Chris Thomas: The blog (18)

looks like I hit a raw nerve with all the freetards coming out of the woodwork to “debunk” me publically.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/2/2010/02/13/openoffice_review

I put my name on the web and I put my money where my mouth is, hardly anyone has the balls to do that it seems and when they do, they make such a complete cock of themselves it’s incredible.

Imagine this, I give point after point about why openoffice is failing and why office 2007 has gotten it right.  Yet instead of detailing a single point why I am wrong, they say that I’m a whiney corporate schill or perhaps that i’m using straw man arguments.  Yet instead of details WHY all this is true, they just say it and hope that it becomes true.

We, my friends, are in classic freetard territory, where the person who ends the discussion with “your wrong” wins.  Classic idiot territory is another way you can describe it.

Here my freetarded friends, I shall give you a point by point way to success in: How to have online discussion

1) if someone says something you don’t like, it’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to put the world straight

2) if you wish to do this, you must counter what is being said, with arguments that address the original text

3) Saying “Your wrong!!!!one!!!!eleventy!” does not make you win the discussion, it just makes you look stupid

4) if you reply like this and you get smacked down, it’s because you’re an idiot, go back to working in McDonalds, the world does not need you

5) If you do reply in an intelligent manner, do not attack the person, if you get called an idiot, most likely, it’s because instead of replying the argument, you retorted that “you must think that because you’re stupid” because thats a sure fire way to lose any argument.

6) if you abuse me, I shall abuse you, plus if I am right and you havent demonstrated intelligence, I reserve the right to publically pound you until I get bored.

Those simple yet effective rules, shall guide you to your path, if they don’t, please go back to your basement, nobody cares about you and I really hope nobody procreates with you also.

A good example of DOING_IT_WRONG is clearly demonstrated here:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/2/2010/02/13/openoffice_review

You can see some people have demonstrated intelligence and are replied in the same way that they have done so, you can also see lots of people who have demonstrated idiocy and the resulting wrath that is laid upon them.

Happy commenting!

February 15th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

hi guys,

now, I’m a prototype guy, I can do jquery, but I find it easier to build apps and OOP structures using prototype, but one of the things that annoys me about it is that sometimes it doesnt respect my authority!

say you have an element in your page you want to fade in and out with opacity settings, normally, in my code, I set display: none, then I set opacity: 0 and when I want to fade it in, I have a little reusable function that uses prototypes setOpacity() method to abstract the differences between how IE and firefox do things.

but the problem with setOpacity is that when opacity reaches 1, or 100 in IE, the method removes the opacity attribute by setting opacity:”" which basically removes the attribute, the reason this is done is because in IE, the cleartype font rendering hates opacity settings and when you fade in an element using a interval based animation, the font type screws up and looks ugly. in all the other browsers it’s fine, just IE.

so whilst your transition fade is happening, you’re fonts look ugly, the answer therefore is to not use the attribute, but well, not much choice if you want to fade something in, so their answer at prototype was to remove the attribute when the element was faded into view, because they view opacity:”" as the same as opacity:1 but opacity:1 has font rendering issues, but opacity:”" basically removes the opacity settings and then that means the element is displayed perfectly opaquely.

The problem with this, is that if you have in your stylesheet opacity:0 for example, in firefox, when you reach opacity:1, your element disappears, because setOpacity then does opacity:”" which mean it’ll default back to your stylesheet, opacity:0

Their answer was kinda obvious dont put opacit settings in the stylesheet.  So basically I have to find another way of doing things just because of what happens when they handle setOpacity(1), which to me, is stupid.

The answer that I came up with was an extra parameter which when set to a true value, would mean that setOpacity(1) would result in opacity:1 and not opacity:”" and false would do the status quo.

setOpacity(1) -> opacity:”"

setOpacity(1,true) -> opacity: 1

to me, it’s my decision wheteher I want to live with crappy font rendering or not, I prefer to let IE users have crappy fonts than cramp my development style working around bugs in prototype.

So I created a patch and uploaded it onto their lighthouse development system, it got rejected, or forgotten about, or whatever.

But if you, like me, want that setOpacity(1) means opacity:1, then you can download the file I have attached below because it is a modified version of prototype 1.6.1 with the modifications I made against 1.6.0.3 for the new force attribute.

Enjoy and please let me know if you think this is a good idea or a bad idea!

prototype.js 1.6.1 w/setOpacity modifications

February 10th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hi guys,

another modification for the fotobook plugin for facebook is the ability to automatically update albums based on a timer, which is great if you casually add photos to the facebook albums, but don’t remember to update them in wordpress, you can actually get the system to update itself.

Firstly, it’ll only work on albums you have already selected to show in the wordpress blog, so if you add a new album, you’ll still have to manually add that through the wordpress blog administration panel.

