Jared Christensen

Well it is time once again for the infamous Site Spotlight.  I am trying to the utmost of my ability to actually stay on top of this and update at least once a month with a new entry.

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Why I am a MacHead

People often ask me why I choose to be a mac user; the questions usually fall into 3 camps:

1. What is it you find more appealing, or better on the Apple platform?
2. Why would you want to lock yourself into a platform with so few games man!!?!  You're missing out on the games!!?!
3. You must be an idiot that doesn't know much about computers, you must b0w d0\/\/n +0 +h3 m45+er h4xx0r!

Yeah, so believe it or not I am getting way more camp #1 questions of late which is a great change in statistics.  In recent years it has usually been either 2 or 3 that held the number one spot.

Today I finally decided what my answer will be to all of these questions: class.  Class is not something you can buy, or steal or copy it must just be.  And that is what apple has, class.

Visual Experiments

I have brought photos back to the site, but in a new way.

I really liked Pictorialis, after I hacked it up of course, but there was still the issue of integration.  Pic was a seperate installation of WP which just added to the complexity of my database structure, and produced some unwanted effects when I say, upgraded by blog installation and all the photoblog tables were modified as well, which would make the PB break.

So when I redesigned the site I decided to go another way with my photography.  I have toyed with flickr and I love it, but I am a little put off by the concept of relying on a third party to host and preserve my photos.  And you know, I now PAY for web server space and bandwidth so I thought I should be using it.

I have recently given in and moved to the Theme System that ships with 1.3.x/1.5.x so I sat down and looked for a way to make it do my bidding.  The result is Visual Experiments.  I am pretty happy with it so far, just need to work out some more styling issues.  I snagged the spiffy code from Couloir and bent it to my will, combining it with the excellent pages function in WordPress 1.3.x/1.5.x and voila!  Photosets.

The beauty here is that my "photoblog" utilizes the existing structure and database.  I am able to fold in comments and ratings via my rating plugin (and yes I know I am behind on releasing it... so sue me.  It is still forth-coming and trust me, when you get it it will be worth the wait... I hope) as well as picking up the benefits of a smaller, less complicated database structure.

The way I have implemented it is pretty elegant I think, and the effects are nice.  Let me know what you think of it, pros and cons, so I can continue to refine it.

Happy Nativity Everyone

I will be out of contact until the last week of December/first week of January, so I am posting this now.

Troparion in tone 4

Your Nativity, O Christ our God,
Has shone to the world the Light of wisdom!
For by it, those who worshipped the stars,
Were taught by a Star to adore You,
The Sun of Righteousness,
And to know You, the Orient from on High.
O Lord, glory to You!

Kontakion in tone 3

Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One,
And the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One!
Angels with shepherds glorify Him!
The wise men journey with a star!
Since for our sake the Eternal God was born as a Little Child!

Parting Words

May all the blessings of Our Great God and Saviour be with you all this blessed season.

powerplant

The Power Plant

We currently employ bleeding edge nightlies of WordPress, usually upgraded once a week.  This is not recommended for everyone, but hey we like to live dangerously.  The site is currently powered by:

1. bloginfo('version');
2. b33r
3. burritos, with extra cheese and red sauce.  Yum.

Modifications and Extensions

At present there are more bits o' code of my devising than not, but I don't expect that to last.  If I am using a plugin instead of just rolling something myself you can be assured that the authors have performed a work of art.

displayPluginsAsTable();

And the Winner is

Well the contest is over, and the vote has been officially tallied.  And look at that the Big Winner is Michael Heilemann.

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5 years

I don't have a lot of time at the moment to write a proper post about this, so I am going to just publish this and then edit it later to include what I really want to say.

Today my wife Heather and I have been married 5 years.  That doesn't seem like a long time for a couple who have been together for 20-30 years, but for a 27 year old that is a very long time indeed.  Not all of the years have been easy, some of them were downright horrible; but the one constant through these last 5 years has been our love and devotion to each other so all 5 years have been glorious ones filled with laugter, love and happiness.

Heather I love you and look forward to 10 more.

Firefox in the New York Times

The Mozilla Foundation has reached thier goal and placed an ad in the New York Times the ad appears in todays (December 16th) edition of the Times.

A triumph for the little man

The ad itself is very well executed.  I had been long wondering how they were going to list every donator to the fund, per their promise.  I think they achieved a usable result.  For those who don't readily see what I am talking about, the image on the left is created using the names of all the donators.

One of the most striking elements of the ad for me is how well Jon Hicks' Firefox logo translated to grey-scale, I mean man is that still beautiful.  I think one of the most inpspired moves the Mozilla Foundation has made recently was to bring a talented designer on board, especially one the caliber of Jon Hicks, to design the branding of each product.  Very snazzy indeed.

And that is the real victory here

The funds that were used to purchase the space in the Times was collected through individual donations from people like you and me (if of course you value choice and use something other than the spawn of the beast).  Thousands of people opened their wallets and paid to get the message out, there is still some strength left in the world of geeks, there might be a day when geek courage fails and we break all bonds of fellowship but today is not that day!

Sorry... Heather and I watched the Return of the King SE on Tuesday.  Still a little on the brain.  And I guess this goes without saying, but if you are reading this and are running IE or Opera, why don't you give Firefox a try, you might like it.

FF7: Advent Children

The newest trailer for the "movie" Advent Children has been added to the japanese site.  Go watch it, and then come back here and read the rest of this post, wherein the author pontificates on the failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

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And Here is Another One

Skippy is at it again over at NewsForge.  This time he is outlining a simple whitelist method to help safegaurd childrens email

As a hopefully sometime-soon-to-be father, I am very grateful that ther are people like Scott out there providing these kinds of tutorials.  If you have missed his other gems over on the forge, here is as complete a list as I can compile to date:

1. Creative licensing can help non-profits protect and share content
2. Save time with syndication
3. A child-safe SMTP whitelist with Postfix and MySQL

Scott has a wonderful way of writing, easily communicating techy-type subjects in a straight-forward, understandable manner.  I certianly hope this is merely the tip of the newsforge iceberg for Scott, we would all be the better for it.