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A Night of Amazing Celtic Music!

Olaf — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:59:13 +0000

My wife and an old high school friend of ours, Colin Blackledge, have put together a most remarkable double-event concert this Friday off the downtown square in Gainesville. Seven Nations and Emerald Rose will be performing in the small pizza bar venue that is the Monkey Barrel. For $15.00, you can get in to see these great acts as they jam Celtic-rock style! If you want to give up some information in advance, you can avoid the line and get priority entry to the event. Just call (770) 287-0970 and let them know you are interested in the Friday concert with Seven Nations and Emerald Rose.

Friday, October 26th
The Monkey Barrel
115 Washington St.
Gainesville, GA 30501

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Seven Nations is a five-man Celtic rock band that features bagpipes and fiddle. Their style is a fusion of traditional and original music. 7N has toured the world playing the Winter Olympics, Irish/Scottish Highland Games and Festivals, as well as traditional concert venues.

Emerald Rose is a four-man Celtic folk-rock band with a rich, traditional world fusion sound with influences randing from the Chieftains to Jethro Tull. Blending amazing vocals and driving guitars and bass, their music ranges from traditional jigs and reels to original folk rock and pop.

WordPress 2.3 Update

webmaster — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:41:58 +0000

I’ve just successfully completed my WordPress 2.3 update. As far as WordPress updates go, this was a pretty big one. So big, in fact, that I actually followed the instructions and disabled (most) of my plugins to be sure the site worked after the update. I knew however, that disabling my plugins would just leave my site riddled with little “function x does not exist!” crumbs. So I employed a new plugin to aid me in reclaiming a clean site – Maintenance Mode. Very helpful. It’s something that exists in a lot of CMS software, but was left out in WordPress until recently. This little piece of code allowed me to demonstrate a splash page (which a few of you might have noticed earlier today) whilst I wreaked havoc on things behind the scenes.

The update went through with no problems, though I had some issues with incompatible plugins that weren’t actually generating errors. To make a long, technical story more easily digestible, I can summarize by saying you need about 16MB of memory allocated to PHP’s script execution in PHP 5.2 and WordPress 2.2.2 (including WordPress 2.3). You’ll also want to update plugins that hit deprecated tables in WordPress such as the Google Sitemap Generator and the WordPress Database Backup. Both of these have current versions that address this problem. I also migrated over from the Ultimate Tag Warrior to WP 2.3′s integrated tag management features. It’s not quite as slick as what UTW had put together, but it’s working and I have great expectations for its extensibility with additional plugins. At any rate, it probably goes without saying that you should not keep UTW enabled with the new version of WordPress – I had heard some people didn’t have any problems with it, but I don’t see how as it makes calls to non-existent (deprecated) tables (e.g. post2cat).

Microsoft Acquires SeaDragon: Photosynth Preview

Olaf — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 18:29:21 +0000

Wow! I mean, really?!? Words cannot express this amazing (new-ish) technology. A picture is worth 1,000 words, and this technology brings together thousands of pictures in new and innovative ways. Perhaps we’re getting close to a proper expression now. I’m not going to attempt to rationalize or dissect this concept because I really don’t know a lot about what goes into it. You’ve just got to go see it for yourself.

Microsoft Labs: Photosynth Preview

Just in case you were too amazed to properly put together what you just saw, here’s my summary. SeaDragon developed an imaging solution (algorithm, I suppose) that regards bit depth and pixel count as only contextually relative. To an extent, your computer does this today. It’s just not as efficient as what SeaDragon was able to do. If your computer is asked to display 100 images in a grid and your computer’s monitor is capable of displaying 786,432 pixels (1024×768), then the SeaDragon algorithms resize the images to 7,800 pixels each (100×78) – don’t argue, just follow the logic of my simple example. Graphics programs such as Photoshop do this with a choice as to how you would like to interpolate the images (Lanczos, B-spline, Triangle/tent, nearest neighbor). I haven’t heard what math is used to do it in SeaDragon’s technology, but it must be something fast (not necessarily accurate). The implementation allows you to seamlessly zoom in and out of an entire image collection without delay. Microsoft demonstrated the technology as a new way to media market. The example involved showing a newspaper with vector text on it and images flowed – just as you would expect. However, the interesting bit was where they zoomed into an area of the paper to bring a micro-fiche like add to the foreground with distinct detail in the images and text (of course). It really merges the world of raster and vector imaging solutions. So here’s where Microsoft steps in and, correct me if my timing is off, bridges the technology with some Microsoft magic to create an imaging technique with spatial recognition. The example you see at the Photosynth link is a collection of Flickr photos of a specific cathedral. They’ve spatially mapped all the pictures into a model of the cathedral. This combined 2D/3D world now allows you to move around within the 3D structure while using a variety of images to give you the detail. As you move the mouse around, it highlights spatially plotted images that were recognized to fit. Now that you know what’s going on, go back and try it again!

WP Plugin: Notify on Draft Post

Olaf — Thu, 24 May 2007 03:02:33 +0000

I contribute to a few other blogs out there as I’m able, all of which are WordPress-based like this one. A seemingly simple function has been lacking in my mind, and the community seems to agree with me. But for some unknown reason, the answer has not been produced until now.

