milliAmp

In true “Hamilton Winter” style, we had some fairly thick fog descend on the city earlier this week, after having to drive through it all, I decided to take my camera out and play with some long exposures.
The photos didn’t come out quite like I thought they would but they are still quite stunning to look at.

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.

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.