Slightly Remarkable

I’ve no valid excuse — lack of time is overused and doesn’t mean anything to anyone anymore. For that reason, I have come to grips with reality and have decided to tell the world what has been keeping me out of the loop.

• Various programming work with Mike Cherim on his Green Methods site, as well as the Green Beast CMS.
• Gametalk. Yes, that disease of a web site that I’ve gone from loving to hating back to loving again… it still exists, and it’s still as screwed up as ever, but just as addictive. This is one of those love/hate relationships… It’s a time killer.
• Video games! It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to sit down and play a good quality video game, so I took about five days out of my busy lifestyle this month to play (and beat) Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for the PS2. The game is so wicked! Does anyone know if there will be another sequel, and if so, when it’s coming out? I haven’t seen any previews or heard any rumours, but I gather from the way the game ends that there will be another sequel.
• Various design work for a few clients including a children’s medical hospital in Puerto Rico, a garbage disposal site, and a new design for Slightly Remarkable.
• Guitar practice. I am really working on playing guitar a lot because music is one of the driving forces in my life. Also I feel like I should become an instrumentalist to learn to appreciate real talent in music and so that I can learn from and play along with my favorite songs.
• Chategory is going to be so awesome! Working with the Rico libraries, Chategory is going to have an awesome user interface. Additionally, we’re adding butt loads of features to it and making it lots more extensible. There may still be room for more developers, so if you’re interested, feel free to drop me a line about it.

That’s a basic wrap-up of what’s been keeping me away from my blog (and from reading others’ blogs) for the past two weeks. I’m still as interested as ever in blogging, but it has had to take a backseat while I clear up other things. I don’t know how long it will be before I make another blog entry, though… School starts soon, family is coming down to visit soon, I’m going to be working on getting my license, and there’s just so much in my personal life I just don’t have the time I used to.

You see, under normal circumstances you would need the space to be appended automatically, saving you the trouble of adding this in your theme, each time you call a category listing function. However, there are cases (such as mine) where a space is unnecessary and, if you’re as nit-picky as I am, an eye-sore. There’s a way to fix it, though, so let’s get to it.

The function I use to list my categories is called the_category(). I use it in such a way that quotes (and commas) are wrapped around each category’s name. When there’s only one category, this isn’t a problem, but with multiple categories an extra, unneeded space is inserted. Here’s what my code looks like:


&#8220;<?php the_category('&#8221;, &#8220;') ?>&#8221;


As you can see, there are no extra spaces in my code, so the problem is coming from Wordpress itself. The file is located in your wp-includes/template_categories.php file. On line 78, you should find if (0 < $i) $thelist .= $separator . ' ';. Yep, that right there is the problem. Snip it out (so it looks like if (0 < $i) $thelist .= $separator;), and you're all set.

Hopefully this'll be useful for someone. It took me awhile to decide to do it, since I figured it'd be a hassle to get into the code, but it wasn't really that difficult to locate and destroy fix the problem.

A client of mine is looking to have online quizzes powered by Flash on his web site. Myself not being a Flash developer, I’m seeking someone who’s capable of creating an effective, clean interface for online quizzes in Flash. Web standards advocation preferred.

Also, if anyone could point me to some tutorials on digitizing images (as in, converting photographs into coloring book-like drawings), I would appreciate it. If I can’t extract and digitize images in time, I may also be in need of a graphics developer who can do this.

Please contact me if interested. Thanks.

There were some pretty cool shirts, though I’d heard most of them. The winner goes to Bob for his fairly long list of shirts (kudos on having so many, by the way) — a couple of them I’d never heard of before. The one that really got me was, “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1.” Way to go, Bob!

I’m going to change the rules a little. Since only continuing the meme by selecting a winner would cause the meme to quickly die (Bob has a lot of the same readers as I do, myself included, I’m sure), I’m going to let anyone pick this up and post it on their blog. Get your readers to let you know about the awesome apparel they wear, and be sure to let me know when you pass it on!

