Helvensteijn.com

Yes, it’s finally finished (I think), so a few minutes ago, I took my new theme online, the third one in about 16 months. I call it TWAIN, or Theme Without An Interesting Name in full. If you own a scanner, you’ll probably know where I got my inspiration for that.

So, besides the looks, what’s new? Well, if everything went as I hoped, nothing really. I already made the necessary changes two and a half weeks ago.

I have tested the design in Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and everything works there, except for some minor bugs with IE7 (complaining of JavaScript errors, but everything seems to work). Firefox 2, Opera 9.x and Safari 2 will probably work fine for the most part, but Internet Explorer 6 is explicitly not supported. If you’re still using that browser, you really, really ought to upgrade to at least IE7! Even better would be switching to a decent browser altogether — like one of those mentioned above.

One more thing to mention is the width of the site, and thus the minimum required width of the browser window to prevent horizontal scroll bars. Until now, I always kept my designs confined to within 800 pixels, or I used a fluid design. But a fluid design is tougher to get right, especially in combination with rounded corners.

The statistics for this site tell me that practically nobody uses such low resolutions anymore. That might change a bit with these mini notebooks that are becoming increasingly popular lately, but still I decided to go a step further and based the layout on a browser window of at least 1024 pixels wide. That requirement is met by over 95% of the visitors to this site.

Well, I’d say try it out, and if you encounter any problems, you can leave a reply below, or contact me directly.

Last Monday, WordPress 2.6 was released. Because I grew more and more unhappy with my WordPress installation hanging together by plugins and hacks, I saw this release as a good moment to do a completely clean install.

I made a database dump and a WordPress export, dropped all tables in the database and removed all files in the WordPress directory after a backup of wp-content. Then, I made a fresh SVN checkout, imported the WordPress backup, and tweaked the settings.

So right now, this web site runs a bare naked WordPress installation, the only active plugin being Akismet.

I’ve decided not to use my old theme again for this installation (it also became quite hacky after a while). Statistics show a rapid decline in Internet Explorer 6 usage. Last month, its share was about 15.7%, this month up to yesterday that number has dropped to 13.0. So either this month or the next, I expect IE6’s share to tumble beneath 10%, at which point I no longer deem it important enough to warrant support.

Then, I can finally make some more complex designs for this web site without a large number of visitors being stuck with crippled pages. Think about some more advanced CSS2 (IE7 is not quite the yet, but at least a lot better than is predecessor) and alpha channel support in PNG images without resorting to nasty hacks. Until that time comes, I’ll just use the default WordPress theme. It is fairly decent, despite being massively overused.

There’s a few other things on my todo list. First one is installing the few plugins that I do want to use, second is moving this web site to a new webhost again, this time a virtual private server, so I have root access and can do whatever I want. It also comes with its own IP address, so I can take care of the third item on the list: mirror this website on a subdomain and secure it with my SSL/TLS certificate — impossible right now, because SSL/TLS and name based virtual hosting don’t mix (without a not widely supported extension).

I also took this opportunity to move my photos page elsewhere. While NextGEN is a very decent plugin, I wanted to keep this installation als lean and clean as possible. So I chose to move my photo albums to my MobileMe gallery. In my upcoming new theme, I will link there more visibly, right now there’s just a small link in the sidebar.

Alright, as of today, The Netherlands is the next country where it is no longer allowed to smoke in hotels, bars, restaurants and other places like that. Fine, so we won’t smoke there anymore.

But leave it to these anti-smoke dickheads to find their next thing to wage war on. Now, they want us smokers to stop smoking on sidewalk cafe’s. People, we’re talking about open air here! Where then do we have to go? Where can we finally smoke our damn cigarettes without you fuckers constantly driving us away? It’s not like we’re criminals or something, though we are more and more being treated as such.

Idiots who decide to go driving while totally drunk, those are criminals. Go bug them. But please, let us in peace. You anti-smoke fetishes now have plenty of room to go where there is not a molecule of smoke in the air. And don’t come complaining to us if the air still smells bad. Instead, take the bicycle instead of your car for a change…

I’ll repeat that again: STOP YOUR FUCKING COMPLAINING!!! Don’t you think you’ve won by now?

As of today, I no longer offer support for my WordPress plugins, pretty much because I lost interest. I did fix a long lasting issue with one of them.

If anyone would like to take over, just download the code and do with it as you see fit. It’s all released under a BSD style license.

