I received an email from a Wish visitor asking me “What if we could help make the wish come true? how do we contact the person?” Turned out it was related to wish #7208 “i wish adam would send me a painting.” It also turned out that the email sender was a painter (I googled her name).
I explained to her that the wishes were made anonymously and I couldn’t trace the wishers. The best I can do is to blog about it and hope that the wisher returns to the site and reads about this.
Introducing Emptiness Theme v0.1 .
Since I started using WordPress few months ago, I’ve tried various minimalist themes available from WordPress Theme Viewer, but none of them really suits me. So, just like any designer-wannabe, I rolled out my own minimalist theme. It’s available for download, though I’m still trying to register it on WordPress Theme Viewer. I don’t know what’s wrong with Theme Viewer, they must be really busy with backlogs of registrations to process, or they’re totally ignoring the current Theme Viewer and currently building a better system.
Haven’t made any project related post since July last year, so here’s a list of little things I spent some time on:
While playing around with Firefox Web Developer Extension, I found out that some Maven reports generated invalid HTML which could break the reports layout with non-default vm templates. Hence MFINDBUGS-29, MCHECKSTYLE-74, and MCHANGES-83.
After integrating Kaptcha in SCode Plugin 0.5, I spent some time working on the Kaptcha project itself where most of the effort was on refactoring the original SimpleCaptcha code. That, and some other patches have made it to Kaptcha 2.1 and 2.2 .
I moved my site hosting to Slicehost about 6 months ago, and I only have praises about their service. What I like the most about Slicehost is the fact that they give a sense of community with their wiki, forum, and chatroom. Gone are the days when I had to wait for at least a day to get a reply to my queries (think Go Daddy).
There are so many testimonials about how great Slicehost is, so I’m just going to write my Sliceperiences here…
My favourite quotes from Randy Pausch (a professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University)’s The Last Lecture
I think the most important message from his lecture is that leading your life the right way is never just about you, it’s about you and the people around you.
I recently made some simple updates to Wish by using Java 1.5 generics and autoboxing/unboxing. Making Java source changes was the easy part, while the time consuming part was on hunting for information on Maven-related changes.
I started by changing maven-compiler-plugin source and target in pom.xml:
<build>
<plugins>
...
<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<source>1.5</source>
<target>1.5</target>
</configuration>
</plugin>
...
</plugins>
</build>Caused by: net.sourceforge.pmd.ast.ParseException: Can't use generics unless running in JDK 1.5 mode!<reporting>
<plugins>
...
<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<targetJdk>1.5</targetJdk>
</configuration>
</plugin>
...
</plugins>
</reporting><' is not preceded with whitespace.
error <;' is not followed by whitespace.
error '>' is not preceded with whitespace.
Sometimes the numbers on SCodePlugin-generated CAPTCHA image are not easy to read. And rather than refreshing the whole page, it would be nice to reload only the image and generate a new / more readable code.
In order to give this a go, I modified the comment form on Melbourne photoblog and added a short Javascript code to refresh the image source. You can try it yourself on this form, just click the text “Generate another code” and wait shortly for the image to be reloaded with a new code.
GateKeeper Plugin v0.1 and IMNotification Plugin v0.1 have been released.
I implemented GateKeeper Plugin for Blojsom following the earlier discussion on a simple anti-bot solution to fight comment spams. This blog has been using GateKeeper Plugin (with very simple challenges for now) and it has worked like a charm with 100% success rate, though I think that the success is actually contributed from the fact that the spammers have been focusing their effort on breaking more mainstream anti-spam solutions like CAPTCHAs.
While working on a mini improvement request for Wish (more on that later), I found out that Der Wunsch is now ‘almost’ offline. Here’s the Babel Fish translation of the message on Der Wunsch home page:
That’s about a year and a half since Der Wunsch came to life. Thanks for the effort, Claus.
Now, back to the mini improvement. I’ve received several feedbacks and was finally able to complete the first request from Machi.
Here’s a screenshot of Blojsom notification messages on Pandion.
You’ll be notified for new entry, comment, trackback, and pingback. I’m currently working on XMPP Plugin for Blojsom, though nothing is stopping this from becoming IMNotification Plugin. I guess there are plenty of AIM and MSN users out there.