all things me

I celebrated too early. It was this morning that there was really snow. Everything was white and still is (pretty much) — at least outside the city centre.

Last night, 8 pm — 2 am, I drew a GUI picture series of a search function. It’s for the ‘introduction to application design’ course. There’s a zoo database which we’ve designed through 3 group projects so far. (It’s going to develop step by step, but we aren’t going to program it. This is just a course on designing.) It was a lot of fun. It would’ve been more fun to design the basic layout for the interface (I would’ve done an html page with frames and forms and then taken a screen shot of it) but it wasn’t my turn — last week I drew use case diagrams and context diagrams, wrote use cases based on Alistair Cockburn’s template…

If you know a program for *drawing* windows (not an MS Visual Basic type of thing that codes the interface), I’d be very interested in hearing about it.

Parents of young children always seem talk about the colour and consistency of their offsprings’ excrement. I’ve also noticed that Finns are way too eager to talk about their bowel movement anyway.

Well, going outside to our back or front yard has been a shock, a horror, and a paralyzing experience for Ami. Today, however, my sister (equipped with a winter jacket, a hat, gloves, a scarf, a forehead flashlight, a commando hat, ….) and I (equipped with sandals, a jacket, and a leash) took Ami outside — front lawn this time because there’re street lamps there. He sniffed some, ate some gawd-knows-what (leaves and pebbles), shivered some, whimpered some. Finally, he also squatted some. That’s right, he doesn’t lift his leg yet… That was his 1^st time doing business outside! It’s about time, the newspapers inside have started to resemble yellow ponds…

Sigh. Most of the buses that go via my place are on strike. Only one line goes regularly and two that have two buses going in the morning and two in the afternoon. That’s alright — I can always take the train to the centre. But now they are threatening to stop the trams too (and subways but I don’t use those). I don’t know how on earth am I going to get to the dept. of computer studies 3 times a week (straight from work where I barely have enough time to be as it is). Hopefully there’re buses going there. BUT, yeah that’s right ‘but’, if the trams are stopped, the buses that I could use would be stopped too because they and trams are driven by the same company.

Darn bus drivers, I understand you need your rights, but don’t I have a right to go to school?! I mean, hello! Here’s a person how actually *wants* to go to school.

Oh well.

It snowed today. Well, it was more of an icy rain but it’s better than nothing. As long as it doesn’t drench you.

This morning I was really busy and shuffling around to get my coffee and toast and get to the bus stop in time (bloody bus drivers’ strike keeps me on edge). Suddenly Amadeus ran whining under the dining-room table. I had apparently kicked him. Mum noticed he was limping a bit but when I touched his paw and squeezed and felt it a little he didn’t complain at all. I had to run but now I can’t concentrate on anything.

I feel sick in the stomach. I just hope Mum’ll send me a message telling Ami’s all right.

[edit @ 10:48] Mum sent a message (or Ami, actually ) telling that he’s alright. Phew. [/edit]

Following some tips on ScriptyGoddess I’m attempting to get my blog not accessible from search engines. Sorry for the inconvenience but I hope you’ll find me without search engines. Other parts of the site(s) are accessible as usual.

[edit: Nov 22, ’04] Well… I want people to find my cool code snippets and stuff. So I removed the blocks. [/edit]

In the attempt to shorten the menu, I decided to put the lists of monthly archives and categories into drop down menus. I just realized that in time they will (at least the monthly archives) get longer and longer and longer…

So, my first problem was that I’ve made a hidden category for static pages and it would show on the menu if I used WP’s built-in dropdown_cats tag.

Luckily, Ria at Typed by has made a Drop Down Cats Plugin with ability to exclude. What’s nice about it is that it a) formats subcategories differently from parents (indented with a hyphen), and b) it includes a post count parameter.

Archive tag (wp_get_archives) has an option to format the list of archives as an option list. You just need to build a drop-down menu function around it. Thus, as found at the WordPress forums…
(remove the spaces after dots in “window.location=” if you’re going to cut-and-paste that — I needed to separate the words because it wouldn’t wrap nicely)

<form name="archiveform" action="">
  <select name="monthly_arch" onchange="window.location = (document. forms. archiveform. monthly_arch[document. forms. archiveform. monthly_arch. selectedIndex].value);">
    <option selected>Monthly archives</option>
    <?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&format=option'); ?>
  </select>
</form>

It includes a little JavaScript, but I don’t know if that can be avoided. I’m disappointed to notice that formatting the archives as options is not compatible with showing the post count.
But
In the same thread there was a solution to that too. It involves a little tweaking (or correcting…) in template-functions-general.php, function get_archives_link around line 180, changing

else if ('option' == $format) {
return '<option value="'.$url.'">'.$text.'</option>'."\n";

to

else if ('option' == $format) {
return '<option value="'.$url.'">'.$text.$after.'</option>'."\n";

I wanted to add an introduction text to category pages. I already had a nice looking introduction text to the blog which only shows on the main page, so I thought I’d put the category descriptions in a similar box.

<!-- don’t show on a post’s page or monthly archives -->
<?php if (!$single && !$monthnum) { ?>
  <div id="intro">
    <!-- don’t show on category pages, either -->
    <?php if(!$cat) { ?>
      < Blog introduction >
    <?php } ?>
    <!-- show on category pages -->
    <?php if ($cat) { ?>
      <!-- single_cat_title(prefix,display) displays (with ‘true’ parameter) the category title -->
      <h1><?php single_cat_title('',true); ?></h1>
      <!-- category_description() alone doesn’t display it, that’s why you need to have the ‘echo’ there -->
      <p><?php echo category_description(); ?></p>
    <?php } ?>
  </div>
<?php } ?>

Here’s Amadeus at 8 weeks old, just before he arrived here.
That’s not my hand, it’s my sister’s.

(or Persnicketiness as the Americans say)

I sent feedback to the library service because there was a separately written compound word (“nouto kirjasto” — the library where I want to pick up the book I’ve reserved) in the Reserved works table. I asked them to correct it.

I renamed a file ‘readme’ to ‘README’ so it would be more visible in the file listing of a website (with no index page). Though it was visible in the file listing on the command line (ls), it disappeared from the file listing of the web folder. I was puzzled for a while and then changed ‘README’ to ‘README.txt’, and — acrabadabra — it appeared as text under the file listing!

Extremely wow.