Sephy’s Platzish

I’ve delayed this a week, so let’s get to it. I skipped one day’s walk, and as I had mentioned on Saturday, didn’t have the pedometer, but did quite a bit of walking anyway.

Monday, 24th March

Ah, yes, the snow was back, and this was about the last you’ll see (hopefully) of the white stuff in mass quantities for a few months.

Distance - 2718 steps, 2.17km

Tuesday, 25th March

Hard to believe, but this picture was taken a mere 24 hours after the last one was - that is definitely the power of the March sun at work.

Distance - 687 steps, 0.54km (plus extra from before the pedometer reset thanks to me hitting the button on the desk at work)

Wednesday, 26th March

Another day goes by, and this time the masses of water that were crossing the driveway have gone away, due to the ground absorbing the water that came from all the snow that melted the day before.

Distance - 2733 steps, 2.18km

Thursday, 27th March

A pretty awesome shot, if you ask me - this is a 1:1 crop of a picture of some Canada Geese (I believe) flying in the sky, making their noise as they go along. Usually my bird shots come out blurry, but this time they were close enough to get a good shot.

Distance - 2661 steps, 2.12km

Friday, 28th March

Two shots of the sunrise on Friday morning - one is from a more open area, and the second is while I was sitting stopped at a stoplight in a built up area. I almost had a complete sunrise/sunset compilation, but I realized that it’d hard to get a decent picture of a sunset through a glass door.

Distance - 4940 steps, 3.95km

Saturday, 29th March

While I didn’t have the pedometer on, I think this shot is quite fitting for the day’s walking - the ingredient list from my risotto adventure. Alongside my notebook is the lemon that was used for grating into the dish at the end.

In other news, I’m really liking my job - although it can be hard to come to the final most desired outcome, it’s enjoyable being able to talk to so many different people in such a wide area of the country. For me, this is really a big change from when I’d be absolutely afraid about answering the phone when I was even a couple of years younger. It would even be rarer for me to take the initiative to pick up the receiver and make a phone call on my own.

It’s also quite amazing how much I’ve changed in the last nine months since I started on this journey. If you would have asked me a year ago about where I would have seen myself by opening day 2008, I’d have probably said in the same place. Yet, here I am, driving (in my own car) to work, socializing with people at work, and really, enjoying life. Now, my challenge is to get myself back into the walking habit - as it is finally going to warm up (double digits by the end of the week!). Really, I just have to force myself to do it - put walk onto the to-do list for the day, and make sure that it gets done.

Just a note - if you’re looking for the week in walks, they’ll be up tomorrow, pictures and all. However, WordPress 2.5’s release is more recent news, and an issue that I believe is worth pushing my normal schedule back a day for.

I bit the bullet and installed WordPress 2.5 on my testing blog, and I’ve been playing with it for a few hours now, and my impression is that the number of things I don’t like far outweigh the number of things I do like. Before I get to my critique, however, I have a couple of important questions.

First, why was this released on a Saturday? Every other major release of software - free or not - has happened on a weekday. To have something as seemingly major as WordPress 2.5 released on Saturday suggests to me that the folks at Automattic almost wanted this release to be as low-key as possible, as most of the “major” web writers usually go at a more relaxed pace on the weekend.

The next question I have is pointed at everyone who is raving over the new interface - what specifically about it makes this particular version superior to the old interface? All I’ve seen are generalities. Something tells me that a lot of this is related to a disease known as “fanboyism” (which I know doesn’t exist, but is noted by the almost-fanatical praise heaped by certain people whenever something comes from one place, no matter how poor it is), and that is never a good thing as it allows hype to take over real substance.

The last question I have, and this is something that I’ll keep coming back to throughout my discussion of dislikes, is about this supposed research that they did. Who exactly did they ask for input? It seems like they’ve asked some quite inept people to get their suggestions when it comes to getting an opinion on the current dashboard’s so-called downfalls.

I’ll be reasonable, however, and let you in on the couple of things that I do like -

Things I like

First, is that in the Theme editor (under Presentation Design -> Theme Editor), they’ve split up the template and style files into their own groups. Actually, I’m surprised they didn’t try to prettify that and manage to totally screw it up in the process. Sure that’s a dumbed-down option that they did, but it’s quite useful when you consider that currently, all the files are listed in one big list.

