milliAmp

It has been a long time since I’ve actually designed a website/theme from start to finish, mocking it up, slicing and implementing it. I did one over the last few days for my girlfriend Aimee and realised how out of practise I am. It wasn’t really my CSS skills lacking but in Photoshop I really am not the most imaginative person. Anyway, I got an idea one night for a theme for Aimee’s website and got up in the morning and mocked it all up.

I never got around to fixing it in Internet Explorer, I don’t imagine it works correctly, for one, I didn’t put in the IE PNG Fix, and I definitely used 24-bit transparent PNGs in there. However, it works in Safari, Firefox and Opera and that seems to be all the Aimee cares about so that is that for now, maybe some fixes another day.

I put it live this afternoon, it could definitely use a few tweaks and finishing touches but I think I’m happy with how it came out.

Aimee is planning on moving around the structure of her site, which is using WordPress. In that respect the navigation isn’t particularly useful at the moment and the front page is going to be a static page rather than her blog.

Also, I got bored near the end and put a weird little Easter egg into the theme, try double-clicking the wings.

After having a rather hilarious conversation at work last week about someone being able to literally punch another “into the ground”, I decided it would be an interesting experiment to buy intotheground.com and then make a small system that showed a phrase in large letters that ended in “into the ground”.

I wrote a small PHP Script to turn the hostname into a phrase, popped in Google Analytics and bingo, a weird, crazy, phrase thing.

http://i.want.to.punch.you.intotheground.com/

Decided to add a small “make your own” box at the bottom too.

At my house, we have a VoIP line provided by Xnet. In my house, I have a small QoS router that has two POTS plug that allow my to plug my normal phones into the VoIP line. What is even better is that the Caller ID that comes with the line also gets displayed on the phones I have.

As I’m incredibly lazy, I set about finding a way for my computer to tell me who was calling when the phone rang instead of having to find the cordless phone (or run to the corded one if it was flat) to check who was calling. I have set an option in the control panel at Xnet that sends me an email whenever someone rings my home, which includes the Caller ID but alas, it still takes the email about 30 seconds to arrive in my inbox (I check my email every 1 minute) so it didn’t really help to know who it was before I picked it up.

It turns out that the router’s status page displays the state of the VoIP line and also the last number that called it. Bingo! I whipped up a little PHP CLI script that polled the router’s status page for when the status was “Ringing” and captured the phone number displayed there.

I then added a piece of AppleScript that interfaces with Address Book on MacOS X which could translate a phone number into a name if that number was in the Address Book.

The last piece of the puzzle was to utilise the command line program called growlnotify to send out a Growl notification and made it send out to the two laptops in the house.

I placed this script on the Mac Mini I have connected in the lounge and set it running. A few bug fixes later and I now have Growl alerts show up on my laptop screen within about 3 seconds of my home phone ringing saying exactly who is ringing.

All in the name of laziness.

If anyone is interested, I can post the utility. The VoIP router I designed it for is the Linksys SPA-2102.

Wordpress 2.7 has a redesigned admin panel that goes a long way to making Wordpress more usable. When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 and deactivated the old Fluency Admin plugin I had installed to make the old admin more usable, I wanted to have a play around with the new Wordpress 2.7 Admin style. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me long to find a whole raft of things I didn’t like about it. For one I found the navigation clumsy and inconsistent in its “javascripty” interactions, and I really don’t like collapsing drawers like they have in the navigation now.

So I went hunting and found that Dean Robinson had released a new version of his Fluency Admin plugin rewritten from the ground up for the new version of Wordpress. After reading what the plugin changes and why on Dean’s website I knew I’d love it. So, I installed it and… wow. I loved the things Dean did with Fluency Admin 1 in previous versions of Wordpress and was suitably impressed with what he did with this one. 

Check out Dean’s page about the plugin for some screenshots. One thing I’m, really loving is similar to a function Habari has. Habari has quick keyboard shortcuts for all the major functions in the menu, and now with this plugin, Wordpress Admin has something similar. 

On a side note, the upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 went very smoothly, I have Wordpress installed the “subversion way” so one “svn switch” command then one Upgrade page visit and boom, all done.

I use a wonderful program called BluePhoneElite at home and at work to interface with my mobile phone over Bluetooth, reducing the need for me to take it out of my pocket. I can reply to text messages using my keyboard and can see who is calling me before I reach for my phone.

One other useful feature that I use is the screensaver reactor which is activated when I move my phone in and out of Bluetooth range of the computer. It automatically starts my screensaver when I leave my desk and turns it off again when I come close. 

This is all pretty dandy and great but there is one little Mac OS feature I’d like to use, “Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver”. What I’d like to have happen is that if I come back within range of my computer, it won’t require a password. My workstation doesn’t require very high security and as long as there is one factor of authentication for being able to access my machine I’m happy, either my password or my phone being in range.

