1. First, edit the nggpolaroid.php file line 41 so that it checks for class nggLoader instead of class nggallery. It should look like this:

   if ( class_exists('nggLoader') ) {

2. Next, copy the code shown below (originally found here) and replace the nggShowPolaroid function with it in the same nggpolaroid.php file. Don’t for get to leave the “?>” at the end of the file.

    
   function nggShowPolaroid($galleryID,$irWidth,$irHeight) {
    
   	global $wpdb;
   	$ngg_options = get_option('ngg_options');
   	$obj = 'so' . $galleryID;
    
   	if (empty($irWidth) ) $irWidth = $ngg_options['irWidth'];
   	if (empty($irHeight)) $irHeight = $ngg_options['irHeight'];
    
   	$replace  = "\n".'<div class="polaroid" id="ngg_polaroid'.$galleryID.'">';
   	$replace .= 'The <a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Flash Player</a> and <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/">a browser with Javascript support</a> are needed..
   </div>';
           $replace .= "\n\t".'<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer">';
   	if ($ngg_options['irXHTMLvalid']) $replace .= "\n\t".'<!--';
   	if ($ngg_options['irXHTMLvalid']) $replace .= "\n\t".'//<![CDATA[';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t".'var '. $obj .' = {';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t".'params : {';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t\t".'wmode : "opaque",';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t\t".'allowFullScreen : "true"},';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t".'flashvars : {';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t\t".'xmlURL : "'.NGGPOLAROID_URLPATH.'nggpolaroidXML.php?gid='.$galleryID.'"},';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t".'attr : {},';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t".'start : function() {';
   	$replace .="\n\t\t\t\t".'swfobject.embedSWF("'.NGGPOLAROID_URLPATH.'polaroid.swf","ngg_polaroid'.$galleryID.'", "'.$irWidth.'", "'.$irHeight.'", "7.0.0", false, this.flashvars, this.params, this.attr );';
           $replace .="\n\t\t".'}';
           $replace .="\n".'}';
           $replace .="\n".$obj.'.start();';
   	if ($ngg_options['irXHTMLvalid']) $replace .= "\n\t".'//]]>';
   	if ($ngg_options['irXHTMLvalid']) $replace .= "\n\t".'-->';
   	$replace .= "\n\t".'</script>';
    
   	return $replace;
   }
    
   } else {
   	add_action('admin_notices', create_function('', 'echo \'<div id="message" class="error fade"><strong>' . __('Sorry, NextGEN Gallery Polaroid works only in Combination with NextGEN Gallery',"nggallery") . '</strong>
   </div>\';'));
   }// End Check

3. Finally, somewhere along the lines, the SWFObject javascript class which is used by the Polaroid plugin is no longer included by default when the page loads. I’m not sure if there’s a setting somewhere in NextGEN to enable this or what, but the easiest way I’ve found to include it by default is to install the WP-SWFObject plugin. This will add the following line to the html of every wordpress page:

   <script src="http://www.your-website.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-swfobject/2.0/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

   There is probably a better way, but I haven’t found it.

Finally, the code polaroid=ireland,500,600 enclosed in square brackets includes the cool animation below, which shows all the pictures in the “ireland” album with a width of 500×600.

I am a graduate student after all, and I still need to be able to write papers on my home computer for publication in technical journals.  Standard procedure on my old windows computer was to use MikTex and TeXnicCenter.  MikTex is great because it automatically downloads and installs whatever latex packages it needs on the fly, and TeXnicCenter beats the snot out of notepad.  After switching to Ubuntu and Gnome specifically, I started tracking down replacements for these two pieces.  The most intriguing (and first) solution I came across was using the Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) development environment with the Texlipse plugin.  Eclipse is an extremely extendable platform that has great plugins and tools for developing in all sorts of languages, and I’ve been using a customized version at work to develop software which runs on some Texas Instruments fixed-point DSPs and Xilinx FPGAs.

