’t let different colours touch or it’ll soon be game over. You’ll need all your fingers to play this one, maybe both hands at some points. Lite version also available.

Flight Control – NZ$1.29

A simplified air-traffic control game: draw flight paths for aircraft so they can land on the appropriate runway or landing pad, but don’t let them collide! Harder than it sounds, but quite addicting!

More to come!

I’ve been volunteering at Catalyst IT working with Brenda Wallace to work on projects of her choice. She assigned me to work on Laconica (an open-source version of Twitter that works in a distributed fashion). In order to do so I’ve had to learn a little about many different technologies, like PostgreSQL, the weirdness of Apache+PHP on MacOS X 10.5, and overall, how to checkout and contribute code to an open source software project with Git.

I’ve now had three code merges into Laconica, albeit very minor ones, mostly fixing bugs.

I don’t even use Laconica. (Twitter is working just fine for me, thanks.)

But I feel great.

Computer programming is something some have described as the most complex thing humans have invented — it’s all abstract, there are few corollaries to it in nature. Probably the only thing more complicated is quantum mechanics (but that is, in fact, nature).

My job is to explain, demonstrate, and encourage people who have never programmed a computer in their life (let alone their VCR) to create rather complicated things we call websites.

Why have I enjoyed contributing patches so much to an project I don’t use or much care about? A couple of reasons:

The Zone

The elusive Zone has many names; Wikipedia refers to it as “flow“. It’s that state of being you get when they’re so intensely focussed in the task at hand that time and reality become irrelevant because you’re so energised and focussed and involved at what you’re working on, and having good success at doing it. You come away feeling elated and energised that you’ve completed something of value.

I haven’t been in The Zone for nearly four years. I’ve been teaching people how to program for nearly four years now, and nary the mind to knuckle down and flex my coding muscles. I’m too worked up with office politics, helping my workmates with the technology, and thinking that I wasn’t good enough to be in the industry.

Learning

It’s good to know that I can do it, though to do it professionally, I’d just need to learn more about the processes involved.

I’ve had to learn how to use Git, how to create PostgreSQL users and databases, and submit my finished code to the project administrators for merging with the mainline version of the program’s code.

I don’t normally get to be a learner. I’m a full-time teacher, and what I have to learn is usually because I need to teach it.

It’s nice to learn things for me and me alone. I may never get to teach what I’m learning here, but what I’ve learned is helping fulfill me (more on that later)

That old adage “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. It’s lies.

Actually I’m a tutor, but that’s just a particular kind of teacher. Not meaning to blow my own horn, but according to my student evaluations I am actually a really good tutor. Sure, I have my weaknesses, but overall, apparently I rock at it.

And I really enjoy teaching. It’s rewarding when the metaphorical light-bulbs turn on above the student’s heads. Some of them slowly brighten, some just pop on, and some of them shine more powerfully than others, but the lights do turn on. To know that a learner now understands one of the most complicated things there is to know,

I was at Wordcamp New Zealand here in Wellington over the weekend, and Nicki Gemmell was talking about using blogs at primary schools around New Zealand. She related how uploading an image to a blog was something a principal got excited about: “I uploaded a photo to our school blog today; how cool is that?!”.

As a programmer who has written photo upload functionality, I forget how far I have come and how valuable the skills I have really are. The challenge of teaching people to do things is fun and rewarding. Teaching students to do this even more complicated stuff is the same but even more challenging.

Teaching programming, from my own experience, is the ability to communicate the concepts and foster the understanding and use of them. I was told by a trainer there were four levels of competency:

1. Unconscious Incompetence – you are unaware that you don’t know how to do X.
… awareness brings:
2. Conscious Incompetence – you are aware that you don’t know how to X.
… learning brings:
3. Conscious Competence – you can do X, and you are thinking about it when doing it.
… practice brings:
4. Unconscious Competence – you can do X, but you do not have to think about it when doing it.

I say that there’s a fifth level: where you have become once again conscious of what it is you are competent at. And that’s the level where you’re ready to teach it.

To be able to teach, you must be able to learn, and then go further so you can show others the way.

