judyonthenet

After much nagging from the WordPress dashboard, I finally upgraded to WordPress 3.0. Actually, 3.0.1 to be exact. I can’t tell what the difference is so far. I tried to do an automatic install, but it left me with blank pages. Thankfully, a manual install got it back working. Considering I haven’t updated for two weeks, I’m sure no one noticed.

I’ve also installed a W3 Total Cache. I know my website has been on the slow-ish site with all the crap it runs, but Kelvin recently suggested I install a caching plugin while I’m upgrading. Hopefully, my ranting will load faster now.

I’m not bored with work so far; I’m still learning a lot of new things everyday. It’s also very busy, so I haven’t been blogging much. There’s not much to blog about either, as all I do is work, eat, sleep, and play video games. And watch TV… I blasted through the first season of Lie to Me using my Netflix trial. The writing is predictable, but I like the gimmick: basically House for deception detection. (He even has a girl underling, white guy underling, black guy underling, and a female co-worker with whom he has sexual tension with.)

Also, we’ve ordered a new TV and are still waiting for it. It’s ridiculously huge for our < 1 bedroom apartment, but it’s what Kelvin wanted to splurge on in celebration of having two paychecks again. Unfortunately, Kelvin just sold our old TV (which I’m missing already *sniffle*), so I’m TV-less for the moment. Which is dumb, since I just started this Netflix trial. We might continue the subscription. After all, once we get our new TV, we will have at least EIGHT different devices that support Netflix. So far, I’ve been using my PS3 (was 360 but switched once I got the PS3 disk so we can use a remote control) and Kelvin’s iPad for streaming. Anyway, I’ll post pics when we get our new toy.

I’ve had Justin Bieber’s Somebody to Love stuck in my head for weeks. Here’s the music video so you can get this obnoxiously catchy tune stuck in your head too (the video’s actually okay):

New thing I learned today: Lie to Me is based of an actual research project studying people naturally good at deception detection called Truth Wizards.

Today is my Sunday for this week, as I had to come into work on my real Sunday. A big part of my job involves verifying stuff in machines, and we don’t have very many of these machines, so the weekend is a good time to find free time on them. Late evening slots also free up a lot, so I’ve been working late as well. I think better later in the day anyway, but I don’t like cutting my evenings with Kelvin short. Though, the majority of our evenings lately seem to be Team Fortress 2.

So, what am I going to do today? I have a free weekday without Kelvin around, a first since I started working again. The difference now is that I can feel good about slacking off and doing nothing, whereas before I always felt guilty not being productive, regardless of what Kelvin would tell me. I think I’m going to:

1. Blog – Oh gosh, I’m doing that already!
2. Make bread – I was making bread every week, and I haven’t made bread ever since I started working.
3. Read everything in my Google Reader until it’s got 0 unread – I’m amazed at how disciplined I’ve been about not reading my feeds at work. I still do it, but in short bursts and not as often.

Speaking of news I’ve been missing, did you know they announced details for Dragon Age II? I’m not sure how I feel about this Shepherd-like approach they’re taking with the character, but still… March 2011 can’t come any sooner!

4. Figure out which headset to buy – A couple days ago, Kelvin’s headset’s right earphone stopped working, so he’s been using speakers with his headset mic around his neck. Last night, my mic stopped working at certain angles (i.e. next to my mouth). And when it does work, the gain is insane, so I have to turn my mic volume all the way and put it next to my eyeball. That’s what we get for buying <$20 headsets. Sucks tho, I really liked my cheapo comfy-and-functional headset. So, with my new paycheck, I think I’m going to splurge on some gamer headsets that should hopefully last longer than a year. Any recommendations would be appreciated!
5. Laundry – Why not? it’s so easy!
6. Play games – I spent most of my Saturday playing Heavy Rain, and I’m almost done with it. It’s getting a little scary, so I’ll wait for Kelvin to come home to play that. In the meantime, I think I’ll get back to doing missions in Mass Effect 2.
7. Watch Old Spice Youtube videos – Did you know the Man Your Man Could Smell Like responds to Youtube, Facebook, and twitter comments now? Is this his fulltime job now? Hawt!

New thing I learned today: Carcharias is a genus of sharks.

Outside of the SC2 headset, Razer audio products seem to be named after water-dwelling predators.

Kelvin ordered some overpriced Apple accessories for his new iPhone 4. Even though our front door area is enclosed and fairly safe from the eyes of passerbys, the FedEx guy didn’t trust my three neighbors enough and decided to hide his goods just in case.

If I was my neighbor, I’d be more inclined to check out what’s under the mat than a nondescript box sitting on top of it. Then I’d write a nasty note.

New thing I learned today: Hightower is the last name of a Police Academy character.

Woohoo for the upcoming Engie update for Team Fortress 2!

I know they’re old (except for the most recent one), but Ted just showed me these Old Spice commercials yesterday. For other people like me would don’t watch enough live TV (or have enough viral video friends)…

An ad about manliness that also targets women. Genius.

New thing I learned today: “The man your man could smell like” is Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL wide receiver.

Gosh, it only took me A FREAKING YEAR. Don’t ask me what took so long, because I have no idea. Sometime in the last couple weeks, I finally sat down and really tried to write this script in an effort to refresh some programming brain cells in anticipation of upcoming interviews.

Problem: Last year, I changed the default image size of my gallery, which shrinks it to be a more manageable size than whatever giant size I upload. Used to be 600 by 450, but I changed it to 800×600. When I did some auto-rebuilt thingy, it got rid of all my 600×450 resizes, but also got rid of smaller resizes I use to post in my blog. As a result, a lot of the pictures in my blog went kaput.

Solution: Write a script to regenerate the right resizes and fix broken image links in my posts. I had already fixed a lot of links of my more popular posts by hand, but going through three years of blogging by hand wasn’t reasonable.

I spent a lot of time reading WordPress DB and Gallery2 documentation. And by Gallery2 documentation, I mean reading Gallery2 PHP code because its documentation is nonexistent/crap. It took me a few days, on and off, to write and debug the stupid thing because I’m easily distracted (especially when reading other people’s code on a computer with internet access). I wanted to write it in Python since I’ve been playing with Python the most since I left my job. However, there isn’t really a good Python Gallery2 interface that I know of. So, in order to do the resizes by script, I had to write part of the script in PHP. (I’m not ambitious or patient enough to write a Python Gallery interface, sorry.)

This is what my script does:
1. In Python, connect to blog DB
2. Go through each blog post and look for broken image links.
3. Put links into a file
3. PHP script reads list of links and builds resizes
4. PHP script outputs fixed links into another file
5. Back in Python, read list of fixed links
6. Replace broken links with fixed links in posts that have them.

Here’s my (very messy and ghetto) code in case it might help somebody else.


fixResizeLinks.tar

Some useful links:

• urllib — Open arbitrary resources by URL
• Writing MySQL Scripts with Python DB-API
• WordPress Database description
• Gallery2: How to write scripts

Most of the PHP portion is copied and pasted from Gallery2 code, so I’m not even sure if I’m using it properly. I’m not exactly a programming master genius coder, so I’m sure my code could still use some work. Whatever, my links are fixed now, and I can get back to writing time-wasting posts again without worrying of losing data with all my experimenting on my database.

New thing I learned today: Single quotes are not the same as double quotes in PHP.