My Holiday Break
Published Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 8:26 pm
So in case anyone is interested (I’m sure your not) here is a breakdown of my holiday activities. Think of it as a week in retrospect to contracts all the year in review posts going around.
I gave my wife a Christmas gift from eLuxury.com, something I thought she world really like. eLuxery.com, in case you didn’t know, is the only official Louis Vuitton online vendor in North America. I did my research… all those online stores claiming to be selling authentic LV at half the price are fake. Surprisingly some of the sites selling fake LV products were very well made… just goes to show you in these days you can no longer trust a company by their website. Well, anyway I purchased an authentic LV product and gave it to my wife. Soon after giving it too her I filled out the forms and made a trip to the post office to return said Christmas gift. Some people are never pleased. I gave my son a talking pooh bear that appears to have problems telling time. He has a tendency to say “I do love dinner” at 2am. Two strikes this Christmas.
I installed WordPress 2.0. I was initially upset when I discovered it was broken. Luckily after spending few minutes I managed to fix it and submitted a bug report and had my fix incorporated into the WordPress core. I also modified the WordPress core files to make the post preview optional. I only look at the post preview a few times why do I need to waste bandwidth and server time on something I’m not using. I was hoping I could make this into a plugin but I don’t see any easy way to do that so I submitted it as a feature request.
I posted my fix to the WordPress bug here so I can help others having the same issue but not willing to search the official bug database. I didn’t like the way the php code looked so I modified an existing WordPress plugin to use the GeSHi Generic Syntax Highlighter to provide syntax highlighting. I was tempted to use the iG:Syntax Hiliter but I wanted more control and besides it is not yet compatible with WordPress 2.0. If I’m satisfied with this final product I may release it publicly.
I went to FilePlanet to sign up for the free World of Warcraft trail. Spent 20 minutes signing up for a fileplant account. 50 minutes waiting in the download queue to start downloading. Left the room for a few hours (at least two) while the file was transferring. Spent 10 minutes unziping the files, 20 minutes installing, and 30 minutes creating a World of Warcraft account (cumulative time so far: 4+ hours). Then I proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes getting bored with the game. Amazingly I spent another 6 hours or so forcing myself to play more so I can discover what all the hype was about. Answer: 3 minute gryphon rides across the skies of Azeroth make it all worth it (well it was free).
I worked on my Xinha Here Firefox extension. I added the ability to open Xinha in a sidebar or a bottom bar. I’m still working on a few issues with missing context menus so it hasn’t been posted yet. I posted a detailed description of my issues to the MozillaZine forum through which I never have received any help. I also added some extra features like recovery of previous text and saving and loading the HTML from a file. These are both features that can only work because Xinha Here is running in a privileged mode in your browser. Any other ideas out there?
In response to a post to my forum that Xinha Here did not work in Firefox 1.5 on Linux I installed FF 1.5 in my browser appliance virtual machine thanks the the instructions here. I was pleased that everything seams to run fin in FF 1.5 on Linux. Turns out there was an issue with the users browser not Xinha Here.
Modified my Firefox installation page to make it more clear that you need to add hypercubed.com to the allowed domains list. Hopefully this will cut off some of the “can’t install your extension” e-mails. Unfortunately, it lead to one “I can’t download your extension at all” email that made me realize I broke the link to the extension. Sorry about that. It is amazing that I can receive so much traffic but nobody reports this error for 24 hours.
Had my server go down in the middle of drafting this post. Requiring me to start all over but giving me the great idea for an auto-recovery feature for future versions of Xinha Here. What’s that phrase “necessity is the mother of invention“? Everything I make is because I need it. That is what distinguishes me from a professional programmer. Which in turn means that I will never make any money. By the way the amount of money that I have earned through PayPal donations and advertisement revenue for Xinha Here: $2… thank you Filip!
I was very unhappy to be late on my last links of the week for the year thanks to above mentioned server issues.
So I think you will agree that while I did many things during the break the most appropriate answer is still… “nothing”. Maybe for a lucky few they will get “read my blog”.