Secondly, open the fotobook.php file from the fotobook plugin in your favourite text editor and search for the this function

“function fb_display_main”

You’ll find it around line 930.

above it, add the following NEW function

function fb_periodic_update()
{
@session_start();

$current = time();
$timeout = 300;

if(!isset($_SESSION["fb_update_timeout"]))
{
$_SESSION["fb_update_timeout"] = $current - $timeout;
}

if(isset($_SESSION["fb_update_timeout"]))
{
if(($_SESSION["fb_update_timeout"] + $timeout) <= $current) { $_SESSION["fb_update_timeout"] = $current; $facebook = new FacebookAPI; if($facebook->link_active()) $facebook->update_albums();
}
}
}

Then at the top of the function fb_display_main(), do this


function fb_display_main($content) {
remove_filter('the_content','wpautop');
fb_periodic_update();

....the rest of the function don't touch it......

now whenever you open the fotobook albums page, every 500 seconds, it’ll refresh from facebook the photos you have in all the albums.  I tried it myself and it works beautifully!

So, I hope you have fun modifying wordpress plugins! Keep the flame burning!

January 27th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Recently I started to keep a fotoblog of my puppy Zora, the reason is that sadly, zora doesn’t live with me anymore because she lives with Cecilia now, who moved back to Amposta.

So I was feeling sad and thought that to cheer me up, or depress me more, I could start a fotoblog of all the happy memories I had and I could share with others who don’t have facebook.

The one thing I wanted to do was to import facebook albums, because I have a lot of cool pictures on it and I came across fotobook, which is really cool, you install it, connect it to your fb account, give permissions to access the albums and then import the album information which then lets you put that up on your wordpress blog.

One modification that I wanted to do to it though was that I wanted to import pictures from a fan page and also from my user account, which with the default, was not possible.

What follows below is a method to obtain albums from your account and any number of fan pages you want, here is how to do it

==========================

you will need to open the ftp of your wordpress and using your favourite editor, open the fotobook.php file from the plugin after it’s been installed, around line: 290, you’ll find a foreach() statemen and just below it $uid = $session["uid"]; that is where all this starts.

the idea that someone had was to replace this with $uid = “123123123″; where the 123123 number is the id of the fan page, this works, but the problem is that you also lose the ability to import albums from your account, so I was thinking of a way to do both, import from fan pages AND your user account AND any number of other fan pages (because you can just repeat the function call multiple times as many fan pages as you want)

I posted this to the help forum, I copypasta it here also

==========================

I have an extension for this idea grabbing the fan pages.

as mentioned above, you can use the following code

//$uid = $session["uid"];
$uid = “12312312312″; <— fan page id

but a muuuch better idea is to refactor the code that grabs the albums, so you can call it multiple times, with any fan page id you could want, I explain.

just above the line where you comment out the session uid and put the fan page id, you find a foreach() statement, which loops through and grabs albums associated with that session uid, the modification basically says, screw the session uid, choose the fan page id instead

my idea is this, create a new method like this:

function get_multiple_album(&$fb_albums,&$fb_photos,$page_uid=false){

}

inside that method, copy and paste the ENTIRE foreach statement, just above it, if you are not a developer, this will be hard, find someone to help you understand how to program, then try it.

paste the code into the new method you’ve called and where the foreach was before, replace it with something like this

if($this->get_multiple_album($fb_albums,$fb_photos) == false) return false;
if($this->get_multiple_album($fb_albums,$fb_photos,”123123123123″) == false) return false;

where 1231231231 is obviously the fan page.

you also notice the first call to get_multiple_albums doesnt have a number like, 123123, it’s because that we are going to use a DEFAULT PARAMETER, to define that in this case, use your account, there is no fan page number, so use the account number instead

the benefit of this is now you can call it multiple times for any number of fan pages you might want to import from, you are not just limiting yourself to only one fan page, now you can import your accounts albums, plus any number of facebook fan pages.

inside the method, you will have to make a modification

where it USED TO SAY

$uid = $session["uid"];

replace it with

$uid = ($page_uid !== false) ? $page_uid : $session["uid"];

now go back to wordpress, import all your albums, hide the ones you want to keep private and you’re all set to go.

I hope it helps you

January 26th, 2010 | Tags: wordpress facebook fotobook modification | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

you are DOING IT WRONG!

The glasses go on the eyes man! jees, these labour guys can’t do anything right!

January 24th, 2010 | Tags: labour sucks ass | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hey guys,

over at the times, there is an article about some british scientists who can’t find the G-Spot, so basically summarise that it doesn’t exist!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6973971.ece

So basically, let me get this straight, some scientist with very little sexual experience can’t find the G-Spot and therefore says it doesn’t exist to make him NOT look sexually inadequate?!?!?!