Those who can teach, do teach.

People

Okay, I’ll be honest: being around Brenda and the other like-minded geeks at Catalyst IT has been a really energising experience. Being able to vent frustration at code and technology, bounce ideas off each other and have fun while doing it has been great.

But working on Laconica and spending some time reading other peoples code and improving it, and learning the technical, and social aspects of doing so has been fun and very enlightening.

My motivation for staying a teacher has been pretty simple: Hell is other people’s work. Most of the employment in the industry has been creating websites for companies; wish fulfilment for others. I could change the world one organisational website at a time, or I could change the world 20 web students at a time.

But working on an open source project has let me use my programming skills to directly improve, ever-so-slightly at this stage, the lives of people around the globe. By making the software they use better.

Having that sense of purpose in what I are doing is really important to me. I don’t want to just be working to collect a pay check: working to live. And I don’t want to be living to work either. I just want to do what is worthwhile while I’m alive: live life to the fullest. Use the abilities I have to do things worth doing.

I am a teacher. I am a programmer. I’ve been neglecting the programmer side of me.

“Computer programming is tremendous fun. Like music, it is a skill that derives from an unknown blend of innate talent and constant practice. Like drawing, it can be shaped to a variety of ends – commercial, artistic, and pure entertainment. Programmers have a well-deserved reputation for working long hours but are rarely credited with being driven by creative fevers. Programmers talk about software development on weekends, vacations, and over meals not because they lack imagination, but because their imagination reveals worlds that others cannot see. Larry O’Brien and Bruce Eckel

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, June 23, 2009: Stop Password Masking

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.

This sounds like Nielson kicking up publicity. This is shorter than his normal articles and he hasn’t backed this one up by mentioning his latest rounds of usability tests. He’s often got really good points, but this is one that I have issue with.

Nielson has forgotten that the reason password masking exists is if you type it out but don’t submit the form right away, then it won’t be on the screen for a long length of time for passers-by to ‘shoulder-surf’. The form could be really really long and/or you might be a really slow typist.

Padlocks and deadbolts keep honest people honest. The same goes for password masking.

Not to mention that password masking is visual shorthand reminder for the personal habits of “you should remember what you right in this box, cos even you won’t see it” and “no-one else should see this but you”. If we removed this ‘tell’, what would become of the culture of ‘protect your password’?

Think of where, other than web sites, that password masks get used. ATMs, EFTPOS machines, computer software, the Operating System uses it. Western culture is conditioned to this design pattern, and I speculate that the only people who have trouble remembering passwords are the ones who were born before 1980.

I guess a compromise would be to have the field in plain text when it has focus, switching to a password mask on blur…? Not a difficult solution.

Just curious as to what your IDE of choice is for PHP development and why?

You’ll see that I replied with the following.

Being nearly Mac-exclusive, I do most of my coding in TextMate, and any text manip in TextWrangler (it has superb grep/regex capabilities).

I don’t use an IDE, but if I was to use one, it’d be something like Coda or Espresso.

If I wanted to use a cross-platform, free IDE that isn’t half bad, but is based on Eclipse, I’d use Aptana for HTML+CSS+JS+PHP support. It’s nice because it has built in support for Firefox and Safari, (and IE when you’re on Windows).

• TextMate Mac, €39
• TextWrangler Mac, Free
• Coda Mac, US$99
• Espresso Mac, €60
• Aptana Mac/Win/Linux, Free

Things

An excellent to-do manager that syncs up over WiFi with a program of the same name on the Mac.  Really good if you’re a GTD fan.

DataCase or AirSharing

These apps let you use the left over space on your iPhone or iPod Touch to store your own files. When connected to a WiFi network, you can use your computer to upload files to and from your iPhone using Explorer.

DataCase is best on Mac as it appears in Finder really quickly thanks to DataCase’s Bonjour AFS support, but also works on Windows with FTP, or you can download files from your device using a web-browser. AirSharing is also really good, but its supposed Bonjour support doesn’t perform to the same standard as Datacase, and is only accessible over WebDAV. While AirSharing isn’t as intuitive to connect to as DataCase, it does have better in-app documentation to help with connecting when you forget.

