However, I could philosophize even more about the pros and cons of this themeable-web-interface-for-YQL but I’m actually not that much into it to do so. The reason for registering was mainly for the hype’s sake and besides, I actually planned to reserve my everywhere used nickname “devilx” – unfortunately it was already taken by an as-it-seems porn addicted guy. :-(
If this guy should coincidentally follow my blog and read this: I would be very thankful, if you could pass me that subdomain name, so I can make use of it for more than just an empty page named “Default” and following porn. Thank you!

Oh well, enough for today. Read (someday) more on http://mariusmm.tumblr.com/. Enjoy! :-)

So, what’s new in 0.3? Well, just about everything. I’ve renamed the bundle (at least its metadata), since webOS is not just limited to the Pre and I’ve modified the shortcuts of existing features to fit TextMate’s styling guidelines a bit better. I’ve also created some snippets which can be used for faster code-writing now and in addition to that, I’ve implemented a very own language for the bundle, which can’t be found in the document type picker named as “Mojo”. “Yeah baby!”, as Austin would say now. Actually, yet it’s just a copy & paste of the JavaScript-language implementation in TextMate, but I’m planning to extend it to fit the Mojo-framework even better.

The TextMate bundle is now also available on GitHub, for everyone who can’t wait for me packaging the releases and releasing them here. :-) If you have any ideas for improvement, feel free to contact me by mail or just leave some lines here on my blog.

Enjoy!

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Download: Palm_webOS-Bundle-0.3

Google Wave Dev Preview

I can happily announce (or brag :-P) that I’ve just received my Google Wave invitation today and already created my account. I’m really excited of exploring and developing on Google’s Wave, especially with the ideas I already have in mind. Yet, I just clicked around a bit, due to the lack of free time, but as soon as I can I will take a deeper look at the API and try out some stuff I might even publish here. So stay tuned to see read (and maybe see) the latest progress of my Wavealicious ideas/implementations. :-)

Btw, you can contact me on Wave via devilx@wavesandbox.com.

53F9 D987 BB30 94E3 24DF 05D9 95C0 28A3 5D4E ED42

You can also find it linked on my contact page. I’ve also already revoked the old key on the MIT-PGP server, it’s just a matter of time until it gets unusable on all the other servers, too.

That’s it already. Later. :-)

The biggest news is only visible if you pinged devilx.net before and re-ping it now: You would see, that its IP has changed. After my web-space’s performance at Strato got more and more terrible (download rates of 6kb/s), I decided to move my blog to a provider I’m more familiar with, where I pay less for even more: HostEurope.

The actual transition was pretty much squabbling, since the WordPress installation I was running at Strato was some never-changed-just-upgraded-from-1.x installation, where WordPress used a latin1-database. This caused me some trouble when moving to the new host, but I solved it by writing myself a conversion script that removes all “random” characters from the database-dumps and converted the databases to UTF-8. As front-end, I’m now running the latest WordPress-release available.

After I’ve finished the transition I looked at the Prologue-theme I was using and thought that an exchange (YES WE CAN!) could bring some freshness to my journal. Though, I had to keep in mind the work I hacked into my Prologue-theme (like for example the iPhone detection bundled with the theme-changer, and so on), since I didn’t want to lose these things. I’ve found a nice theme, downloaded and installed it and started extending it. The main problem with my actual Hemingway-theme is, that it doesn’t make use of standard WordPress widgets. Instead it uses its own widget-concept, what pretty much made me write every widget I wanted to use on my journal from scratch – and so I did. For some, I took existing WordPress widgets and transformed them to work with my current Hemingway, others, I hacked in from ground up. I will still need to extend the widgets a bit more, for example to make use of some caching, so that the widgets won’t reload each tweet or gallery picture every time a user opens a new link on my journal. Correction: Done. :-) I’ve now implemented caching, even before going live, just to avoid data-transfer/connection troubles.

Altogether I hope that the browsing experience will be more enjoyable now. At the moment, the site’s speed seems to be pretty good, but I’ll keep an eye on it when the heavy usage starts. Feel free to write me some feedback regarding the site’s new layout and the site’s speed. :-)

Enjoy!

Since I’ve already posted a quite descriptive post regarding the theme itself, I won’t beat around the bush now. For those who haven’t read the initial story, here you can review it. You can download the theme by clicking the link at the bottom of this page. Note, that the theme needs the theme-switcher-reloaded Plugin for WordPress to be up and running to work properly. Additional to that, you will need to make some changes to your actual theme, which allows the user to actually switch to the iPhone theme. These changes depend on what theme you are using, but in general you need to modify your theme’s header.php and include a code like this one:

<?php
if(empty($_COOKIE["iphonetheme" . COOKIEHASH]))
{
if (stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'iPhone'))
{
echo "<div style=\"background-color: #F66; color: #fff; padding: 8px;\">";
echo "You seem to be browsing this site from your iPhone or iPod Touch.";
echo "Would you like to <a href=\"?wptheme=iphone\" title=\"\">change to the optimized site</a>?";
echo "</div>";
}
}
?>


The iPhone Theme itself already contains a button which provides you to switch back to the regular theme.