Another thing that I like is the addition of a link to edit a newly-published post. Also, the fact that they did make the size of the fonts smaller wasn’t a bad idea either.

And that’s about where this ends.

Things I don’t like

Where do I start with this? There are a lot more things that I don’t like about the new admin panel, but let’s start with the most obvious one -

New-look menus

Instead of sticking with the normal set of menus, they decided to split the main toolbar into two parts - with the connections between them being loose at the best. Thankfully, it’s easy to hack the admin-header.php file to get the Plugins, Options Settings, and Users down with the rest of the menu items, it’s something that shouldn’t have to have been done in the first place (not to mention that cForms and Polls are now to the left of these other sections). Also, the dashboard is an integral part of the WordPress admin panel - why is the link to that relegated to a teeny-weeny link in the upper left that almost blends into the background?

Widget redesign

Pardon my French, but what the fuck were they thinking when they thought this one up? Actually, what the fuck were they smoking and/or drinking at the time? I’d like to have a sample.

Since I’ve been using WordPress, the Widget page has been a straight-forward drag-and-drop affair where you could take the available widgets (at the bottom of the page) and drag them up to either sidebar. You could also have multiple text widgets at your disposal, and if you wanted to take one away for a short while, all you had to do was drag it out of the sidebar and it’d be saved.

Now? Well, now you can only work on one sidebar at a time, and those saved text widgets you had off of the sidebar before you upgraded? Gone. Hope you saved the code to them.

Oh, by the way, if you remove a text widget from a sidebar - you can say goodbye to whatever text was in there before. It’s not saved. It was something important? Sorry, but it’s not OK to take text widgets away anymore; game over, you lose.

The other thing that is completely ass-backward is that they show you all available widgets, including those you already have activated. How useless is that?

Like whitespace?

If you’re a fan of completely wasted space on a webpage, then you’ll love a lot of the pages in WordPress 2.5! Why? Well, on most of them, there’s a maximum width of just less than 1000 pixels. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was centred on the page, but infinite wisdom was used to put it all aligned to the left. Fortunately, if you’re using Stylish, you can create a new style for your URL and put this in between the curly braces -

.wrap, .updated, .error {
max-width: 100% !important;
}
.narrow {
width: 100% !important;
}

That will fix one of the few things you can actually fix on your own.

Categories are dead. Long live tags.

Or that’s what they want you to believe when you look at the write screen. Instead of the current setup of having categories at the top of the right hand column, easily accessible, they put them at the bottom of the write screen (where you can’t move the elements anymore, like you used to), under tags. The message here is clear - categories are less important than tags.

Gaping security hole

One of the more ballyhooed new features in this new version is the ability to automatically upgrade plugins from your plugin page. On my site, I had tried out a different plugin that allowed me to do just that, but it didn’t work because of server permissions that there are.

However, WordPress have made a great decision to usurp any server’s security when it comes to running zip files by including its own unzipping program in the WordPress install - that’s got to be part of the reason why the zip file is 30% larger than it was previously. By doing this, anyone running a plugin has the potential of opening themselves up to a major problem with their server by upgrading to a new version of a plugin that has a malicious file in it.

The chances of this happening are slim, but it is not outside of the possible realm of things that can happen. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this and to break the plugin upgrade function - set the permissions of the wp-content/plugins folder to 555, thus making it read only, and forcing an error on the update page.

Lazy time

The last item I have on my list of dislikes is that they’ve changed the way you select your timezone - it used to be that you just typed in a number, say, -6 for Central Standard Time, like you would on a forum run by SMF. However, apparently in these supposed interviews, they discovered that people had a hard time typing in a simple combination of a plus or minus sign and a number between 0 and 14. It’s been replaced with a drop-down box with selections for timezones, with minor half-hour intervals.

Overall initial verdict

If I had to give a grade to their efforts in regards to what they did, I would give them a grade of about 60/100, or just barely a D-minus in school grading terms. The biggest thing that they lose points for is the rule of “don’t fix something that ain’t broke”. The Admin interface in previous iterations of WordPress worked perfectly, and were, after a bit of a learning curve, very intuitive.