Implementing a feature like that would probably present a range of issues for the developers and if ever created may end up with some sort of custom screensaver implementation or finding a background way of killing off the screensaver when the device is brought back in range.

When I was 9, my parents, my brother and I took a trip around the world to visit Mum’s relatives, Dad’s friends and other family friends they had built up over the years. One place I’ve never been to though, is Australia.

I think I might have an opportunity to “jump the ditch” as they say and have a holiday over in Australia next year. A couple of our friends are heading over there for the Soundwave ‘09 Festival in February/March next year. Aimee and I are hoping we’ll be able to save enough money to go too but it does mean that I’ll probably need to negotiate time off from my new job only 4 months after starting which may or may not be a problem. The concert is only for one day, depending on which city we go to but we’ll want to stay at least a couple of days.

The bands performing at Soundwave include some of my favourites like Madina Lake, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Funeral for a Friend, New Found Glory and hellogoodbye as well as some major headliners like Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains and Bloodhound Gang.

As of Tuesday, 28th October 2008, I’ll be moving jobs from Evos Group Ltd. to Enlighten Designs Ltd..

I’ll be straight into C# ASP .NET programming which is all new to me. They have a ton of work on at the moment so they’re hoping I can hit the ground running and I hope so too. It should be lots of fun.

Tom and I have decided to move all of our sites from our hosting at StartLogic to something a little more reliable. We decided to give MediaTemple’s Grid-Service a go. I’ve been trying to get all our sites migrated over but because we want as little disruption as possible we needed everything that was running currently documented.

So far it has been fun, this site has been running from the new system for a couple of weeks now and I haven’t noticed anything that isn’t working and the control panel is great for a pseudo-shared-hosting control panel.

My workplace Evos has been using MediaTemple for over a year now and we’ve only had great customer service and awesome uptimes so we didn’t have any qualms about switching over.

I’m not a fan Hannah Montana but this caught my eye. The director of Step Up 2: The Streets issued a dance-off challenge to Miley Cyrus (who plays Hannah Montana) and Mandy Jiroux who produce the “Miley and Mandy show” on YouTube.

Whether the idea was conceived as a marketing stunt or not, it certainly has a lot of followers now.

If you like Hip-hop dancing, check out these videos on Youtube:

By now you must have heard the noise about Vodafone New Zealand’s announcement of their iPhone 3G Plans.

What a lot of people are saying is that compared to international prices, these plan details are extortionate. Vodafone have made the point that their plans compare with what is on the market in New Zealand already but that doesn’t seem good enough.

A Vodafone Marketing representative got monstered on Campbell Live last night in typical John Campbell fashion. I don’t think the guy completely expected John Campbell to have complete listings of the plans available to iPhone customers from all over the world right in front of him. The guy had to stick to “we are offering a range of plans” that “represent great value” for New Zealand customers.

Vodafone also mentioned that the upfront cost for the handset on their cheapest plan is comparable to the price of an iPod Touch. Currently in the USA, the iPod Touch is more expensive than the iPhone. You normally expect a handset-subsidy when you sign up on a long contract and that point was basically saying that on the $80 a month plan you get no subsidy.

I was waiting out to see these prices to decide whether I’d get an iPhone. The announcement in the US of such cheap prices gave me a little glimmer of hope when Vodafone announced they would also offer the iPhone from as low as $199. The catch is that to get the phone for $199, you have to sign up for a 24 month contract at $250 a month. This includes 1GB of internet traffic and 600 minutes as well as 600 text messages but comparing to plans overseas it falls far short as most countries offer a plan cheaper far cheaper than that which includes unlimited traffic.

Unfortunately, I won’t be getting one in the near future. Public pressure has caused a Swiss provider to alter their iPhone plans, we’ll see if the consumer attitude is similar in New Zealand. I hope Vodafone have shot themselves in the foot. They had the potential to murder the market share statistics by getting a bunch of people who haven’t yet had a PDA or cell phone into the market by making this device affordable, similar to what has happened in the US but it appears they’ve lost that chance. It would have been perfect considering Telecom’s imminent entry into the UMTS world.

You can buy the iPhone from Vodafone without a contract by visiting a Vodafone store but the 8GB model will cost you $979 and the 16GB model $1129. However you apparently won’t be able to access the internet via the Vodafone network without a Mobile Broadband contract.

Also, visual voicemail will not be available from launch in New Zealand and you apparently cannot use an iPhone on Prepay.

Oh well.

It turns out you can use the iPhone on Vodafone’s existing on account plans as long as you have a mobile broadband plan. This means you can get an iPhone for $849 on a plan which includes 200MB Data ($0.50/mb overage charge), 40 text messages, 20 anytime minutes and 60 off-peak minutes for $48.90. This may be appropriate for those who want to only use their iPhone occasionally. This plan is the Mobilise 200 + YouChoose Base plan.