Evernote

A note manager much better than the built-in Notes program. If you have an iPhone or 2nd Gen iPod Touch, Evernote will also support creating photo and audio notes too. The best part about Evernote is that it does sync with the Evernote website, which will perform optical character recognition on your photos (it can READ photos) and makes that text within the photo searchable.

WifiTrak

If you’re always looking for a free ride, WifiTrak will tell you what wireless networks are around you, and even tell you if you can get to the real internet through them without logging in.

Ocarina

A reasonably new app on the scene, Ocarina turns your iPhone into the world’s first social-network-enabled musical instrument. Sorry iPod Touch users, this one needs a microphone. Seriously check this one out, even if you wouldn’t consider yourself a musician — it’s extremely easy to learn, and you don’t have to be able to read sheet music either!

RjDj album

Combined with a microphone, this one listens to your surroundings and gives aural feedback to you to enhance and alter your perception of the world around you. I ran this app commuting to work one day: trip. py. Try the free lite version, RjDj single, first if you don’t believe me!

Apps (internet required)

Shazam

Hold your microphone up to the music for twelve seconds and Shazam will check online and come back with the name of the song and its artist, the album, the album cover, and links to iTunes for you to buy your own copy. Surprisingly, this works almost anywhere, off the car radio, or even off a PA system in a noisy bowling alley.

Wikipanion

Wikipedia has replaced all the encyclopedias of yesteryear as the first place to go when you are curious about something. Why not carry a portal to that resource in your pocket? While there are tons of free and not-so-free apps that all do the same thing, I like Wikipanion‘s interface the best.

Bible (YouVersion) or Mantis Bible Study

YouVersion.com’s bible app appropriately named Bible has many translations available to you, including ESV, NIV, NASB, NCV, The Message, KJV, and many others, even in languages other than English. The cool thing about YouVersion Bible is that it also lets you download copies of some translations for use offline, so you can still access the word of God, even if the 3G broadband doesn’t perform well on Sunday morning. Mantis looks really powerful, but unfortunately you have to pay a lot to download extra translations, commentaries and other resources, most of which are free over the internet via YouVersion Bible.

Google Mobile and Google Earth

Google provides so many services that it’s nice to have one button that lets me do searches quickly and also lets me get to my Reader and alternate Gmail accounts easily. Google Earth is just amazing: once you’re hovering over a location, raise the device upwards like you would a photograph and the map becomes 3D – WOW!

Mobile Fotos

A on-the-go tool for accessing your Flickr account. Upload photos with geocodes generated from the GPS, or access your other photos.

Twinkle and Facebook

If I had to go with only one social network, I’d pick Twitter. Twinkle is a stunning interface to one of the world’s most useful social networks. The Facebook app is good too, but going through Safari works just as well.

That’s all for now. I’ll talk about my pick of iPhone and iPod Touch games in the next couple of days; stay tuned!

So floppy disks are totally redundant. Very few new computers are coming with floppy drives. Ask a five-year-old kid what each of these things is:

In my totally unscientific research, I asked a mother of a six-year-old if her little boy would know what these three things were:

CDs: Yes.
Memory Card: Yes.
Floppy Disk: Probably not.

So what did software developers do? Look for a new replacement.

The past

Microsoft Office X for Mac (2001) has used a ZIP disk:

NeoOffice 2.x for Mac took me a while to figure out… Something akin to the Windows and OSX icon for Removable Drive?

Why did they have to confuse me?

The Steam Train Comparison

My reaction to this confusion was ‘why change it?’

In New Zealand, and as it turns out, Italy and Sweden, our road signs that say ‘railway level crossing’ look like this:

(courtesy ltsa.govt.nz)

But hold on, that’s a STEAM train! These trains are not around any more except for in museums and… children’s books. Of course, we all know that this sign is a train. Digging further, it turns out here in New Zealand we have a sign for ‘light rail level crossing’:

(courtesy ltsa.govt.nz)

What the hang is that… I guess it kinda looks like a train, but it’s electric, but it could be a tram.. huh… *SMACK!* Your car just got hit by an oncoming TRAIN. Talk about confusing and potentially fatal. Luckily, I’ve only got my learner driver’s licence, and I haven’t ever seen this sign in use.