However, doing patently stupid things like splitting the options panel into two distinct menus, making the dashboard into the least important thing in the dashboard (by the way, where can you see the stats for your blog? the stats sub-panel under the dashboard has gone missing.), and making everything fixed width only goes to hurt the cause further.

Unfortunately, it seems that the folks who are at the head of WordPress are only more concerned with glorifying their latest release, but don’t be surprised if there are urgent updates to 2.5 coming out as soon as a week from now, as it seems that they’ve gotten creative with the roadmap, making up nearly 30% of the overall progress in their planning within a week or two.

As far as my site is concerned, I’m going to stick with 2.3.x series WordPress releases for at least the near future. Maybe if someone comes out with an admin theme that looks like the old version, and maybe fix the widget issue (come on, they seriously fucked up there).

What do you all think about this release? More importantly, do you know anyone who was interviewed to help them out? I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who would love to know how they came to the conclusion that this was “needed”.

As I had mentioned the other day, I’d been doing some reading while working, and one of the things they have available for reading are old issues of magazines, such as Cooking Light. In the March issue of the magazine, there is a recipe that piqued my interest - Risotto with Italian Sausage, Caramelized Onions and Bitter Greens. I actually went through the effort of manually writing the recipe down by hand; of course, I then found out that I could print it, but it actually was cool being able to cook off of your own handwriting.

Anyway, before I could actually get to the business of cooking the food, I had to gather some of the ingredients; specifically the sausage, shallots, wine, cheese and arugula. I also had to go to my bank to deposit my paycheck. Now, unlike most people, I have to travel 18 miles to get to the bank (something that I’m going to get sorted out sooner rather than later), so I decided that I’d stop at an Aldi that is right in the neighborhood of my bank.

I go around the store, find the stuff I came there for, along with some other provisions for the week ahead (and the months ahead, considering that I got table salt ), and head into the checkout line. Now, if you’re not aware of their policies there, you cannot use a credit card to pay your bills - it saves them money in having to pay credit card fees. However, you can use a debit card, and that was the plan that I tried out.

It didn’t work. I tried it three times, and all three times I saw the message “300 - Denied” - the clerk said that she was seeing an error that the card was an unrecognised card. Fortunately, she could just set aside my order, and allowed me to go to the ATM to get cash. Thus begins the next part of the adventure - finding a low or no-fee ATM to use (now that I think about it, I could have just run down to my bank and used the ATM there as it took longer to do what I did instead of just running those 6 blocks or so). Anyway, I try the first bank which is across the street; this is the same bank that has branches in just about every grocery store in the area, and at those, their convenience charge is $1.50 - not at this one though. They wanted $2.50 to use the drive-up machine. No deal I though, so I went to the grocery store across the street, and settled for paying $2.00 to get money out of the bank, and went back to Aldi to pay for my shopping ($18.95 - most expensive item, white wine - $2.99 for 750mL).

The next step should have been quite easy - go to the normal grocery store and pick up the rest of the ingredients. However, thanks to the bizarre setup of the store, I wound up spending so long in there that I got the call I had been waiting for - one from my mom wondering as to where I was. As it had happened, I had finally found where they had the grated cheeses (in the dairy case - at the very far back end of the store, and hidden at that). The redeeming news of it all is that I did get quite a bit of walking done - shoulda brought my pedometer.

Now, on to the cooking!

I should note from the outset that I used slightly different ingredients to the list set out by the recipe, mostly due to not having the exact items, and not finding the exact items. I used regular chicken broth (4 cubes of bullion and 5 cups of water to match the order they have in the recipe, which I now realize should have only been 4½ cups…I think that much evaporated out of the pan while it was simmering), along with regular Italian Sausage.

It all started by sauteing chopped onion and sugar until it was brown; I didn’t get it fully browned, but trying a bit of the mixture while it was sitting, it didn’t taste too bad.

