Author: Joe

Categories
Adventure

Went Fishing on a Boat

IMG_0132I braved the seas the other day and went fishing from a boat. For the most part it was pretty cool. Never really been much of a fisherman nor a boater for that matter, so the experience was mostly new to me.

The kind Shepherd invited me on this epic quest. Along for the journey were Mr. Miller and the Shepherd’s brother in law Nick, who also was the boat owner and captain of this voyage. First we bought some bait which came in chinese food containers. They just pack minnows in those containers like it’s fried rice.

Then we headed over to the docks to board the vessel. She was a fine ship and I was welcomed aboard. Then we went out into the ocean to the point where you really couldn’t see the shore off of Longport. So I’d say that’s the furthest from land I’d been in a boat.

Then Mr. Miller taught me how to cast and I waited for something to bite. And waited, and waited some more. Technically I didn’t catch anything, but Mr. Miller did let me real a fish in that bit his line. It was a flounder, not big enough to keep but a fish nonetheless. Fish are very slimy and squirm a great deal, but I found it very enjoyable to pick them up and throw them back out to sea.

I did get seasick and was told that jumping in the ocean would make me feel better. So I went to end of the boat and fell in like Frodo falling into the black water. Since I was out of it at that point, I have to admit that for a few seconds I did kinda freak out and didn’t realize where the hell I was. But, I settled down and grabbed onto the boat and all was well.

We did manage to catch 2 flounders that we were able to keep. So overall it was a fine expedition.

Categories
Development

Incorporating Lightbox 2 effect with WordPress gallery

I wanted my client to be able to add pictures to a gallery using the build in WordPress gallery, but was hoping to customize the display of the gallery thumbs a bit. I was hoping to get it to display as the following:

      use the Lightbox 2 script
      able to override the CSS that is being written to the page

Since the default CSS that the gallery generates is written in the page, overriding the styles was kinda a pain to do in the site’s stylesheet I was using. However I did find that I could edit the default CSS that is being written to the page by the gallery by editing the following file:

/wp-includes/media.php

Locate the following code and edit as necessary:

	$output = apply_filters('gallery_style', "
		<style type='text/css'>
			#{$selector} {
 
			}
			#{$selector} .gallery-item {
				float: left;
 
				text-align: center;
							}
			#{$selector} img {
 
			}
			#{$selector} .gallery-caption {
				margin-left: 0;
			}
		</style>
		<!-- see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php -->
		<div id='$selector' class='gallery galleryid-{$id}'>");

You can see I’ve removed some styles in this case.

Further edits can be made to the gallery from this file as well. I chose to use a little bit of javascript to attach the rel attribute to my anchors instead of editing the php file. Personally, I’d rather do that so in case a future version of WordPress altered the media.php file it’d be one less thing for me to worry about.

Very basic javascript to add the rel attribute that Lightbox 2 requires to the image anchors:

var galleryDivs = YAHOO.util.Dom.getElementsByClassName('gallery', 'div', 'bd');
for (var i = 0; i < galleryDivs.length; i++) {
    var imageAnchor = galleryDivs[i].getElementsByTagName('a');
    for (j = 0; j < imageAnchor.length; j++) {
        imageAnchor[j].setAttribute('rel', 'lightbox[gallery]');
    }
}

I use the YUI Dom collection to help me gather nodes.

Then it’s just a matter of calling the relevant dependancy scripts and styles into your page and it should work for you.

Categories
Books

Marvel 70th Anniversary Collection

While on lunch break with NGM I noticed the Marvel 70th Anniversary Collection at Borders. It’s a reprint of several comics over the 70 years that Marvel has been putting stuff out. I didn’t buy it that day, but a few days later I found myself picking up a copy to read over.