The first step to getting a workable Eclipse-based LaTex environment working in Ubuntu is to install a Java Development Kit (JDK), whether that kit is the Sun JDK 6 or one of the open-source (openjdk) distributions.  Since I already had the Sun JDK installed as a prereq for a different program, I’ll outline that first.  On my particular system, I have installed both the JDK and the JRE, which I believe are both required, although I’m not sure about the JDK. Therefore, to install Eclipse 3.4 using the Sun JDK, (sourcing john from jhcore.net):

Install the Sun JRE and JDK:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk

Then download and install Eclipse 3.4:

wget
http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/eclipse/technology/epp/downloads/release/ganymede/R/eclipse-java-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz
tar xzvf eclipse-java-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz
mv eclipse eclipse3.4

Edit: It has come to my attention that there is a service release (SR1) to Eclipse 3.4. Therefore, when downloading Eclipse, the package name should be downloaded with:

wget
http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/eclipse/technology/epp/downloads/release/ganymede/SR1/eclipse-java-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk.tar.gz

I haven’t tried this installation yet, but it is my guess that the process will be identical.

At this point, you should have a working copy of Eclipse installed in your home directory which can be run by ~/eclipse3.4/eclipse. The next step is to install TexLive, which is a pretty good LaTex package for Linux. In Ubuntu, this is accomplished by:

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base

There are other TexLive packages in the Unbuntu repository, but it is my understanding that the texlive-latex-base package includes the necessary binaries (like latex, pdflatex, and pslatex) needed to compile *.tex files. As for the LaTex classes and style packages, that’s where MikTex comes in. Wait, what?

MikTex is a great LaTex package manager for windows, but it turns out you can compile it for linux too! I’m not going to go through it step by step, because that website does an excellent job of it. Just make sure when you’re compiling that you SPECIFY YOUR HOME DIRECTORY PROPERLY TWICE in the part where it says:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DMIKTEX_INSTALLROOT="/home/YOUR USER/texmf" -DMIKTEX_ROOTS="/home/YOUR USER/texmf"

This is important because this will be the directory where the MikTex package manager stores the LaTex packages when it downloads them. Also, that website says to run a sudo make install which will install the package into the texmf directory and, by virtue of running this using sudo, make root the owner of the texmf directory or some directories in it. It is convenient to sudo chown -R YourUser:YourUser ~/texmf to give yourself permissions to install packages and update the MikTex database without the sudo command. By default, TexLive is already configured (in /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf) to look for LaTex packages in $HOME/texmf when compiling LaTex files. BAM! Now when you need a LaTex package like cite, you can just run:

mpm --update-db
mpm --install=cite

Piece of cake.

The last piece of the puzzle is the Texlipse plugin for Eclipse. This does the syntax highlighting, compiling, etc, etc in Eclipse. It works pretty well I might add. In Eclipse 3.4, it is a piece of cake to install. Just run eclipse and go to the Help >> Software Updates… menu and add a new site: http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/ . Then check the box next to the site you just added and hit install. Also a piece of cake.

You should now have a completely usable LaTex editing environment at your fingertips, and since it’s based on Eclipse, you can use all sorts of other great add-ons like Subclipse for accessing your LaTex documents stored in a SVN repository.

Hope I’ve helped to make this process a little more straightforward for someone else.

I found an XPS M1330 refurb with some decent specs for a spectacular price.  It showed up on my doorstep on Monday with a busted screen though.  I’m not sure whether the screen was defective or busted up during shipping (the box had a decent dent on one side).  The LCD wasn’t actually cracked, but there was some crazy pixelation and flickering.

Preparing myself to ship it back, I contacted Dell and they troubleshot the laptop over the phone, having me connect an external monitor to the VGA-out plug to make sure it wasn’t the motherboard or video card.  Then, to my surpise, they told me they’d send a technition out to my house with parts to correct the problem.  This was about 6:00PM on a Monday, and at 8:30AM on Tuesday, I got a call saying they had the new screen and would like to install it that day.  Nuts.

I’m very pleased with the laptop overall, and the new screen is extremely bright and very sharp.  It’s actually so bright that it’s easier on the eyes if you turn down the brightness a few notches.  The extended life 9-cell battery is also nice, with battery life somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-7 hours.

On a side note, the XPS M1330 came with FOUR PRIMARY PARTITIONS, the maximum number allowable on a single physical disk.

1. EISA Tools (Primary) This might only be present on refurbs to check the hardware at the factory, but I’m not sure.
2. Recovery Partition (Primary)
3. OS Partition (Primary)
4. Media Direct Partition (Primary)

This means you have to blow one away before you can make any other partitions.  So that dedicated data partition to protect yourself from Vista crashes will take some fanagling.  I’d vote the recovery partition off the island first.  I’m pretty sure I’d reinstall from scratch before I tried to “recover” the factory installation and included standard bloatware.

P.S.  I’m a big fan of the photos with the word “Nebula” in the title.

