This illustrator is amazing. Found via Veerle

Human beings really have made some incredibly bad decisions – lets hope we manage to get through the next 25 years making some better ones and avoid destroying civilization (strange that this seems so melodramatic, and yet it’s probably true). Here is the video: The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be.

1. Get some great bread, let it go stale and turn it into bread crumbs (or if you are lazy like me toast it blitz it and toast the resulting bits under the grill).
2. Soak dried apricots and dried cranberries in (very) hot water. Add some cinnamon to the water if you like. Cover and put to the side.
3. Add an onion and lots of garlic to a frying pan (you probably know how much garlic you like). Cook for a bit in butter.
4. Bash up some walnuts.
5. Add some mixed spice to the frying pan and grate in the zest of a lemon.
6. Add the walnuts, continuing to fry.
7. Wait a bit, stiring the crushed up walnuts.
8. Drain the fruit and keep the liquid to the side.
9. Add the well drained fruit to the frying pan.
10. While this is heating through thoroughly, cut the skins of a packet of sausages and place the contents in a bowl. Use good sausages.
11. Add the contents of the frying pan to the sausage meat. Mix well. If you are into your fatty meat feel free to mix it with your hands.
12. Add the breadcrumbs.
13. Add an egg.
14. Continue mixing… adding in some of the liquid from the earlier soaking of fruit as needed to make a ‘stuffing’ consistancy or something ever-so slightly sloppier.
15. Add a handful of parsley.

Finally, it’ll taste better if you put it inside a chicken or turkey. Remember to leave some space above the stuffing so that air can circulate inside the chicken/turkey and it has a chance of cooking.

I much much prefer WordPress to Zine. The whole setup (and particularly the admin interface) seems a lot slicker and easier to work with. Given the small amount of time I plan to dedicate to this, it is much better.

I have some more interesting projects that I should get out there rather than fiddling with a Python blogging tool. More on this in one month

At some point I’ll write up about how it all works… but almost more importantly I’ll have some time for different personal projects, including a js framework designed to promote code reuse and a kind of social website. Lets _hope_ I get there by the end of the year.

Who knows I might even write a few blog entries too and sort out this site! I’ve decided I’m going to do the sensibel thing and move it over to Word Press (a complete blogging system) rather than Zine, which is far too cumbersome to adapt.

I’ve been building a site for a friend recently and the issue of how to add vertical padding to images automatically came up during this development, so I’ll reproduce the changes I made to the excellent Code Igniter image library to support this.

1. Open <CIROOT>/system/libraries/Image_lib.php in your favourite text editor.
2. Code Igniter libraries generally extract all of the contents of their configuration array as member variables of themselfs. Not too sure this is great best practice in PHP but it makes our life easy and we can rely on $this->pad_image being in the class if we specify it in config.
3. If maintaining aspect ratio and resizing we still may want to pad the image so we need to store the size that was originally wanted rather than what the current class does which is to change the requested sizes ($this->width, $this->height) to be the maximum bounding box with the same aspect ration as the original image that will fit inside our requested width and height. Therefore inside the initialize() function on line 276 (or directly before $this->image_reproportion();) I needed to store the requested dimensions before we loose them:

   
   $this->req_width = $this->width;
   $this->req_height = $this->height;
   
   

4. The next thing we need to do is find the correct resize() function. In my case I’m using GD2 but I’m sure similar code could be written for the other graphics libraries supported by Image_lib.php. Replace the image_process_gd() function with the following slightly different code:

   
   function image_process_gd($action = 'resize')
   {
   $v2_override = FALSE;

   // If the target width/height match the source, AND if the new file name is not equal to the old file name
   // we'll simply make a copy of the original with the new name... assuming dynamic rendering is off.
   if ($this->dynamic_output === FALSE)
   {
   if ($this->orig_width == $this->width AND $this->orig_height == $this->height)
   {
   if ($this->source_image != $this->new_image)
   {
   if (@copy($this->full_src_path, $this->full_dst_path))
   {
   @chmod($this->full_dst_path, DIR_WRITE_MODE);
   }
   }

   return TRUE;
   }
   }

   // Let’s set up our values based on the action
   if ($action == ‘crop’)
   {
   // Reassign the source width/height if cropping
   $this->orig_width = $this->width;
   $this->orig_height = $this->height;