My point is why change something that works?  Luckily, developers have caught on that the floppy disk is an international symbol:

The Present

OpenOffice 3.0 Beta has a floppy disk:

And thankfully, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac has switched back to a floppy disk:

Here’s the cincher: Google Docs, a web application that doesn’t even have access to your local computer still uses the floppy disk for its save button:

Curious and Curiouser

Looking for further examples, I dug around. It turns out many applications don’t even have save buttons any more. Apple’s iWork doesn’t have a save button in any of their applications tool bars; you can’t even customise the tool bar to put one there either! I guess these applications are expecting you to memorise the more universal shortcut of Command+S or Ctrl+S

Conclusion

I think that we should stick with the floppy disk. It’s recognisable by all us old timers, but I think that young ones who haven’t seen a floppy disk will still know that it means ‘Save’.

But then again, isn’t just using the keyboard a lot quicker?

Anyway, a common problem with RSS reader users is they suffer from too-much-unread-post-itis. If I don’t read my feeds, in two days I’ll have 1000+ unread items.

Here’s my tip: if your reader lets you put one subscription into many folders, make a ‘heavy traffic’ folder, and put all those feeds that publish far too many posts, and that you only read when you have copious amounts of time. I have Slashdot,  Techmeme, Joystiq, Wired News, and 901am in my folder, with many more to be copied there.  Now when you’re feeling the overflow, you just mark that entire folder as read, and your unread count will drop substantially, and you won’t feel so bad anymore!

I was previously using Quicksilver, but I never bothered to set it up on my new user, and instead decided to try out Leopard’s new Spotlight – to great effect!

The one thing I detested about Spotlight in Tiger was the fact that the default choice was “Show All”, but now in Leopard it’s the Top Hit, which is usually what I’d want. The other thing was Quicksilver had a calculator function, but the new Spotlight has a calculator feature, which is live, unlike Quicksilver!

And because I managed to score the MacHeist this year, I received a copy of CoverSutra which totally surprised me with its awesomeness; like a sneaky ninja springing out from the ceiling, katana unsheathed, cleaving my mind, but in a totally awesome way, as ninjas are prone to do.

It’s no surprise that Gmail has pushed this out solely because of the iPhone and it’s built-in mail client that requires IMAP — no POP support for you, iPhone owner, you lucky dogs you.

I’ve been using Gmail since June 16th 2004, and started using it as my main email client in October 2005, and haven’t looked back! Its got a whole lot of great features: Google Talk (XMPP) integration, conversation threading, excellent spam filter, address book, filters.

But I’m most ecstatic because I can finally have my Gmail offline, thanks to IMAP! I can carry my laptop with me, and know that I can access that message I received a few weeks back because a copy is stored right there on my laptop, and if I do anything with it, it’s going to be accessible through the Gmail web interface! That and templated messages…

If you want Gmail IMAP, you just need to log into your Gmail, click on Settings in the upper right, and click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and follow instructions there. If you don’t have that option there, log out of Gmail and log back in.  Failing that, wait a couple days and everyone will have this feature enabled on their account.

My place of employment, Natcoll, uses an internal proxy to ‘measure and protect’ bandwidth usage. Because I take my MacBook to and from work, I have to tell my mac to switch to my Natcoll network location, so that everything that needs to get online knows to use Natcoll’s proxy.

Doing that manually was a hassle, but now with Marco Polo 2.0.1 automatically changing my network locations better than ever, that’s been solved. I tried Marco Polo when it was 1.0 but it didn’t have all the evidence sources that I needed, but it’s all good now

Even with Marco Polo to reconfigure my network settings for me, it wouldn’t affect Firefox — Firefox doesn’t look at the operating system’s settings, and just uses it’s own damn settings. This is true on all platforms. Camino for OS X watches Network Location, but Camino doesn’t have all the neat plugins that Firefox does.