My first WordPress plugin, Notify on Draft Post is now in its first public release. Here’s the rundown:

This plugin has now been accepted and is available for download via WordPress.org’s plugin site.

*** This tool has reached its usefulness. Version 2.2 of WordPress now includes the functionality natively. ***

**Release v.1.0.1
Cleaned up some of the comments within the code itself. It should be well documented by this point!

Features v.1.0
Check that user *can’t* Publish a post on their own (Contributor, for instance)
Selectable “ready to publish” flag for submission
WP Moderator notification email (admin email)

Installation:
The file notify-draft.php must be put within the wp-content/plugins/ directory of your WordPress installation. Activate the plugin from the administration interface…done!

Roadmap:
I would like to add some options for Notify on Draft Post to allow the selection of an alternate email or multiples. By default, the product utilizes the site’s defined “admin” email address.

The Maize Maze

Olaf — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 03:21:18 +0000

A crowd of us hit Uncle Shuck’s corn maze this evening for some group entertainment. There was quite a crowd already there, so we blended in nicely. Balthazar came along with us to be in his (and ours) first ever corn maze. Running the maze reminded me a little of running new levels in Quake or something. The whole thing was laid out over many acres and a nascar scene was carved out of the corn. This scene made up the three mazes that we wound through. I found it it easiest to get my head down on the map and cruise through at a good clip. The group had some difficulty keeping up with me. In fact, we lost half of them. There were way-points to reach and have a score sheet punched. I enjoyed that aspect of the game. We got all 12 punches done across two different mazes. There was also a haunted maze, which most of us ran. It was a little on the lame side just in that there were long stretches where nothing happened. There were a couple of really good spots in the haunted maze, however. We also did the hay ride at the end – they drop you off at a bonfire-ish spot where you can roast some marshmallows and warm up…finally. It was a really cold night. The first cold nights of autumn are always hard to prepare for. Balthazar told me as we walked back to the car around 10:00pm that he had a really good time. That was good for me to hear. It was also the last thing we would hear from Balthazar tonight. He is sleeping like a rock.

MMORPG Memory

Olaf — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 04:24:42 +0000

A gp to anyone that recognizes this:

In Memory of Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001)

Olaf — Thu, 25 May 2006 14:46:45 +0000

Today is Towel Day throughout the Universe. If you know of and love Douglas Adams, you will wear your towel in reverence of his comedic brilliance.

Pictures are everywhere, though Flickr is a good start. And here’s mine.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Major Updates Coming

Olaf — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:45:08 +0000

Seriously this time. I’m in the process of migrating the site over to WordPress 2.0.1. I’ve done it in beta now and have finally reached full success. There were issues with importing comments that I’ve finally worked out. The last element of known risk is permanent links. Out there in the blogosphere are links to my site that will quite suddenly and catastrophically fail. The new URL’s will be something quite different and I don’t know that I’m going to take the time to remap the links to their present form. That could be a complicated process with very little return in reality. Another problem I’ve just thought of is related to displaying my Flickr pictures on the site without having to go to Flickr to see them. Flickr has a public beta of an API, but I noticed some changes in it recently that cause some problems viewing certain pictures. As a beta, they can’t support it so I’m kind of stuck on my own to fix the problem. Unlike the link problem, I am working diligently to correct this issue by any means possible.

I’m going to hold off posting until I can get the site completely moved over. Shouldn’t take more than a day or two. Also – don’t expect any major changes to the look and feel around here. I went to great lengths to recreate this site as a theme in WP. There will be subtle changes, but nothing shocking.

Atlanta Killings Make BIG News

Olaf — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 16:27:32 +0000

Brian Nichols escaped from a courthouse today in Fulton County, having shot and killed the judge, court reporter, and possibly a sheriff’s deputy. I’m guessing by his shocking departure that he’s guilty. He also took the time to pistol-whip an AJC reporter while hijacking a vehicle. I’m shocked that this sort of thing could even happen, especially during a rape trial. I would think that everyone would be on their toes when dealing with criminals of this caliber on a day-to-day basis. I’m very sorry that people have lost their lives in the line of duty related to this incident. We can only hope that the deputy will persevere.

FOX News Link

**UPDATE** They’ve made positive identification of Nichols driving in a green Honda Accord (GA Tag, 6584YN). That, in and of itself, isn’t interesting. What’s cool is that every traffic sign in Atlanta has this information posted. With our redneck populous (and aggressive driver index), this guy will be run off the road in no time.

Orion’s Omen

Olaf — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 03:34:31 +0000

This evening we’ve undergone a great storm that swept rather hastily across north Georgia. I have attempted to take some brilliant pictures, but they’re probably all blurry – we’ll see when I’m able to get the camera and its cable together. After the showers, the sky began showing little pockets of clear stars showing through low-hanging clouds. When I arrived home, I was welcomed by a perfectly framed “Orion” within a hole in the clouds. They were moving quite quickly, so it didn’t last long and I hadn’t a tripod on me to capture the moment. It was really awesome, however. I wish you all could have seen it!