Archive for the 'technology' CategoryPage 3 of 32

Zero’d Out

Published
by
michael lee
on 30 January 2008
in geek, life and technology
. 1 Comment

Well, I started at 2:30, and it took me until 4:30, but I finally got my email inbox down to zero messages. It’s just beautiful.

I have this recurring fantasy about shutting down my email address, canceling my cell phone, going off the grid and off the grind completely for, like, a month. Maybe go down to Mexico, sit on the patio of some crumbling hacienda with an Underwood typewriter and a bottle of Corralejo Anejo, fall asleep to the sound of the waves hitting the coast and wake to the sound of children laughing in the streets, writing, all the time, writing, with no distractions, just letting the crisp staccato of the keys wash over me until …

Hang on, I just got another email.

underwood.png

Colour Lovers

Published
by
Zack
on 26 January 2008
in The Intra-Web-O-Sphere!, art and culture, geek and technology
. 9 Comments

Many of us Addison Roadies work in the creative fields. Whether our pursuits are graphic design, filmmaking, or music, quite a few of our loyal readers and contributors pay ‘da billz by making something. Personally, I am a film/video editor and camera operator, and I have a pretty huge handicap when it comes to graphic design…I’m more than 50% colorblind. That doesn’t mean I race through red lights at intersections, (of which the Red/Yellow/Green are arranged in a consistent manner for freaks like me, in case you were wondering) since I have a relatively good grasp of what color I’m looking at. If you pointed at a color, and asked me to identify it, I’m correct about 65% of the time. It’s the more subtle palate that presents the biggest obstacle.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I found Colour Lovers. (Which should not be confused with this site) Colour Lovers is a community-based website that studies and monitors trends in color, from advertising and branding to product design. There are tons of great color palates to view, compare, and contrast. And it doesn’t just stop at colors, either. You can evaluate textures, patterns, and how color palates are used in the real world. Looking for a palate to produce a new website? Want to simply be inspired for your next layout? Check out the site. It’s pretty impressive.

Another color-based site to check out, is Adobe’s new Kuler. Yesterday, TUAW reported on the new Kuler site, and the comments were mostly of the “That’s a rip-off of ColourLovers.com” variety. While Kuler offers some very similar functionality, I really prefer Colour Lovers - it’s community-based, and they offer free downloadable versions of almost every color palate imaginable, in various formats - Photoshop, Illustrator, CS Stylesheets, etc. Some favorites….

Fixing Gravatars for WordPress

Published
by
michael lee
on 26 January 2008
in geek and technology
. 12 Comments

Ok, I did some coding mumbo jumbo, and got the gravatars to work even for people who didn’t use lowercase emails. If you want to geek out on it, this is how I got it to work.

The gravatar function creates an md5 hash of your email address, and tags it onto the end of the URL when it goes to get your icon from the gravatar server. That’s how it knows which icon to return. By using a hash encryption, your email address doesn’t show up in the html for the page. The reason the lowercase matters is because the hash is different based on the case of the letter. It’s all good and fine to tell everyone to only use lowercase email addresses for their comments, but we have several years worth of archives here, and I’m not about to go back and fix the letter case of every comment to make the gravatars work.

Fortunately, php allows us to alter a string return before we hash it. That way, regardless of how the email address was saved in the database, it always gets sent to the encryption process as lowercase. Locate the gravatars.php plugin in your WordPress install, in the plugins folder. On line 17, you will find the following code:


.md5($comment->comment_author_email);

You need to add an additional modifier ’strtolower’ to the function, so that it looks like this (remember the extra parenthesis!):


.md5(strtolower($comment->comment_author_email));

Save, reload your page, and check it out. It should return gravatars for people who left comments, even if they used capitalization in their email address.

Of course, this doesn’t explain why Chad is the only guy left who can’t get his to work … but that’s a whole ‘nother post.

Translation, please?

Published
by
michael lee
on 25 January 2008
in The Intra-Web-O-Sphere! and technology
. 12 Comments

Sooooo ….

This site has a link back to Addison Road, to the post “Sex and the Bible“. I’m just dying to know what it actually says, though. Anybody want to give us a translation?

Seth Godin on The Death of the Music Industry

Published
by
michael lee
on 10 January 2008
in art and culture, geek and technology
. 2 Comments

Seth Godin (all-around internet guru guy) wrote an article on things that can be learned, by existing industries, from the slow and agonizing death of the music industry. The quote of the article has to be:

You used to sell plastic and vinyl. Now, you can sell interactivity and souvenirs.

Some of his language is a bit “insider” to the internet marketing world, but you can get past that and still hear what he’s saying. Here’s the article: Music Lessons.

(ht: Matt, the guy who built wordpress)