Turns out my solution for this was… yet another Firefox plugin! Specifically, System Proxy, which gets Firefox to inspect OS X’s Network Location for proxy settings! Hooray! Firefox plugins, is there anything you can’t do?

So with Marco Polo and System Proxy, I can just pop my computer open at home and at the office and have it just connect, without me having to worry about it, which is the way these things are supposed to work, right?

The extension for Firefox just went 1.0 final (heh, a Web 2.0 tool coming out of beta), and that’s a big deal. Joe has been working on Firebug for just over a year, and it has become a tool more indispensible than even Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension!

What? You don’t have either of these?! You call yourself a web developer? Let me guess, you still think IE is the only browser worth developing for, and heck, you probably believe that developing to Web Standards is just elitist acadamia… get with the program. Why leave the interpretation of your code to tag-souped chance?

… Eh-erm. Sorry about that monkey I had to get off my back. I heard a rumor yesterday and my anger has found its vent.

But seriously, all those IE die-hards that are still out there today should be amazed at what tools our industry-standard (as opposed to the de-facto-standard) web browser we call Firefox makes available, let alone makes possible.

Since Mozilla 0.7, I’ve found it’s more time-efficient to develop in a Gecko-based browser, then bug-fix for everything else — because it’s much harder and stressy to start in IE and bugfix to Gecko. I’ve found this true for all the technologies: CSS, JavaScript, XSL, AJAX, and now SVG

Viva la revolución! Viva la web standards!

You can now update from your Mac OS X Dashboard, with my first ever Dashboard Widget Twitterlex. It displays the latest status messages from your friends, and provides a quick access way for you to update your own status easily!

Download Twitterlex dashboard widget

So we did. And let me tell you, I’m really happy with how it turned out. It’s nothing revolutionary or taxing, but it was heaps of fun to redesign and make the templates as we went, with Michelle right there working with me.

This comment from The Abandonware Blog about Bunny Abandonware 4.0 really made me feel good:

Finally some nice scene news! Bunny from Bunny Abandonware has been mentioning is for quiet some time now but finally managed to get the new version of her website online and I must say (again) that it kicks ass! The unique colors used by only one abandonware site, the wonderfull [sic] navigation, the nice kinda web 2.0 style with all the gradients and big buttons ‘n stuff… damned pretty.

LOL, I did some Web 2.0 :rolleyes: But I’m taking it all as a compliment. I believe that what Michelle does with her abandonware hobby is crucial for the survival, not just of the games, but of the memories. Abandonware, while legally dubious, is less a case of stealing and more the case of paying tribute. I keep telling Michelle she’s not just another retro gamer; she’s an archivist — the curator of her own museum. A museum where the exhibits remind her visitors of the way video games used to be, and where not only games, but ourselves as people have come since then, for better or for worse.

I think the best Christmas present I gave myself was when for Christmas I gave my brother a huge pack of water balloons . I had moved out of home to Wellington and I had come to realise that I missed him. We had fun in that back yard that one day, running around with the sole purpose of cooling off and having a blast. But I did it with the motive of having that memory to look back on — a careless, happier day in my history. It worked, and it’s one of the most cherished memories I have. It didn’t cost a lot.

Memories are worth gold, but the most valuable memories are the ones that cost the least.

I had a short problem upgrading the firmware to 2.0; it ‘bricked’ the device. After a bit of wiki reading and obtaining advice from djwillis on efnet#gp2xdev my SD card wasn’t playing well with the firmware upgrade software. I’m now the happy owner of a Linux-powered entertainment device! HUZZAH!

I’ve installed Quake 1, a Sega Master System emulator, a Mega Drive (Genesis) emulator, and can’t wait to see what else I can get running on this thing!

What are some strategies for prioritising tasks in day-to-day work?

Running a car is expensive, so why don’t more people use the bus, especially in Wellington, since we (arguably) have the best bus system in the nation… ?

Why is picking up good habits so difficult, but picking up bad habits so easy?

Have you… seen my legs?

