Pixel Pushing Monkey

Quite frankly, I never expected this will ever come true, especially so soon after the release of Kindle 2. At this point, Kindle 2 is just barely hot off the press, shipping to those early adopters, and already it's being replaced by a software platform strategy. You have to wonder about Amazon's claim of Kindle success. For as long as Amazon has tauted Kindle being a hot selling, successful consumer electronic product, the company has been more than reluctant to release any sort of sales figure. During the Kindle shortage throughout the holiday season, Amazon would not divulge any production schedule or data.

Every consumer product company, regardless of industry, understands the important in marketings its own success. McDonald's with their millions of burgers served, Pepsi with their "4 out of 5 people prefers the taste of Pepsi over Coke", Apple with their millions of iPhones shipped. Publishing these numbers breeds consumer confidence, and leads to increasing momentum for the popularity of your product. So why isn't Amazon more forthcoming? Is Kindle really as much of a success as Amazon want the outside world to believe?

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Meanwhile I'm working on a completely new template for my blog, I made the decision to temporarily rever the blog's template to something very simplistic. This will give me the flexibility to be able to add richer content without having to worry about the constraints of the previous blog template, and start looking forward to the eventual implementation of the new one.

I did run into one snag: Since WordPress's own default theme is really formatted for a fixed width 800x600 screen, it doesn't jive with my new design & content areas. I looked around and found this theme, which is a 1024 adaptation of the original WordPress template. You can download this template here:

WordPress Default Theme 1024 Wide

I've been contemplatinng creating a new blog template... perhaps something that's completely written from the ground up by yours truly. Can't say when I'll have it done, but at least by making the fact public, it might give me enough push & motivation to get it done.

I still can't find what's wrong with AJAXed WordPress. After a few back & forth on the author's forum here, he offered a few things that I could look into, but nothing I did or could look into solved the problem. The only thing either of us can point to seems to be some weird error thrown by the newest version of WordPress:

Warning: htmlspecialchars_decode() expects parameter 1 to be string, NULL given in /home2

/pixelpu1/public_html/blog/wp-includes/compat.php on line 105

I can't figure out what that means... there are nothing in the configuration that even points to that directory. Comparing the old "compat.php" in WP 2.7 and WP 2.7.1 revealed that the new compat.php file is incredibly huge compared to the old one, seemingly with a lot more error checking routine than before.

The only thing I can do for now, is revert back to WP 2.7. I'm also considering a new blog layout that will probably make AJAxed WordPress unnecessary anyway.... Things to ponder...

AJAXed WP is still broken, but I've reactivated it in hopes that the author can come take a look and try to figure out what's going on. I've tried several things, including:

• Disabling all addons other than AJAXed WP.
• Re-uploading all the files from WP 2.7.1.
• Re-uploading AJAXed WP files manually.
• Changing back to default theme.

Nothing's worked so far... I'm gonna try a database repair or something next.

Update:

Performed some database maintenance routines... optimizing and removing overhead. It's not having any effects.

I upgraded to WP 2.7.1 today, and it broke some functionality in the "AJAXed Wordpress" plugin. So if you click all the "click to continue reading..." links, they won't work.  I'm too lazy to deactivate the plugin right now, since it'll make my "wall of text" look even more daunting than ever. You can still read the full blog post by clicking on the title.

Hope they fix it soon.

Update: Temporarily disabled the addon and inserted old school ---more--- tags on the more recent posts.

For most of my childhood, I was a scrawny little boy that didn't eat very much. I developed a habit of eating junk food before dinner, eating while watching TV, and leaving half bowl full of food sitting around while doing homework. Even when Mom forced me to sit at the dinner table, eventually I'll find a way to migrate over to the TV and my desk. Neither Mom or I could've predicted how much I would grow to love food. Oh, the miracles of puberty.

As irony would have it, my puberty wouldn't arrive until I moved to America to live with Dad. It's almost as if all those years of begging to finish my dinner was completely pointless, as Dad took all the credit for my healthy development into a young adult with little and no effort. Not that my Dad was a terrible cook, in fact he was a terrific cook when he had the time; but it was also a fact that Dad could've fed me anything remotely resembling human food, and I would've gladly shoveled them with complete disregard to the actual content.

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QuickSilver, for those who are unfamiliar, is one of the greatest software utility on Mac. On its most basic level, it is a text-based application launcher. With some experience with its more intricate features, you can select and copy multiple files from different locations, append text into files, create drawers for multiple copy and paste as well as storing text clippings. Some people would go as far as getting rid of OS X's dock altogether and base their entire workflow on just QuickSilver alone.

In the past year though, the development of QuickSilver came to a grinding halt. It was put into the open source community but received very little attention since. The original developer of QuickSilver now works for Google's Mac division, and has been focused on other projects. So imagine my excitement when I came across the article on Smoking Apples Blog that the same developer has unveiled his latest project, Google Quick Search for the Mac.

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IM conversation of my friend asking me what I was doing on New Year's Eve. Well, it's really just me rambling on, but I do that a lot anyway.

I'm not big on new years celebration anymore.
my friends & I used to go up to Twin Peaks in San Francisco every year, years and years ago.. and watch the fireworks.

'til this one year, we all got sick
because it's super windy & cold up there on New Year's Eve
and that was the last time
of course, everyone also went their own separate ways
because we all deeply hated each other
deep inside...

No, not really... it makes a good backstory for some sort of a revenge epic involving former best friends who acquires super powers and then proceeds to destroy like... downtown Tokyo or something in their fights.

Oh, the things my friends put up with. Or something like that... (trying to figure out a clever thing to say to close this post....)

...

Me: I'm full of useless analogies today.

Tinu: You can be a writer!

Me: I am, according to my own blog.

Tinu: Haha.