However, feel free to download, distribute, modify and have fun with my WordPress iPhone Theme – it’s released under GNU GPLv2!

Download: WordPress iPhone 0.1

//edit: So, after being asked by some people, what this post means, I’m just going to append some more info.

On the 20th of March my Blog became four years old. I launched it in 2005, after the team-project called “Code.dev” just dissolved. Though, then ago it was not called “A Place Full of Dorkness”.. I remember it was something like “My life, my stuff”. However, now, after already four years yet I’m still here and yet I’m still blogging, heh. :-) I hope there will be some more years of blogging-fun… enjoy!

The red block let's you choose.

I’ve been now using Prologue for quite a very long time – I guess longer than I’ve ever used one WordPress theme before – and I’m highly pleased of it. However, even that Prologue has a built-in iPhone/iPod Touch browser-detection which cuts away the sidebar and only keeps the important news-stream in focus, I haven’t been very satisfied by that. The font is still pretty small, nearly unreadable, the links are therefor pretty hard to hit, et cetera.

However, yesterday then Andi showed me some pretty nice little framework he just found, what actually doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress itself, but made me think of a very cool idea. The iWebKit-Framework is a small set of CSS and image files that concentrates on building a website in a way so that it looks just like an iPhone or iPod Touch Application. The whole thing’s appearance is pretty sexy, you can take a look at the downloads and get the framework plus some example HTML files for testing.

My optimized front-page.

So, I took a closer look on the iWebKit stuff and did some (again better, a lot of!) PHP WordPress theme hacking. I think I spent the whole night building that thing – but I also think that it was worth it, heh. And I guess, I’ve created a revolutionary and new WordPress theme aimed for the usage on iPhones and iPod Touches – the only problem I had left was: How to I get WordPress to use this theme only on the tiny Safari, but on nothing else? After some more PHP hacking, which included modifying my Prologue theme but not the actual WordPress (what’s the really cool thing within the whole story), I’ve found a way.

When you browse my WordPress now using your iPhone, you should be getting a red message right on top of the site, which tells you that it has detected the tiny Safari and suggests you to use the iPhone optimized theme. If you confirm by clicking the first link, the whole site’s design should get to look just like on the pictures I’ve inserted here.

My contact information - optimized.

I will extend the theme some more, maybe by building in JavaScript effects or other Eye-Candy, to make it fit even better into the iPhones Look & Feel. I was also thinking of some Cover-Flow’ish effect for my Gallery (which at the moment just links to my Picasa-Site, but thanks to the great API provided by Google it shouldn’t be too hard to implement that right into the page).

Maybe, after some more testing I’ll be able to provide it for download, including a whole documentation of how to make it work. :-) Until then, I hope you enjoy browsing my Blog, especially over the iPhone or your iPod Touch. Please feel free to write me your impressions, feedback and also suggestions for improvement by commenting here or writing me an e-mail. So far …

Have fun!

I think, that I should maybe upgrade the package some time or maybe totally change the webspace provider. Some time ago, I registered some domains via Hosteurope, I could take a look whether they can provide me more performant webspace for a blog. I mean, come on, it’s a WordPress with nearly no traffic. It can’t be that it’s that slow. *grml*

Oh well.

Spam-Chart

So, I was just wondering how my Akismet’s well-being is, since the 13th of November, the day I’ve set it up on my blog. I browsed its stats and took a look over the spam statistics and I really have to say, that it’s pretty good working out for me. I didn’t think of receiving that much spam, but as it seems I’m getting monthly over one hundred comments which are just spam. I browsed to the spam queue and it’s true: All comments blocked by Akismet are spam-comments. It’s really cool, since the plugin integrates very nice into WordPress and there is no patching needed when upgrading to another version or changing the blog’s theme (one of my favorite hobbies).

Though, I’m wondering how that many spammers got attracted to my tiny, winey blog and what they actually hoping for, when spamming my posts with crappy comments? As it seems, 76% of the comments I receive are spam and only 24% are Ham. Hm… well. Whatever.

My first Dashboard Widget

So, I’ve just played around a bit with Dashcode, Apple’s IDE for Dashboard-Widget development, and I have to say that it’s pretty cool. It’s quite easy to use and provides excellent WYSIWYG features. I just started a default RSS-Reader project and customized the template it gave me the way I liked it. It’s really interesting what can be done with a little JavaScript. Of course, by using that script language, Dashboard Widgets might not be the best in performance or system-usage, but in my opinion this way is a better one for writing widgets, than for example OpenSource projects like Karamba provide. I don’t want to have to learn Python from ground up, just to be able to write my own RSS-Reader widget. And of course, for writing more advanced Widgets with Dashcode, the developer must know JavaScript – but it’s a small difference between the time it takes to learn simple JavaScript and the time it takes to just understand Python or whatever other language.