So I’ve been mucking around with Quartz Composer for Mac OS X recently, and a few nights ago, inspiration struck. So I spent my evening making up this: ESV Daily Verse Screensaver. I am learning a lot about Quartz just making these kinds of things, and the fact that this one goes online to get stuff from the ESV’s RSS feeds is even neater. Maybe someone out there will enjoy this one

I’m working on a ‘star wars’ type screensaver with the same content right now, but am having issues with pixelisation of the text when I get it at the right angle and perspective, i.e., freakishly close up.

As Quartz Compositions tend to be user-editable, I’ve decided to release all of mine under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Turns out Google Maps is now higher resolution than smaps or ZoomIn. You can get down to the level where cars are blobs of pixels. Also, Google Maps has more up to date photography — you can see the work on the Inner City Bypass (same location on ZoomIn, smaps).

To be honest, I’m glad that we’ve finally got some decent competition in New Zealand’s online maps — Wises was sucking ass ever since I saw the original ‘ajax map’ maps.search.ch from Switzerland — long before Google Maps was around.

I especially like the simple Firefox Extension. It adds a little ‘open notebook’ to the browser’s status bar, which when clicked pops up a little in-page pop-up where you can type text or capture selected text from the current page. Very nice!

I did find one pretty neat feature that the Google Notebook help pages doesn’t mention. Right click the button in the status bar, and you’ll find an Enable ‘Note This’ button option. Enabling this doesn’t seem to do much straight away, and in fact, it took me a while to figure it out. But when it’s enabled, try selecting some text, and a little [+] button will appear at the end of your selection — click it to add your selection to your currently selected notebook! Neato

So uses for Google Notebook? I could find it useful for keeping a list of things I want to post about, a shopping list, inspirational quotes, or maybe even for some GTD loving. What will you be doing with your Google Notebook?

SubEthaEdit is basically multiplayer notepad – it allows you to collaborate with others across a network, all editing the same file in different places.

I don’t know if I’d use it personally, but hey, commercial software for free is not something I’d balk at

MacZOT is updated every week day with a new piece of discounted shareware, available for instant purchase, while stocks last. Every so often they mix it up and offer a Myztery ZOT, which is an unknown package of many pieces of software for an amazingly discounted price.

I’m posting this story to maybe scam me a free copy of AppZapper with what MacZOT is calling a “BlogZOT” — every post linking to MacZot will put the price down by five cents. If we get 259 posts about MacZot, 1000 people will get it for FREE…. wooooooot! Be in quick, there’s only like 2h45 minutes to go before the software will be available

• Interactive Weaver – Weave your own Tartan
  design your own tartan, and recieve a free downloadable background of it, and even order weaved fabric of your design… pretty neat
  (tagged: clothes culture design fun scotland tartan tools)

Today I asked him if he saw the software box on his desk — he hadn’t seen it. I told him it was a big white box. I got concerned that it might have fallen into his rubbish bin when it fell from the inbox — his desk wasn’t exactly tidy.

So we got concerned, and went and checked the rubbish bags downstairs. Luckily, we don’t actually have a dumpster, and there were only 5 rubbish bags, and 4 of them were translucent. Without committing to gutting each of the bags, sorting through the garbage, and repackaging it all, we assessed each of the bags unobtrusively, and lo, the box was located! Luckily, the bag was tied loosely, so we could retrieve said software from the bag quickly and efficiently.

The box had a few surface stains on it, and smelled a little like garbage.

“It’s just a little slimy. It’s still good, it’s still good!”

And the moral of the story is: Don’t have your waste paper basket “downhill” from your inbox…

Now excuse me… I have to go wash my hands…

As mentioned in previous posts, I’m a huge fan of this game. It will probably go down as my most favorite video game of all time.

Try it at the bottom of the sidebar on this site, or in the Meta section of the sidebar on Webfroot!

The site is valid XHTML, they provide various RSS interfaces, including Bible in One Year feeds and various other daily devotionals, a Web service (SOAP and REST/HTTP-GET) interface for doing verse fetches), favelets, A Firefox search plugin, integration with OpenSearch initiatives such as A9.com, Javascript syndication, and even search-by-email! Talk about spreading the Word of God!