Growing up I was a huge comic book reader, especially anything being put out by Marvel. So I was excited to see that the following were reprinted in full color in this collection:

  • Marvel Comics #1 1939
  • Captain America Comics #2 1941
  • Captain America Comics #3 1941
  • Journey into Mystery #6 1953
  • Tales to Astonish #13 1960
  • Amazing Adult Fantasy #10 1962
  • Fantastic Four #13 1963
  • Strange Tales # 115 1963
  • Amazing Spider-Man #50 1967
  • Avengers #93 1971
  • Iron Man #128 1979
  • Uncanny X-Men #128 1980
  • Daredevil #168 1981
  • Incredible Hulk #340 1987
  • Marvels #0 1994
  • Avengers #4 1998
  • Ultimate Spider-Man #13 2001
  • New Avengers: Illuminati #1 2007
  • Captain America #25 2007

The only story that I had read previously was Uncanny X-Men 128, with the Hellfire Club. It was one of my favorites anyway so I was glad to read it again. Actually issue 129 which isn’t included was one of my all-time favorites. It’s when Wolverine pretty much becomes a major character in comics in my opinion.

The early Namor story was extremely violent. I’m was surprised to see such violence in a book published  back in 1939. Once I got the the Fantastic Four #13 in April of 1963 I started to enjoy reading these much more. At that point that’s where all the characters I’d grown up reading about started to make their early appearances.

The “Elektra!” Daredevil #168 was a very good read even though I was very familiar with the story by now. I also enjoyed New Avengers: Illuminati #1 a lot. It was cool to read something very recent that was still pretty cool to read.

At $25 I think this was quite the bargain for all these great stories.

Categories
Movies

Transformers: The Complete First Season (25th Anniversary Edition)

When I saw the first season of Transformers on DVD, I immediately picked it up and bought it, no hesitation. When the Transformers cartoons first aired in 1984, my brothers and all my friends at the time were instantly hooked. The rist now was would I still enjoy watching them after all these years, or could this possible ruin the fine memory I have of what was an amazing show.

I gotta admit, they held up very well. The stories weren’t that bad at all. The whole end of the world when cybetron is brought to Earth was pretty cool. Always was a sucker for those end of the world plots. I gladly went through all episodes pretty quickly.

Starscream is still my favorite character. Gotta root for the bad guys. They come so close to ruling the universe too, it’s almost sad to watch them fail. I forgot that the Constructicons made their first appearance in the first season, so that was a nice surprise.

The quality is pretty solid, considering how old it is. The extras provided are so-so, nothing too amazing.

Categories
Books

The Twitter Book

Just finished reading The Twitter Book app for my iPhone. This was the first book that I had ever read on my iPhone, and overall I was very much impressed with it.

The book itself was great, and more than up to the high standards I expect from an O’Reilly book. It does an excellent job of detailing what Twitter is, why it’s grown so much in such a short period of time, and most importantly how best to make it work for you. Very easy to read, with many examples which conveniently are linked to the web since this version is digital and an app on my iPhone.

The app itself was very easy to use and reading on it was rather natural. I figured the screen might be too small or too dim, but it really wasn’t that much different than reading from print. Navigation was easy and natural. A bug plus for me was that I was able to just read at times I didn’t expect I’d be able to since my iPhone is always with me.

My only complaints with reading on my iPhone vs a traditional book were that it was a little tricky to jump around the book when compared to dealing with paper. Also, many of the illustrations were difficult to read as well.

Overall this was a great read and reading it on the iPhone turned out to be better than I had expected and would read more books this way. If you’re looking to learn more about Twitter I highly recommend, and if you have an iPhone you might want to give the app version a try too.

Categories
Development

Google App Engine

I’ve finally gotten around to messing around with the Google App Engine over the weekend. It allows you to run web applications on Google’s infrastructure for free as long as you don’t go over roughly 5 million page views in a month. If your app has the good problem of going over that traffic then you’re billed by usage.

Currently only Python and Java are the supported languages. I’ve been interested in dabbling with Python a bit more than I have, and building an app on this platform has given the excuse I need to try it out.

Getting started is fairly easy. Sign up for an account at the Google App Engine site. Then download the SDK for your OS. Leopard already has Python 2.5 installed, so I didn’t have to install or upgrade that.

There’s an amazing getting started guide available for building a simple Python app. It’s one of the better tutorials I’ve done in a while, even if you’re not proficient with Python it’s easy to follow along.

Using the datastore to work with data vs. a relational database seemed strange at first, but it’s very easy to work with. The GQL can be very similar to working with SQL.

I’ve got a couple of ideas I’ll like to try building, and this seems like a great platform to build on.