However, I think I might be doing some more playing around with Dashcode. I don’t know yet what widgets to implement, but I’m sure I’ll find some interesting ideas I could realize.

You can download the RSS-Reader for my Blog here. Enjoy! :-)

A Place Full Of Dorkness

A Place Full Of Dorkness

Visit Archive.org :-)

The first Snow, this morning.

When I got this morning, I’ve been pretty shocked when my precious girl happily screamed “SNOW!!!” through the apartment. First I actually did not believe her and though she would just want to fool me, but after taking a look out of the window (yepp, I don’t do that right after I wake up, …) I saw it myself: This morning the first snow for this year just fell and accordingly to that the traffic was chaotic and dangerous. I’ve seen three accidents on the highway while driving slowly to work and really had to pay attention to not involve myself into a fourth one. I guess I really need to buy snow-tires this year.

I was really surprised of the snow, especially with the past few years in mind. In this region of Germany we didn’t had snow until the middle of Januar in the last two years, so I assumed that it’ll be the same this year – which is why I didn’t organize myself some snow-tires till yet. I’m really afraid of tomorrow being even snowier than today. :-/

Anyway, what else happened in the last few days/weeks(/months?). I haven’t been blogging anymore, since I’ve ordered an upgrade of my webspace at Strato (on the 10th of October) and they told me to backup everything I have uploaded on my account. This request made me think “Hm, let’s not write anything anymore, let’s not change content, in a few they the upgrade will be done and I’ll be able to blog again.“… WRONG!* They didn’t seem to be doing anything till now. And besides, they didn’t even answered the mails I wrote, in which I asked for some status info about the upgrade. I’m kinda disappointed of the Strato support on this, because actually I had the support center as a pretty good and reliable contact point in mind. :-/ Eh, I’ll just wait and see what happens. At least they didn’t charge me for anything – yet.

What else is new… well. Today my salary arrived, so I ordered a new iPod Touch. But I think this is not worth mentioning, since everyone has an iPod Touch today. Lately I’ve seen the Apple Keynote for October and I really fell in love with these new aluminum (A-LU-MI-NI-UM, dear AE-speakers, not “aluminum” ;-) ) MacBooks Apple presented. I think it would be a great gadget for the Norway trip mpain and I’m planning for next year.

However, so far. I think I’ll start up blogging again, until I’ll receive at least some info from Strato.

* Thanks again to Michael for this link! It’s amazing funny.

Now, I’m planning to do some more work on this theme and add some own modifications to it, to make it look even sexier. I have something with flat shapes in mind… but you’ll see when it’s done. :-)

I hope you like the temporary new look – don’t get used to, it will keep on changing by the time passing. ;-)

Btw: You might have noticed that I enabled permalinks. I just wanted to test the feature and if it works out, I’ll keep it like that.

REX Car Entertainment System

Btw: The theming documentation on Splashy is crap! I’m searching for a way to include an animated GIF into my Splashy-theme for two hours now and can’t find anything about that. *grml*

What else is new? As you can see I’ve added a new category to my blog called “Mac and stuff …”. I didn’t do that for fun, some weeks ago I just bought an used Apple PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.8. I found out that these toys can be pretty usefull (and no, by toys I do not only mean Laptops, I also mean Mac OSs) and it really is damn fast for the lousy 400 MHz it works on. Yesterday I just got the new 2,5″ hard-drive I ordered and hacked (not mounted, hacked) it into the Apple. Reason for this was the complete dumbness of the way Apple fixes the harddisks into their notebooks, but I guess it’s like with my car – it looks sexy but when it comes to repairing things you’re getting mad.

However, beside that PowerBook I donated myself an (also used) AirPort and some other W-LAN router for finally being proxyless with more than one computer online. The reason for buying two (W-LAN) routers was that the other HP notebook I have here lying around couldn’t really communicate with the AirPort and I didn’t want to wire it up. As soon as I’ll have some little time I’ll draw a picture of my actual network-infrastructure – it’s funny to hear it, but it’s even funnier to see it, heh.

So okay, I guess that was it for the moment. Now I gotta go to tell everybody about my new c00l l33t h0ax0r site !!!!!11111 11 11elevenel1even one1on1e ;)

I’ve found a very, very, very nice theme on the internet called Vivacity by Beng Hafner. The theme base is very cool, I just didn’t like some stuff on in, like the banner or the extras displayed on the site footer. I designed some own banners using images made by Jason Brooks (by the way, one of the greatest artists today) and also changed some other CSS things in Beng’s theme. The actual result of all my work is what you see now, I hope you like it.