I also really enjoyed reading the Technical Introduction to the ESV Online Edition, which included a report of a usability study of their own and other bible search engines, expected behaviour and implemented behaviour, caveats of search ambiguity, how their whole bible is in XML and is transformed into XHTML, what they did for older browsers, popular bible book query patterns, and strangely enough, MySQL database definitions and PHP source code for viewing (not borrowing) of how their search works. I learnt a lot.

Wow… It’s so geeky, it almost makes me proud to be a Christian

Oh, and the translation itself is good too They even have the entire audio version available to listen to, and if you search on something, you can listen to the results too

Current Version: 1.3

What it does
Creates a list of posts with comments that haven’t been read by the user since their last visit/session. Uses cookies to track users last visit – no database required!

How it works:
Users are issued cookies which are used to track last visit. If this is their first visit, all comments in the last 14 days are unread. The plugin generates a list of unread comments. It keeps track of the user’s read posts for the session, removing them from the list as the user goes. Each page load updates the last unread timestamp cookie. Users can also mark all comments as read.

Installation:
Either:

• RECOMMENDED: Install WordPress Plugin Manager then use the One Click Install for Smart Unread Comments. This will also make it easier to install other plugins and upgrade them in the future.
• OR: Download Smart Unread Comments, extract and upload wbft-smart-unread-comments.php to your wp-content/plugins directory. Log-in to your WP admin panel, go to the Plugins tab and activate the Smart Unread Comments plugin.

Implementation:
In your template, add this code.

<ul><?php echo get_smart_unread_comments(); ?></ul>

get_smart_unread_comments() also takes options:

• $limit
  Default: 5.
  Maximum posts with unread comments to display.
• $output_when_no_unread_comments
  Default: TRUE
  If true, when there are no unread comments, it will output a <li class="wbftSUC_NoComments" > item containing $no_unread_comments_text
• $output_when_more_unread_comments_than_limit
  Default: TRUE
  If true, when there are more than $limit unread comments, it will output a <li class="wbftSUC_MoreComments" > item containing $more_unread_comments_text
• $mark_comments_as_read_text
  Default: “Mark all comments as read”
  String used in link Mark all Comments as Read link.
• $no_unread_comments_text
  Default: “There are no unread comments”
  String used when there no unread comments and $output_when_no_unread_comments is TRUE
• $more_unread_comments_text
  Default: “There are %d more unread comments…”
  String used when there are more than $limit unread comments and $output_when_more_unread_comments_than_limit is TRUE
  %d will be replaced with a count of how many more comments there are to view.
  

Documentation:
You’re looking at it!

CSS Classes output:
Remember, CSS classes are CASE SENSITIVE.

• class='wbftSUC_MarkAsRead'
  Used on the Mark Comments as Unread link
• class='wbftSUC_Recent'
  Used on comments less than 6 hours old
• class='wbftSUC_MoreComments'
  Used on More Unread Comments list item
• class='wbftSUC_NoComments'
  Used on No Unread Comments list item

Version History:
1.3: Now uses permalink structure, and sets cookies to your blog’s path. $limit defaults to 5 (not 10), and $output_when_more_unread_comments_than_limit defaults to TRUE.
1.21: Fixed broken (x)html validation due to stray
1.2: Fixed major bug with post title links.
1.11: Tables are now pulled from WP variables.
1.1: Initial Public Release.

Known Issues:
Comments on Pages (as opposed to posts) turn up on the list, but visiting the Page doesn’t mark those comments as unread.

Credit:

• Chris Beaven (aka SmileyChris) for writing the original code seen on Webfroot, and helping with updating it.
• Dan aka Mufasa and Tom for isolating the code from Chris’s Webfroot code magic and encouraging Me to write it.
• Brett Taylor (Me! aka Glutnix) for turning it into a WP plugin and making the number of unread comments on each post link to the oldest unread comment rather than the newest unread comment.

Bugs and Suggestions
Any bugs or suggestions, please email me – email link in the sidebar (RSS readers: drop by the site ).