I found it, more than once, if you can’t find it, the reason is NOT because it doesn’t exist, it’s because

YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!

January 17th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I am a follower of the naturaldocs project, it’s great,I love it, the syntax is simple, it can document almost any language, it’s an amazing piece of work.

Unfortunately he seems intent on destroying his user base and making someone else take the glory of pushing his project forward without him…..it’s his choice. He has decided that the next version of his amazing project will be released in a language most linux users hates: .NET/Mono.

So in one bold move, he plans to make everyone choose to use a different software, but it’s amazing software, I don’t want to change, so I will start a project to rewrite in a language I can use, whilst keeping the same cross platform benefits that greg has so espoused.

Greg, the second you release naturaldocs 2.0, it’ll be amazing, but I can never use it, I hereby promise to open a simultaneous project on sourceforge and rewrite your code in java or python. You remember what happened to TomBoy right?

January 17th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Cause it’s a fucking shithole, thats why, it never words, it hasnt got ANY configuration tools, the protocol is a mess, ICCM? Shoot the bastards who wrote that piece of shit, it’s always crashing, the basic gnome desktop? 200MB of working memory, compiz almost always crashes, or eats memory, ubuntu removes functionality without creating any alternatives (therefore leaving you stranded with no way to configure things), fedora is just as bad, the on screen keyboard can’t be used when you are being asked for a password (like on vista where the screen goes black), nautilus (gnome file manager) sometimes just doesnt do what it’s told, or it’s too slow, for some reason, copying 50,000 files from one directory to another requires nautilus to go through a list of 50,000 files before even copying the first one (retarded!), kde is just as bad, it’s slow, eats memory, constantly crashes, lxde? what a piece of shit, I can’t even create links on the taskbar or desktop by default, xfce? can’t use network shares without some convoluted scheme of installing and configuring something called fusesmb, which never works in the first place, can’t even replace thunar with nautilus because it doesnt work (thunar is so awesome btw!!! it has almost no functionality!!! /sarcasm)

Oh please, you say you dont know why people prefer macs over linux? the more I use linux, the more time goes by and the more I expect it’ll get better, but it doesnt, it’s the same pile of shit it was 5 years ago, only now we have pretty buttons and compiz.

whoopy fucking doo, someone tell these fools that nobody gives a fuck and thats why it’ll never be the year of linux

December 4th, 2009 | Tags: linux sucks apple donkeycock | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Hi,

I got my HTC Hero the other day, I bought it free without a contract because I would have to change to orange, at the same cost price of just buying the device and keeping my superior service at vodafone.

Orange>

if you are listening, please dont try and tell me I have a choice of two plans, one with unlimited internet, but only free calls during the night, or 100MB of internet a month, but 700 minutes of calls during the day.  This is 2009, we use phones AND internet, DURING the day.  You’re fucking hilariously stupid phone plans cost you a customer the other day, Vodafone, are laughing all the way to the bank.  Even if they are not perfect, they are better than you.

Well.  Anyway, the device itself is great, I love the application selection I can use, lots of tiny apps which dont cost anything (cause most of them are repackaged GPL code from linux), I think the device works really well, I like having multiple screens and the social network interaction is GREAT! No more crappy apps for my crappy nokia N85, which btw, is about 6 months old and fucked, it’s so broken, I havent a clue how to fix it, nor can I take it to nokia, so then they tell me it’s “water damaged” lol.

This list might update over time, I will datestamp each entry, so you know if it’s new or old.

THE GOOD BITS>

(13/09/2009): Facebook and twitter integration is FANTASTIC, I now dont have to open lots of tiny tools to do the same job, they are built in

(13/09/2009): I can browse facebook albums from my phone, as if they were local albums, this is cool

(13/09/2009): The email application is FAR superior to the nokia messaging app, which never really worked very well, it was ok, but didnt kill me, the hero’s application is great, it displays all my email correctly, it’s fast too.

(13/09/2009): SSH TERMINAL APPLICATION!!! ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG, this is great, because I sometimes need to access these things in order to make some quick fixes whilst I am not near my computer, having this, can sometimes save my day!

THE BAD BITS>

(13/09/2009): No bluetooth file transfer, I cannot export the contacts from my macbook agenda into a vcard, then push it to the device, noooo, for some reason they decided to launch a device with no bluetooth file transfer.

(13/09/2009): No contact sync across bluetooth either, nor have I been successful at importing my contacts by putting them onto the sdcard and then using that vcardio tool, it doesnt work, no matter what options I use and what settings I seem to try, vcardio just keeps saying, file not found.

THE END>

if I think of something else, I will return to say it.  Thanks for coming, have your say on this device below! KTHXBYE

September 13th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment