Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Wordpress 2.7 is a whole lot of good. Snappier and (to me) better designed UI. However, there is one aspect of the UI that has a few irritated (perhaps irriated is too strong a word). Not a critical thing, but still something they’d like changed. What is the issue? When looking at the publish date for future/scheduled posts, instead of the normal date on when it will be shown (e.g. 2009/1/25) the user is presented with how many days from the current date the post will be published (e.g. 37 days from now).
So, I’ve taken a gander and came up with the following solution. It may not be the best (and for anyone sketchy about editing code, a little concerning), but it’s fast and easy.
There are two lines in wp-admin/includes/template.php that effect the date display. If you have any text editing/coding program, you should be able to go to the lines 1342 and 1552. If anything, a search for “$h_time = sprintf( __(‘%s from now’), human_time_diff( $time ) );” (without quotes) will do the trick. Now, you can replace that exact text with “$h_time = mysql2date(__(‘Y/m/d’), $m_time);” (without quotes) and that’s it! Save and upload the modified file. If you’re sketchy about replacing the line, you can comment it out as I did.
line 1341
line 1552
And once you’re done and uploaded, you can see your results when you refresh the page.
If you would like to put the “from now” information on the tooltip when hovering your mouse cursor over the date, you can add the code chunk in the screenshot below to line 1361.
line 1361
Morning came quick. Perhaps too quick. Nevertheless, rising this particular Friday morning, October 24, was not the laborious chore that I would normally struggle through. It was the first day of Podcamp Hawaii. As I munched on my Frosted Flakes cereal, I ran my checklist of needed gear and made sure I got one of my Podcamp Hawaii shirts out. I worked out my plan of attack to tackle traffic and ended up leaving at about 7:30.
While it wasn’t a smooth ride, I got to the Hawaii Convention Center at a reasonable time. Parking was easy to find and was given directions to the location of the event. After a very quick check in, I spotted Dave Zuls and met his co-worker Kathi. I also met Nathan Kam, Chris Heuer and Kristi Wells. Then it was off to the opening ceremony and start Podcamp Hawaii!
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Netbooks seem to be the latest craze, and with good reason. Many are affordably priced and verge on the edge of an impulse buy. They tend to be highly portable and well equipped for handling the day to day tasks of checking email, browsing the internet, instant messaging and even office productivity. The combination of price, portability and technical capabilities can make netbooks very tempting indeed.
Amidst a small bout of research, I chose to get an Eee PC 901 with Windows XP. Like most in its class, it has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 12GB SSD an 8.9 inch display, a 1.3 megapixel camera and weighs about 3 pounds. It also has a 6 cell battery, built-in Bluetooth and 20GB online storage via Asus. After spending a week of using my Eee PC as regularly as possible, here are my observations.
Design
The outer design of the Eee PC 901 isn’t as thrilling like my Macbook Pro, but it’s cute and functional. I chose the white shell because I don’t want to deal with the fingerprints on the cover and the palm rests (my coworker who just got a new Dell XPS understands). The touchpad is large and worked well enough out of the box. The keyboard however, is painfully small and I can understand the many complaints about it. Since I have small fingers, touchtyping is feasible with enough practice. In fact, this article has been entirely written using my Eee PC. The main problems I’m experiencing are the apostrophe and right shift key. The apostrophe is real close to the enter key and the right shift key is located to the right of the up arrow key. The keyboard seems quite responsive and I have yet needed to do the “tape mod.” An internal design decision that I find quirky is having the 12GB SSD drive split into two drives; a 4GB and an 8GB.
Graphics/Display
I don’t intend to play any games on my Eee PC but do intend to watch a few movies on it. The display can reach a maximum of 1024×600. It can also go up to 1024×780 but goes off screen and you have to scroll. There is a compress mode but that distorts the render of the screen and doesn’t look that great to me. However, the 1024×600 resolution is quite alright for browsing the net, reading email and even watching movies, which I tested with Transformers and the quality was fine and wasn’t sluggish, especially since I was running it off an external USB flash drive. The most irritating bit about the display is the brightness level. It initially starts at 100% but once the level is modified, it remained stuck at about 61-63%. To address this, I initially installed eeectl (http://cpp.in/dev/eeectl/) which allowed me to increase the display brightness, among other things. Then I found the Asus BIOS revision 1501, which seems to fix the problem.
Sound
The sound isn’t spectacular, but isn’t bad either. Only thing is the speakers are located on the underside of the front end of the palm rests so it can get muffled. The sound was also okay with my “use with anything” (my reference because the default jack fit perfectly in the gen1 iPhone) Bose headphones.
Connectivity
Out of the box, the wifi worked very well with regular WEP networks but hiccuped on a combination WPA2 and hidden network (my macbook had no problems at all). I have Service Pack 3 but still needed to update the adapter driver, now it works just fine. I haven’t tested the Eee PC’s Bluetooth yet. There’s also an Ethernet port, but I haven’t used it at all. There are three USB ports, which for me is one port too much, but better too much than too little (Macbook Air). I haven’t tested the VGA port for external monitor goodness and have yet to get an SD card for the integrated slot, however I do intend to make use of it. Incidentally, I don’t miss an express card slot, like my Macbook has, because the only use I had for it was to read SD cards.
In conclusion, after doing some customization and updating of some drivers and applications, the Eee PC 901 is running really smooth and has met my expectations positively. With the 6 cell battery and some toning down of the display and sound, I’m getting an average of 5 hours of use from this little bugger. Definitely portable as I don’t have to stay wired to anything and it’s light and easy to carry around. It may not be the best netbook out there, since this is my first I can’t compare it, but it’s working very well for me.
In case there’s interest, here’s a list of stuff I did to my Eee to either customize it to my liking or increase its usability.
- Installed eeectl (mainly for display brightness, but can control fan speed and overclocking, etc.)
- Updated BIOS to 1501 (to address display brightness)
- Installed TweakUI (Activate some UI eye-candy)
- Installed Vista Inspirat theme pack
- Installed Launchy (I got spoiled by Quicksilver on the Mac)
- Updated the wifi adapter
- Installed ECap utility for the integrated camera
- Updated the touchpad drivers/control panel
- Installed 2GB RAM and set 512MB for Ramdisk using Gavotte’s ramdisk app to shunt temporary internet files onto, instead of my SSD
So, my first attendance to the Manoa Geeks event was on Thursday, July 31 at HMSA. It was a pretty nifty experience, what with about 70 people attending in person and some others (20? Not sure) via chat. It was nearly full when I arrived and a pretty good indicator of the sold out status was the fact the pizza was wiped out shortly after the geeks were given the green light to mob the tables.
After the dust of dinner settled, a few people came up to demo and talk about products they were developing, from Labels That Talk, to New View Hawaii. Of particular interest that I might mention at work, though, is Errorlytics. This web service captures 404 errors and can use an appropriate redirect to the correct page. I think the only main drawback is when working with very large sites one would have to program in the redirects via rules. If the rules could be vague, like if the page is supposed to be a special offers page (rather than a specific page) then redirect to the main page listing special offers, it would probably be really nifty. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a full demo of it due to network issues. I know, I know, a full house of geeks and couldn’t get it to work. Stuff happens. 
Aside from that, Eric Nakagawa from I can Has Cheezburger attended and mentioned he’s working on an ICHC book. Also, Bytemarks Cafe is going live this Wednesday, be sure to catch it! I was surprised, I know I shouldn’t be, to find out that one of the folks working at HMSA knew several people I currently work with.
All in all, the experience was great and while I didn’t talk to many people, it was cool to soak in the atmosphere. An event I wouldn’t mind attending again.
How do you one-up a revolutionary mobile device? You don’t. At least for now when other manufacturers are trying to catch up to Apple’s iPhone. The first generation iPhone was revolutionary due to its incredible integration of different applications. For example, using the Google Maps application, one can find directions to a restaurant and with one touch, could either call the establishment or bring up its web site. The multi-touch capabilities were also revolutionary compared to other mobile devices.
Other revolutionary concepts of the iPhone:
- Multi-touch interface – zoom in and out on webpages and images
- Accelerometer – Auto-detect in landscape or portrait mode for integrated camera and web browsing
- Safari browser – First (nearly) full-featured web browser on a mobile device
- Smart virtual keyboard – Its ability to learn a person’s typing is uncanny and its “trust in the Force” mentality is a nice nod to Star Wars fans
- Minimal hardware buttons – Features and applications can be modified and installed through software updates, which can be tied to virtual buttons/icons
While the first generation iPhone was revolutionary, the second generation, the iPhone 3G, is not. It merely builds upon the original device. This is not to say I don’t like the new version, I really do, but anyone who has the first version is just as well off as owners of the 3G one.
The only major new change of the iPhone 3G that I really like is the curved plastic back. While I initially thought the change to plastic was a step back, it’s actually really good. The curved mold feels more natural in the hand while the plastic makes the iPhone less slippery and lighter. Many people may like the flushed headphone jack but it doesn’t look as sleek as the first device. I’m also biased because the headphones I had bought actually fit in the first generation’s jack out-of-the-box. The new 3G speed is wonderful but eats through the battery like crazy. Not a problem in the office or at home due to easy power connection, but out and about folks might have concerns and of course, what’s supposed to help such folks out (e.g. no Wi-Fi) actually hurt them more. Until turn-by-turn vocal directions can be integrated, the GPS isn’t all that special. It’s nifty to look at the dot move on the map as you move, but doesn’t provide much practical application… yet. I haven’t explored geo-tagging images, so that might be interesting.
The most major update to the iPhone is via the 2.0 firmware, which nearly puts the first generation iPhones on par with this later version. If you’re new to the iPhone craze, a 3G is a good choice. However, if you can get a really good deal on a first gen, I’d suggest going that route, especially if you’re not an AT&T customer that’s eligible for a device upgrade.
