Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.
Today I was really impressed by a piece of software. I have to say that it has been a while since I felt so excited about software the last time.
I came across the link to these videos that show KimDaBa in action. KimDaBa, by the way, stands for KDE Image Database. Basically, this is a program that allows you to manage a collection of images in a very effective way. By managing I mean organize, tag, search, and do all sorts of processing.
So, what is so exciting about this particular program?
Due to some problems with my ISP the site will be somewhat slower at least for the next few days. Some traffic shaping rules were applied to my connection and now it will deliver only half the speed of what it used to. Hopefully, the problem will be resolved in a few days and everything will be back to normal.
In the meantime, I feel like I am back on dial-up, although I have a 512 Kbit/s link…
I think I am done fighting with the design of the site. Currently everything seems to look just fine in Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera. The site also validates without any errors against w3c HTML and CSS validators, meaning that if you are using a standard-compliant browser, than the site should behave. Otherwise – you’re on your own. Microsoft Internet Explorer is not a standard-compliant browser, but it mostly works too. It just shows a couple of glitches here and there and I am not goingto fix them until Microsoft will fix their browser. Yes, I know, that will not happen in any near future. But enough about it.
I have also installed and activated another plugin to make finding things easier – Terong Related Links. Withthis plugin I can clearly link to related articles at the end of each post. The related articles links will only be referencing posts in this blog and not any outside resources. At least for the mean time.
If you see any misbehavior or some missing functionality, please let me know and I will fix it. Don’t take that as a promise though.
I had a good opportunity to get a sweet revenge today, but I totally blew it. And now I don’t like myself very much.
As you might know I am working a lot of night shifts these days. That’s all good because I was the one to choose such a schedule. There is one downside though. There are only a couple of guys who are changing me in the morning. And one of these guys can’t ever wake up before 7:00am, when he is supposed to come. So for the last couple of years he was always late. He came anywhere from ten minutes to an hour later. Every time.
Today though there was a different scenario. It happened that he was doing a night shift and I was supposed to come in the morning and change him. I was very glad when I saw this in the schedule. In fact, I got so excited that I sent him an email describing how late I will come and how good that will feel to me and how misarable he feel to actually call me in the morning and beg me to wake up. You can imagine.
And what do I do? Yes, you are right. I totally forget that I am changing him and I set my alarm clock for 6:20. 6:59 I am in the office. When I saw that it was him in the office, I was SO pissed off with myself! How stupid can I be? DAMN IT!
Actually, I almost did The Grand Stupidity today and it was only by luck that I managed to avoid it.
Continue reading I blew it with the revenge
If you thought that I’m done with changes, think again. There is plenty going on behind the scenes. In fact, so much is changing that I better write about it before I forget.
For starters, I messing around with the theme. I didn’t manage to make it look exactly like I want yet, but I succeded in braking browser compatibility. It only looks nice in the Firefox now. Konqueror is the second runner up. It looks almost as good, but with few pixels moved left and right here and there. MSIE on the other hand is totally screwed. The funny thing is that the both HTML and CSS validate against w3c.org just fine.
Than there are categories and tags. With excuses to McDonald’s advertising campaign – I’m loving it! I am talking about the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. I like it so much that I have removed all the categories today, except for the default one which just has to be there. Yes, you’ve heard me right. There are no categories for posts at all now. Tags only.
What’s so good about it you might ask. Well, plenty. Firstly, it imported all categories as tags. Than it imported all my Technorati tags too. Than it gave me an nice administration interface to manage tags. And than it has these totally cool concept of tag synonyms. I’ve been thinking about this for a year or so now and I was stunned to find it in this plugin. Basically, I can assign synonyms to tags and thus decrease the number of tags used on the site without losing any functionality. For example, I configured “Cyprus” to have synonyms “Nicosia”, “Lefcosia”, “Lefkosia”, “Paphos”, “Pafos”, “Limassol”, “Limassos”, “Larnaca”, and “Larnaka”. Now you can use any one of this sysnonyms or tag itself to get the same results. Consider for the moment the same synonym defined for two different tags!
With all these huge changes I of course have a lot of stuff to take care of. My usage of tags was very chaotic before. I didn’t have any naming scheme what-so-ever. My categories were marked badly in some cases. Dumping this all into tags scope didn’t make it all much nicer. I am fixing it all over the place and you might see gradual improvements. But even if you don’t,
stay with me. It’ll me over before you know.