milliAmp

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.