My mobile phone — a Nokia N73 — was having some issues after it took a fall on hard concrete, most annoying of which was the fact that it would spontaneously switch off for no apparent reason. So it became time for a new one.

Last week Friday, I placed an order, and after some trouble with my package being lost, my new Nokia N82 finally arrived last Thursday. Man, is that thing sweet.

Some of its key features are UMTS/HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, 5 megapixel camera with xenon flash and of course you can use it to make phone calls. This is what the beast looks like:

Nokia N82

After using it for two days, the thing I noticed the most is that it is lots faster than my old N73. That one always felt a little sluggish, but not the N82. It feels very responsive, most apps launch almost instantaneous.

The number keys that I read so much about in reviews are acually kinda nice. They are rather small, but their spacing makes it almost impossible to mistype. Granted, it takes some getting used to, but don’t criticize them if you haven’t tried them yourself.

Haven’t used the camera much. But as far as I can tell, it takes excellent pictures for a phone camera, even indoors thanks to its xenon flash.

I haven’t really made a trip using the GPS yet, but it usually finds a fix pretty damn quickly, even indoors. The maps applications seems to do a decent job. The phone came with a 90-day navigation trial, so we’ll see how it performs on the go.

So far, I’m very happy with this new gadget. It might even replace my Palm T|X as my navigation device, if the Nokia Maps application does a good job. Will have to find some other use for that thing then, like letting it run Linux just for fun.

Last weekend, I got myself a 16 GB iPod touch. Managed to get a nice rebate on it. They look a bit like the incredibly over-hyped iPhone, but without the chrome rim and about half as thin. That’s only a mere 8 mm. It’s a good thing it feels quite sturdy, otherwise I’d be seriously concerned about snapping it in two… So, this is what it looks like when displaying its home screen:

Apple iPod touch

So, Ive been playing with this gem for a week now, and it’s incredible! The multi-touch interface really is as amazing as Apple claims it is. The sound is of the quality I’d expect from an iPod, and video just looks gorgeous. It’s a shame that it only supportys H.264 encoding for video, but then again, having to recode a movie specifically for it does have its advantages. I can optimize the result for the iPod’s screen resolution, which brings an hour of video down to less than 450 MiB while keeping good quality. Not too bad.

I have jailbroken the device, but that caused it to be so unstable that I’ve restored it within an hour. I’ll just wait for the App Store that Apple says will open up in June. And it is of course still mainly a portable media player, and when it comes to that, it performs like a champ.

I had some problems with my existing router, like it suddenly deciding to enter a reboot loop. Or forgetting its port forwarding rules. And other weird stuff. So I decided that it was time for something else, and ended up buying a Linksys WRT54GL. You might have seen them before, they look like this:

Linksys WRT54GL

I’ve chosen this one because it runs Linux, and most of all, because it can be flashed with 3rd party firmware, which in most cases offer a lot more functionality. After some research, I decided to try Tomato. It not only looks very nice, it also promises some interesting features.

After some failed attempts to flash the unit with its new firmware — for some reason Safari was not behaving as it should — I managed to do it using Firefox instead.

After a few more minutes of configuring everything to my needs, I left it alone. As far as I can tell after one day, it performs excellently. The near future will tell whether this little gadget will keep my network stable.

On my home served web site, raptor’s playground, I’ve hidden an easter egg. Find it, and you’ll earn eternal fame (and your name listed on the home page).

So, what have I been up to lately?

Well, there’s a thing called real life that’s been keeping me busy. Obligations here, weekend trip there, you know how it goes…
Then there’s the MetaD IRC network that I’ve set up with some other people. And I’ve been busy (well, sort of) with a new sort of web publishing software, called UniTextus. It’s still in the conceptual stage, no actual code has been written yet.

So, in all the fuzz, this web site has gotten little attention over the last few weeks. And I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to put into it for the time to come. There’s one thing I have decided about this site: I want to get rid of WordPress. By now, this site hangs together by plugins and tweaks, which is not how I like to see it. I have yet to decide whether to wait for a reasonably stable version of UniTextus or to build something myself in the mean time. One thing is sure though: one of these days I’m going to drop support for my WordPress plugins. I do have an issue with one of them that I want to resolve before then, but don’t expect any more updates.

I’ll make an official announcement when the time comes. In the mean time, if you’re interested in taking over development for my plugins, go ahead and do so. They were released under a BSD license, so you may do with them as you please.

I wish everyone a happy new year. A few days early, but I won’t be at home for the occasion so it will have to do.
Try not to harm yourselves or others with fireworks!