Dammit Jim!

I’m just finishing up a contract making maps of telemetry data from satellite tagged animals. Basically just finding daily positions and making a pretty map out of them. It’s taken me a little while to write the code for it and while I’m not sure a whole lot of other people will be able to use it, I thought it might help one or two people out if I posted it online. The boss ended up wanting that as part of the contract too so pretty good motivation.

It’s not completely automatic but if you want pretty hexmaps of animal positions and you’re reasonably proficient in R (with maybe a little knowledge of GMT), then this may save you a good bit of time (or least let you skip some of the stumbling blocks I ran into). There’s also a function to read the output from the Douglas Argos Filter which could be handy if you’re working with Douglas filtered data in R.

The project page is here. Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions below.

I realize I’m getting in the dead horse beating side of automatic avatar creation plugins but brainsolid asked for a plugin to generate binary avatars that looked like the text from the matrix and I figured it wouldn’t take too long to change WP_Identicon over to it. Of course, then other things came up and I managed to take quite a while to get around to it but it’s done now so here is WP_Texticon. It generates avatars with an array of colored characters. It’s sort of hard to describe so it’s probably easier to just show a few examples.

So I guess it’s mostly for anyone that likes that text in the Matrix, writing about code (with 0 and 1’s or 0-9 and A-E if you want to get fancy) or biologists (give every commenter their own DNA sequence with ATCG) or maybe general literature (with some random letters and a white background).

Features

• Dynamically generated avatars for each commenter
• Matrix/DNA/Binary-like text array icons
• Customizable character selection
• Gravatar support
• No theme edits necessary

Current Version:

WP_Texticon

Installation instructions:

Unzip wp_texticon.zip. Upload wp_texticon.php and the texticon folder. Make sure the texticon folder is writable. If your unzipping program creates a wp_texticon folder please only upload the contents (wp_texticon.php and the texticon folder). That should be it. Texticons should now appear next to your commenter’s names.

You can adjust the background colors, the type and number of characters making up the Texticons and CSS in the Texticon Control Panel. If you’d like to change the fonts used for the characters, add or remove any Truetype Fonts (files that end in .ttf) you’d like to the texticon/fonts folder. You can also clear the Texticon image cache in the control panel.

For Advanced Users:

For even more control, you can disable the automatic placement in the Texticon Control Panel and add an Texticon to any comment with texticon_build($comment->comment_author_email, $comment->comment_author);. For example, find the comments.php of your current theme (it should be in the folder wp-content/themes/[currentThemeName]/). Open it up and look for something similar to foreach ($comments as $comment). Inside this loop there should be code that displays the comment author’s name or metadata like <p class="comment-author"> or <p class="comment-metadata">. Just before all this enter:
<?php if (function_exists(texticon_build)) echo texticon_build($comment->comment_author_email, $comment->comment_author); ?>
If you would prefer to base the Texticons on the commentor’s IP address instead of the commentor’s email just replace $comment->comment_author_email in the above with $comment->comment_author_IP.

Change Log:

• v0.52 3-27-2007:
  • Fixed missing gravatar bug
• v0.51 3-27-2007:
  • First Public Version

I just updated my MonsterID plugin with great monster artwork from Lemm who out of the blue emailed me with artistic very cool sketches of every monster part. I was just saying I wished I had gradients in my monsters and now I have honest to goodness hand-sketched monsters. Man the internet is great. The new version is a little processor intensive so it might take a few reloads to get all the monsters cached on a popular post but it will only happen the first time and things will be quick after that (and I set it so no one user should have to wait more than 5 seconds). They sure look great once they’re generated. Lemm’s about page says she does some freelance work, so if you’re looking for a great illustrator, it sure looks like she can draw.

I just graduated a few months back and I figure it’s about (past) time I start looking for a job. I’ve been meaning to look into microformats and they have a resume microformat so I figured I’d give them a try and get my resume done at the same time. As far as I can gather, microformatting is basically just hiding some machine readable information in text meant for humans (usually in the class attribute of html tags e.g. <p class="someMicroformat" >). This means people can read the page quiet happily one moment and a computer can come along the next and parse the page much better using the microformatting hints. The big microformats seem to be calendar and addressbook entries (also tags, licensing, and external links but these seem to me to be in a different, simpler class). It seems like a smart idea so although I’m not sure there’s any actual benefit (yet), I figured if I’m going to make an html resume I might as well make a microformatted html resume.

Things went pretty smooth after I figured out the basic formatting since it’s just adding the same annotation for calendar events for all the dates and same addressbook format for the employers/universities. It was really helpful to refer to the resume of someone who knew what they were doing for any questions. The only hitch was when I hit things unexpected in the microformat (like a job that started and stopped a couple times or more than one employer for one job). I guess in those cases you either have to sacrifice human readability or the microformat clarity so I just marked it up as best as I could. The only other complaint would be that they give publications the short shrift without any microformatting. Seems like a citation microformat would be really handy on the internet.

So anyway here’s the resume. If you’re actually curious and look at the source, there’s all kinds of microformatting goodness going on behind the scenes with all the employers as hCards and the job times as hCalendars. If you want to be able to see microformats in action without looking at the source of every page you visit there’s the handy Operator plugin for Firefox that automatically puts a little indicator in the title bar (like the little orange RSS indicator) and allows appropriate actions (like adding to a calender or address book). You can start to see how useful microformats could be using that plugin. I think Firefox is planning to push microformats in their next version so here’s hoping they catch on.

Aziz of metaBLOG suggests that the new tags in WordPress 2.3 can be used to create a “folksonomy” on WordPress blogs. For those not in the know (including me until a couple days ago), a folksonomy is is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content according to Wikipedia. Basically it’s letting normal people (versus say artificial intelligence or an administrator) help describe things. For example, adding a tag on flickr or using del.icio.us.

So since WordPress doesn’t currently have anything like a public “Add a Tag” and I haven’t coded a WordPress plugin recently (although I did upgrade WP_MonsterID if anyone is using it), I thought I would code up a quick plugin to see how it works. So here is WP_Folksonomy. It’s fairly basic at the moment but I’d like to get it out there to see if it’s useful and if anyone is interested in it.

Since it uses WordPress’s tagging features WP it’s only going to be compatible with WordPress 2.3 and up.