Reading news today, I came across an article at Mozillazine about the bookmark system in Firefox being rewritten by Vladimir Vukićević. The thing is, Vladimir hasn’t finished this small project, yet he’s announcing that he will be doing it in the near future. Sure there’s no deadline, but Vladimir has no choice but to do what he announced he would do.

As I read the article, I thought to myself, “What if I were working on something like this and said that I would be making such-and-such? What if I didn’t deliver? How would I feel? How do I feel now?” The truth is, I have a feeling that I won’t be able to commit the time to a project that I need to in order to complete it. It’s a feeling of fear and self-inadequacy. I’m confident that I could do it, time providing. The problem is that, obviously, time is a large issue and I am afraid that I won’t be able to complete what I set out to do within that limited amount of time (even if there is no deadline, an approximate one should always be assigned mentally, otherwise you’ll never get to it).

A vital approach to a beginning project is to start confidently. If you are having doubts or approach the project with a timid attitude, you’re more likely to give up or, worse, procrastinate. Get your things together and be completely sure that this is something you want to do and can do, then give it your all — don’t hold back. Think of it as a game of chess: you consider the location of the pieces, decide which piece you want to move, where you want that piece to go, and then you confidently move that piece — no second thoughts, no take-backs. If you cause a problem, you can rectify it by making changes in the future or changing your strategy, instead of wishing that you could go back and make changes.

If you’re a newsreader like myself, you know that there were some recent news about the XML-RPC vulnerability. I’m slightly confused by all that’s going on, since Matt didn’t seem too worried about it, but I figured the safest thing to do was to upgrade. Hey, and what do you know? A little weird design bug in my Tiger administration is fixed now! So, I’m happily using Wordpress 1.5.1.3 now. Please, let me know if you run into any problems on the site!

I’m back from Florida, finally unpacked and feeling just a little more refreshed (as opposed to very groggy from when I got off of the airplane), but I’ve been covered in emails and getting back up-to-date with all the things I missed while I was gone. So, what’s going down now and in the near future?

Relocation: I’m moving out of my room and into my new room which used to be my brother’s. Since my brother got married and moved out, I have a larger room now. I’m basically already moved in (the room is liveable), but a lot of things need to be changed still (move the T.V. so that I can use cable, move the bed to a more comfortable spot, move other things in the room, move clothes from my old closet to my new one, and so on). Last night we painted it a light creamy beige (very soft on the eyes), giving the room a much more elegant, serene feeling. Very nice.

Emails: I’m basically caught up on emails, though there are a few I haven’t had a chance to get back on (Medical site, GB/MikeCMS). Aside from that, I think we’re good. (Oh yea, and Chris Martz, it looks like you’re not the only one asking about college degrees.)

Blogging: I’m not back to a point where I’m prepared to reinitiate the whole blogging process, but it’s getting there. I spent a good hour or so reading the 487 blog entries that I missed, and got a lot of good reading in. (If you look at my del.icio.us page, you’ll see that I marked a lot of things “read later” or “use later” because I didn’t have time to spend on them like I want to.)

News: In addition to reading 487 blog entries, there were over 490 news items that I missed while I was gone (and briskly skimmed over today). I’m caught up, I think, with the news. Some highlights are: Google Earth, Google Maps API, iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting, My Web (and accompanying developer API) by Yahoo!, U.S. Scientists Create Zombie Dogs, and AI Researchers Produce New Kind of PC Game.

And, I think that about wraps everything up. Normal blogging (read: good blog entries, or so I think) coming…

I got nearly eight hours of classes in each day for four days (the first day I got about two or so hours, I think). Unfortunately, there was nothing for me to learn in the Web Development class, but I was glad to learn quite a bit of Java, so I’ll definitely be spending plenty of time working on Java from now on. I’m beat, have loads of emails to check, lots of work to do, and I’m about to be moving into another room across the hall (my oldest brother moved out). On top of that, July 4th and two of my brothers’ birthdays are right around the corner. I’m off to do no good for awhile, so for those of you who are waiting email responses, please be patient — I’m really working on it, but after going for a whole five days without Internet, it’s going to take a bit to get back in the swing of things.