Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! A lot has happened since I last made a blog post. I got laid off at my old job, but I found a much cooler job, and in record time! (Only out of work 2 months! Woot!!!) I now get to build sites for Atom.com, part of Viacom and MTV Networks. They even sent me to Comic-Con this year!  We’re doing lots of cool stuff, and starting to plan even cooler stuff for the coming year, so it should be a whole lot of fun!

I probably would have found this site ages ago if Google-ing for “free fonts” actually brought up sites with free fonts instead of bait-and-switch poser sites. But thanks to a recent post on Ajaxian, I know have an excellent source for open source fonts to use in whatever project I want: Font Squirrel!  I can embed it with sIFR or canvas-text, I can give them to everyone in my Thursday night typography circle, and I can create header images until the cows come home.  No more looking over my shoulder wondering if that assassin from the all-powerful font maker lobby has finally tracked me down.  (I think I lost him in Munich.)

http://www.fontsquirrel.com

Viva la open source!

It’s official! Apple took my $99, and now I can write applications and submit them to the iTunes App Store! I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Time to start reading up on PhoneGap again. Appropiately, I am writing this post from my iPhone.

For those of you still anxiously awaiting a working version of Albatross, we are one big step close!  The latest test builds of VLC 0.9.9 have fixed on-the-fly transcoding and streaming to Flash video format (.flv)!  Okay, it’s almost fixed.  They still haven’t fixed the problem where transcoding the audio to any sample rate other than the source file’s native sample rate causes the audio and video to speed up or slow down accordingly, but at least it’s working again!  You can download them for Mac OS X here:

http://jones.videolan.org/~videolan/0.9.9-test/

I’ve only tested this on the Mac so far, but history tells me that it should work in other environments as well.  Works with a stock installation of Albatross 0.5.1.

The new 2.7.1 release of WordPress was just too good to pass up.  I had installed it on another clients site (soon to be launched), and just fell in love with the new interface.  It’s very snazzy, I love the auto-updates, and the layout is fab! But there’s one thing that was still missing… themed login pages.

If you follow the mailing list and the TRAC ticket, you’ll know that they’re looking for a more extensive patch for themed login pages, where as I’ve taken a more minimalist approach.  Both approaches are valid with their own pros and cons, but given my choices between upgrading without a themed login, waiting until I found time to create a “more extensive” patch (I’m an impatient person), and just updating the old patch, I chose the third option.  The blog you see before you is the result!

If you already have a themed login page from the previous patch, all you need to do is update to WordPress 2.7.1 and apply the new patch.  Your existing login.php theme template will work just fine with the new patch.  The new patch is attached to the TRAC ticket linked to above.  Feedback is welcome, as always!

Original Themed Login post

Update – I’ve updated the patch so that you no longer include error messages in the custom login_header() function.  This means they can’t be “forgotten” by the template designer.  Unfortunately, it also means that your existing login.php template won’t work.  Luckily, making it work is as simple as removing all references to login_header_error() in your template.  A new sample login.php has been posted on the TRAC ticket.

Update 2 - For those of you who have difficulty patching, here’s the patched file for 2.7.1.

WordPress Themable Login patched for 2.7.1

Thanks to my wonderful wife, I have joined the legions of iPhone users. This means that I can blog from anywhere! For example, I’m blogging from my iPhone right now as I’m sitting here… at my desk, in front of my computer. Okay, bad example. But this sure is a fun toy! And with projects out there like PhoneGap, there will very likely be a lot less free time in my future!

New and improved!  Albatross Home Media Streaming Server 0.5.1 is released! New features include:

• support for mfs_ftp (this method is more reliable if you need to kill the stream)
• improved stream killing (it actually works in most cases now)
• user interface tweaks and improvements
• detailed program information in HMO mode
• more awesomeness!

TyStreamer is now the Albatross Home Media Streaming Server!  The new release has many, many new features and improvements including:

• Support for unhacked TiVos through the HMO interface
• Watch videos on your Nintendo Wii’s Internet Channel!
• Major user interface update
• Cool new logo!

Good news from our scientist friends over in France and Switzerland.  The Large Hadron Collider went online today, and our planet did not get sucked into a black hole!  Yay!!!  Unfortunately, this also means that I still have to attend my mid-year review at work.  Ah, well.  C’est la vie!

Sure, you love the full-bodied debugging environment that comes with Firebug 1.2, but when you’re on the move, jumping from browser to browser, you just can’t get weighed down by being tied to Firefox all day. When I’m surfing Safari, live at the Opera, or kickin’ with IE, I debug with Firebug Lite, now with more debug!

Let’s start to mix commercial metaphors: this is not your father’s Firebug Lite!  More than just a console, this Bug is completely tricked out with HTML, DOM, CSS, Script and XHR (XMLHtmlRequest) inspectors.  There’s even a JavaScript console.  All this comes with a much slicker presentation, as well, making it nearly as useful as it’s big brother on Firefox.

The Firebug Lite web site has complete and simple instructions for embedding it into your pages, but if you don’t want to go to all that trouble (or you’re just snooping around on a random cool page), you can use Firebug Lite anywhere with this cool bookmarklet from the Get Firebug Lite home page. Just drag the link to your bookmarks, and away you go! Go ahead, click it. You’ll get all the Firebug Lite goodness right here on this blog!  For those of us who have to use a proxy server to do our work, you can still use the bookmarklet by adding two domains to your exceptions: *.getfirebug.com and *.appspot.com.  In IE6, you can find this in Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections (Tab) -> LAN Settings -> Advanced.  Why they hosted the image and the script on different domains, I don’t know, but you need to add both for a working Firebug bookmarklet. 

Firebug Lite is no longer the wobbly toddler of a debugger with unsure steps and limited functionality; he’s grown up into that awkard teenage phase.  Pretty soon, he’ll be asking for the keys to the family browser.  It’s almost enough to not make you miss all of Firefox’s cool developer plugins.  Okay, maybe not, but it sure beats the pants off of the IE Developer Toolbar!