Then, the next step was to take the onion out and fry up some Italian Sausage (the recipe calls for sweet, and I believe mild is the same thing); you could also just buy some Italian seasoned sausage from the store (the stuff you use for pizza) and use the sausage which has had the skin removed (not as bad as I thought it would be). You simply crumble it up when it’s frying -

Then the tiring part of the cooking begins where you have to stand over the pan, stirring it constantly while you add the rice, shallots, and the liquid (you can’t add it all at once, because it has to be completely absorbed before you can add more). I think the reason for the constant stirring is that you don’t want to let the mixture sit still for a long time and allow the liquid to evaporate out.

The next couple of pictures show how much the consistency of it changed in the 20 or so minutes that I was stirring it up. It’s hard to believe that, when you look at the final product, it was only 1 cup of rice that was put in, but that’s all that was called for.

Just after adding the first of the liquid - 1/3 cup wine.

About 8 minutes in; note how much more pan is covered.

After 15 minutes, look at how big the grains of rice have become.

After getting the liquid put in, the next step was to put in the arugula, onions and some lemon zest (though i think that could have been done without; I’m not a fan of the zest of citrus), along with some of the infamous romano cheese that I had such a hard time finding. Since the whole pot was still very warm, the greens wilted right down and almost melted into the rest of the dish.

As far as how it was received - I liked it, but it did have a bit of too much of a lemony flavor to it, probably due to the zest of the lemon, but it was certainly an interesting dish - and now that I know that the rice we’ve had for quite a long time is still good - one that I wouldn’t mind to try again, but this time with different ingredients. I didn’t mention the cheese being added to my mom, but she didn’t mind it either as far as I can tell.

I think risotto is one of those very versatile recipes that you can do a ton of stuff with. Who knows, I might be making risotto every week now.

I got up early this morning so that I could go to volunteer all day today; it involved taping pieces of paper to plastic boxes for some upcoming events the group I volunteer for have coming up. Anyway, as I was in the shower, a discussion came up about the “new kid” on the video scene - Hulu. I’d heard about it a while back, when it was in closed beta, and to be honest, I didn’t think it would have much potential.

However, I gotta say that I’ve been converted to what they’re doing by another site out there - Veoh, which has full episodes of CBS programs like The Price is Right and others. They have small breaks; in an episode of Price, for example, there are 3 30-second breaks in the show.

The big part of the discussion was that on Hulu, there is a wide breadth of programs available. If you have a look at the list of TV shows by network, there are tons of shows available. The most awesome thing, at least to me, is that if a show was originally broadcast in HD - Prison Break, for example - it is shown in the proper format on Hulu (i.e. widescreen). If you don’t already know this about me - I’m a stickler for taking advantage of a widescreen monitor, so someone showing a 4:3 program on an HDTV in 16:9 stretch bugs me.

One of the coolest videos that I’ve found on there is a video from the NBC News Time Capsule - the parts of the first episode of “Today” that were preserved on film, along with clips from the 25th anniversary of the program. It’s a fascinating look back, especially when you consider that those news scrolls you see on the bottom of the news channels are definitely not a new thing!

Also, be on the lookout for the technical glitches along the way. It may be innovative, but it sure wasn’t perfect.

Just a note - if you’re not in the US, you likely will not be able to view the videos on there, as it is designed for American viewers - much like the ABC’s forthcoming Playback program and the BBC’s iPlayer are only available to Australia and the UK respectively.

The thing to note is that this can only be a good thing for the networks - while it might sound like buying into “the man’s” plans - I think it’s great that the networks are actually embracing the technology that is available to them in order to provide something that they know (thanks to YouTube and other sites) that viewers are interested in viewing. The best part of it all is that it is free.

Somehow, I don’t mind seeing a 30-second commercial every ten minutes or so; or, on a longer video, watching a longer ad and being able to watch the whole program ad-free.

I don’t know where it went wrong with what I did when I posted my first attempt at editing a theme, but what happened was something that, to this day, still confounds me quite a bit. Just to recap the story up to here, I had found a theme that I liked for my blog, but after finding some major flaws with it (i.e. “F–K THIS” written out in the header, the CSS file being lumped together in one big chunk), I changed themes to this one. However, I then wanted to revisit the theme and see if I could improve upon it. The final result wound up being my first foray into theme tweaking.