The GPS latitude, longitude, and altitude gets written into the image’s EXIF data and can be used to display the photo on a google map.  The XML Google Maps plugin for WordPress can be used with the NextGEN Gallery plugin to do this.  I’ve uploaded just a couple of the over 800 photos we took on the trip, all of which are tagged with their locations.  The few that are shown here were taken at Connor Pass on the way to Dingle, on the west coast of Ireland.  Also a few are of the coast itself.  It’s pretty cool to see the jagged coastline from above in the google map and then see the first-hand photographs.

A feature I think would be useful in the XML Google Maps plugin, and I’m not sure the best way to do this, would be a way to highlight spots on the map where photos are closely bunched together and may not be totally obvious.  For instance, there are three photos closely bunched inland near Connor Pass which you can’t clearly distinguish without zooming in the map.  Maybe a small bubble with the number of photos hidden beneath the top photo?  All in all though, it’s a really sweet plugin.  I thought the google maps plugin for Gallery 2 was cool, but this works flawlessly.

I think I should also mention that there are other ways of recording your GPS location without using sony’s little gadget.  I only mention this because the GPS-CS1 tends to lose track pretty often, and if you want accurate locations, you have to hold it away from you to get a good track again before you snap a photo.  Basically, any handheld GPS device that can record waypoints would work just as well.  There are also more expensive systems that attach directly to Nikon and Canon high end digital cameras and talk directly to the camera to tag the photos.  But hey, I’m just a grad student.  I can’t afford that stuff, so the GPS-CS1 worked just fine.

The NextGEN plugin creates this nice list of photos:

while the XML Google Maps plugin uses the NextGEN gallery to create this sweet google map.  Click on the photos in the map to see descriptions, and be sure to zoom around and make use of all the features google maps have to offer!

Edit: Somehow I missed the emergency landing in the middle of the show?  The plane must have (and should have) landed on a runway far from spectators because I certainly didn’t see it.

12►

As a derivative of Debian, Ubuntu uses the APT package handling utility and the Synaptic Package Manager graphical frontend.  I’d heard great things about the Compiz Fusion window manager and I’d always wanted to try it out (Look up Compiz on YouTube if you’re unfamiliar). With Ubuntu installed, I finally had the chance. It was a piece of cake to download and install the necessary packages using Synaptic, and here’s a list of the packages I installed to get it working:

1. compiz_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_all.deb
2. compiz-core_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
3. compiz-gnome_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
4. compiz-plugins_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
5. emerald_0.7.2-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
6. libdecoration0_0.7.4-0ubuntu6_i386.deb
7. libemeraldengine0_0.7.2-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
8. compiz-fusion-plugins-extra_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
9. compiz-fusion-plugins-main_0.7.4-0ubuntu5_i386.deb
10. compizconfig-backend-gconf_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
11. compizconfig-settings-manager_0.7.4-0ubuntu2_all.deb
12. fusion-icon_0.0.0+git20071028-2ubuntu2_all.deb
13. libcompizconfig0_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
14. python-compizconfig_0.7.4-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

I’m sorry if I missed any. You can find these by simply searching for “Compiz” in Synaptic. This list of packages includes all of the graphical configuration frontends which are useful in configuring the multitude of compiz options. You can tweak just about everything. I’m a big fan of the popular Cube desktop. Using a laptop with limited screen real estate is so much easier with hot keys which can rotate the cube in any direction to other (hopefully uncluttered) desktops. Also, if you’ve been thinking about trying Compiz but were worried that your graphics card wasn’t up to the task, don’t be. My laptop has a built-in intel graphics chip (using the i915 module I believe) and the Compiz cube desktop with flame effects and wobbly windows runs flawlessly. It even shows video while rotating the cube. Really awesome stuff.

Edit: I’ve noticed that this post has been somewhat popular, so I thought I’d point out that you can install compiz-fusion in the Synaptic Package Manager by selecting really only a few packages and the rest will be installed as dependencies.  These few are:

1. emerald_0.7.2-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
2. compizconfig-settings-manager_0.7.4-0ubuntu2_all.deb
3. fusion-icon_0.0.0+git20071028-2ubuntu2_all.deb

If the plugins packages aren’t installed, then they might have to be selected separately.  I believe all the other packages will be installed as dependencies of the three above.  Once that’s done, a fusion icon will appear in the system menu I believe, and you can access the compiz configuration GUI from there, as well as the emerald theme manager which lets you mess with window themes.  There are also options in there for metacity, but I ignored those and know little about them.