   // GD 2.0 has a cropping bug so we’ll test for it
   if ($this->gd_version() !== FALSE)
   {
   $gd_version = str_replace(’0′, ”, $this->gd_version());
   $v2_override = ($gd_version == 2) ? TRUE : FALSE;
   }
   }
   else
   {
   // If resizing the x/y axis must be zero
   $this->x_axis = 0;
   $this->y_axis = 0;
   }

   // Create the image handle
   if ( ! ($src_img = $this->image_create_gd()))
   {
   return FALSE;
   }

   // Create The Image
   //
   // old conditional which users report cause problems with shared GD libs who report themselves as “2.0 or greater”
   // it appears that this is no longer the issue that it was in 2004, so we’ve removed it, retaining it in the comment
   // below should that ever prove inaccurate.
   //
   // if ($this->image_library == ‘gd2′ AND function_exists(‘imagecreatetruecolor’) AND $v2_override == FALSE)
   if ($this->image_library == ‘gd2′ AND function_exists(‘imagecreatetruecolor’))
   {
   $create = ‘imagecreatetruecolor’;
   $copy = ‘imagecopyresampled’;
   }
   else
   {
   $create = ‘imagecreate’;
   $copy = ‘imagecopyresized’;
   }

   $_dst_img = $create($this->width, $this->height);
   $copy($_dst_img, $src_img, 0, 0, $this->x_axis, $this->y_axis, $this->width, $this->height, $this->orig_width, $this->orig_height);

   if(!empty($this->pad_image) && $this->pad_image == TRUE)
   {
   // pad the top of the image if necessary
   $dst_x = $this->req_width – $this->width;
   $dst_y = $this->req_height – $this->height;

   // we want the image positioned at 50% if it is taller than it is wider.
   if(abs($dst_x) > 0)
   {
   $dst_x = round($dst_x/2);
   }

   // create a new image with a white background
   $padded_dst_img = $create($this->req_width, $this->req_height);
   $bg_color = imagecolorallocate($padded_dst_img, 255, 255, 255);
   imagefill($padded_dst_img, 0, 0, $bg_color);

   // copy the previous image over the new one.
   $copy($padded_dst_img, $_dst_img, $dst_x, $dst_y, 0, 0, $this->width, $this->height, $this->width, $this->height);
   }
   $dst_img = isset($padded_dst_img) ? $padded_dst_img : $_dst_img;

   // Show the image
   if ($this->dynamic_output == TRUE)
   {
   $this->image_display_gd($dst_img);
   }
   else
   {
   // Or save it
   if ( ! $this->image_save_gd($dst_img))
   {
   return FALSE;
   }
   }

   // Kill the file handles
   imagedestroy($dst_img);
   imagedestroy($src_img);
   if(isset($padded_dst_img)) {
   imagedestroy($padded_dst_img);
   }

   // Set the file to 777
   @chmod($this->full_dst_path, DIR_WRITE_MODE);

   return TRUE;
   }
   

Now you have images which are all the same size and consistently positioned with white space at the top. There are lots of variations on this theme that you might be able to make the code here better. It may make life easier than putting inline margins on images that come out of Image_lib in different sizes when trying to keep an image proportional.

function isCSSAnimCapable() {
    return (
        ("WebkitTransition" in document.documentElement.style) ||
        ("MozTransition" in document.documentElement.style) ||
        ("MsTransition" in document.documentElement.style) ||
        ("OTransition" in document.documentElement.style) ||
        ("Transition" in document.documentElement.style)
    );
}

It does however become a little messy trying to do animation from both Javascript and CSS. You have been warned.

Lets back up a bit before we talk about India. I’d been on one other big holiday before, on my own, Thailand. I had been intending to go with a friend on this trip, but that person (you know who you are) backed out and I was so excited about the idea I just booked my ticket anyway. Going away on my own for the first time turned out to be a very good thing for me; it made me realise that almost the more adversity I put myself in the better things turned out. So the following year I was looking for other places to travel, Brazil and South America sounded difficult and India seemed like a very very safe alternative… little did I know that while India is safe it is certainly full of cons and swindles and aggressive rickshaw wallahs.

So after a 20h of travelling my first con began…

This will probably never be finished so I’m going to publish it now, as is.

I’m looking forward to playing and configuring this machine and providing a few tutorials and updates on things I’m doing from Code Igniter, to frontend code, to breaking my new server

For now that’s it.