However, I made a critical error in that post - I took the initiative to find the actual site of the person who created the theme, and linked to his post that announced the original release of it. I made sure to give the credit where it was due, because a lot of the hard work was done already, and I thought that the original creator would not have issues with having a theme redone (with all original links left intact in the theme’s files - even though they go to sites which aren’t the same as when the theme was made originally).

Clearly, I was wrong.

I published the post at 11.44PM, and got a comment shortly afterward, but about 6 hours after publishing, I got this notification of a new comment -

That was followed, almost immediately after, by an email about a new contact form that I received, with a similar message -

Now, after receiving these messages, I dutifully did what I was asked by him to do - removed the download link. I would have thought that it was enough to just do that, but apparently he didn’t like my only doing that - he wanted the whole thing scrapped, so about 12 hours after the first comment was dropped, I received this comment -

The hilarious thing about all of this is that he claims to hold copyright over that particular theme, but a quick inspection of the theme’s files yields nothing in the way of a license, or even a copyright notice in the CSS file (which is the standard place for doing things like that). Even themes released with a license are released under the GPL license, which allows you to modify the work, so long as you keep record of the originator of the work, which I had done. After receiving the mails and contact forms, it was time to do a bit of a mea culpa, by sending an email with a profuse apology for any infringements:

Any even-handed person probably would have taken note of the fact that I hadn’t done this before, and been slightly lenient about it, even possibly allowing the download to be available again. Again, I was wrong. This was the reply that I received to my email:

It was at this point that I started to do some searching into his supposed claims over copyright and everything to do with him, and this brought up an interesting revelation. Let me share the line I used when I found this bit of information out -

[1/13/2008 8:13:51 PM] Sephy says: hmm…i was assuming that he had dangly bits, apparently i’m wrong…M1l0 IllVIl has the right to contact and demand Participant to remove any non-suitable display or use of her work at any time (without reasons or explanations necessary).

That line was culled from her page with all the disclaimers she holds, which also has this hilarious bit of text, which would mean anyone who has downloaded one of her themes and changed even one thing would be in violation of these disclaimers -

Participant also agrees not to alter, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, or otherwise modify the Downloaded Material.

By that same logic, anybody who uses one of themes at all without asking her permission would fall afoul of this line -

ANY USE OR PARTIAL USE OF THE IMAGES; ILLUSTRATIONS; SENTENCES OR LOGOS OF M1L0I11IVII WORKS WITHOUT PERMISSION IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED

After that, Snoskred said that I should go ahead and re-release the theme without any of the supposedly copyrighted things - images, sentences, etc. In other words, release the theme as my own original work. There were a few other revelations that were discovered in searching her site. I did a little bit of digging into her site and found a post about a forum that this person had created. Now, for someone who had such a fit over one person modifying one of her themes, I was shocked to find this tidbit in the post -

post your modified m1l0 themes with screenshots

That sounds like a completely different story to what she was complaining about to me. In fact, if you look at the thread in which the themes are posted, one person asked if he could post his themes for others to use. The most hilarious thing is that the reply from her to his post was saying that his way of showing off the edited themes was the way it was intended! Anyone smell the irony?

Along with what I’d done already, I’d sought the input of someone who has done quite a bit of theme modification, and basically, they told me that if they were asked to take something down, they would. It was with that bit of information that I decided that maybe, the best way to handle this was to let her go on her way and let this go away as it was something that I didn’t need to deal with. That doesn’t mean that I had started to draft a reply back to her in response to her second email. This is what it looked like after I had stopped working on it -

But, the story doesn’t end there.

A couple of days later, she sent me another email that was very different to the other emails, which made the whole situation even more strange, as this was a mail that was actually halfway polite. This is what she sent -

For sure, it’s an interesting query; however, if you think about it taking and modifying a theme (with, as I noted in my reply to her, none of the acknowledgements changed), and try to correlate it to someone scraping your blog’s content, it doesn’t make any sense.

As it is, my plans for the near term when it comes to WordPress themes is that I’m going to take some time and read the information that is available on the WordPress codex in relation to writing your own themes. I have some ideas for my own. I might just start out with the sandbox theme to start with, just to get my bearings as to what is involved in a theme.