Features

• Choose any shelf that you want to display
• There are 16 sorting options
• Choose one of the 3 book cover sizes
• Show or hide book title
• Set the length of book title
• Show or hide author name, isbn, user rating, and average rating
• You can also change the display labels for author name, isbn, user rating, and average rating

Download

GoodShelf (85)

Installation

To install it, simply unzip the download file and move/copy goodshelf.php to /wp-content/plugins folder of wordpress. In the admin page, go to Plugin and activate the GoodShelf plugin. After that, you need to configure to get it working. Go to Design or Presentation and select GoodShelf. There is a list of options (mentioned in Features) that you can choose from. The final step is go to Widget to add GoodShelf widget to your sidebar. 

Customization

If you like to customize the widget, below is a list of CSS classes and id associated with the widget that you can style:

• Book list: .goodshelf_ul
• Book item: .goodshelf_li
• Book cover: .goodshelf_cover
• Book description: .goodshelf_text
• Profile link: #profile_link

These are the web browsers installed on my machine.

How many do you have?

Normally, I use Photoshop to resize my photos because along with resizing photos I also need to apply some filters. A few days ago one of my friends asked me was there any application on Mac that lets him resize a bunch of photos in one go. He also mentioned that he didn’t wanna apply any filters at all and opening Photoshop takes time (it’s true).

Then I figured out that properly we could do that in Automator (a built-in application for automating repetitive tasks). I had never used Automator before but it’s really easy to use, everything is done by drag and drop. After a minute or so, I came up with a small app that does the job perfectly.

If you need to do that task over and over again, you might wanna check this app out. You can download it here ResizePhotos (97). I don’t need to explain how it works because every step in the app is quite explanatory. Enjoy!

In the last few days, I’ve been busy looking around for different web development frameworks. I’ve found quite a lot and these are some of the major ones - Ruby on Rails, Symfony, Django, CakePHP, CodeIgniter and Zend Framework.

Ruby on Rails is the most popular one because it’s the first one of its kind and it’s based on Ruby language- which is an easy language to learn. But I have heard many people say that Ruby on Rails is not so scaleable in some ways.

Django uses Python language. Python is a powerful scripting language, which is also used by Google. Django is properly the best in terms of performance. However, I don’t like the structure of Python language at all, it really does concern me.

CakePHP, as you can see from the name, is based on PHP language. I can say PHP is the most popular (web) server scripting language language ever. PHP is probably the the closest to Ruby on Rails in terms of features provided. Other frameworks that are based on PHP are Symfony, CodeIgniter, and Zend Framework.

Personally, I did not choose Rails and Django due to the fact that I really like PHP language and I don’t wanna give up on it. Furthermore, not all hosting service providers support ruby and python so this is the major reason not to take Rails and Django. Then it came down to CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, and Zend Framework.

After looking at some code snippets of these frameworks, I realized that I prefer CodeIgniter and CakePHP. I mean it’s easy to get going with these two. It was really hard for me to choose one of the two. CodeIgniter code seems to be clearer and it has a lot of the components and helpers compared to cakePHP. However, cakePHP seems to be more popular and has more active community and also has quite a number of satellite sites around. After a while, I thought well after all, open source is all about community. I was reading a lot of blog posts on web development frameworks. It was really helpful reading snook.ca.

I spent more time reading CodeIgniter and CakePHP and finally I find myself falling for cakePHP. So now I know exactly that cakePHP is for me. I’ve been reading more on its documentation and tutorials. It is a really cool framework. It’s easy to get everything up and running yet there’s so much that you can customize and bakers (cake users/developers) are really helpful.

So, if you’re looking for a web framework for yourself I really recommend cakePHP. Check out the links below: 

• Official site
• The bakery
• Cake Manual
• Cake group

There’s one more thing I learned from reading cakePHP manual. Apart from learning a new framework, I’ve learned more about good practice and MVC methodology.

To conclude, all of the frameworks I mentioned here are all great but the reason I chose cakePHP is because it suits my style and its community. If you know any other good frameworks, let me know. I’ll most likely write on cakePHP.

Till then, happy baking!

I stumbled on an interesting blog post yesterday. The author wrote about various information which was included in his blog footer. There were 4 pieces of information and I found one of those really interesting - where he uses an Applescript to upload the uptime of his computer (Macbook) and it is updated periodically.

Upon reading that post, it made me think of implementing the idea immediately. However, only after a while have I decided to do it. Instead of using Applescript, I chose bash script because bash script is lower level than Applescript and furthermore, you don’t have to interact with other high level applications which consumes less system resources. Below is the bash script that does the work on local machine.


# get the uptime
days=$(uptime | awk '{print $3}')
hours=$(uptime | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/,//g')
# start the uptime in a text file
echo $days $time_lable > temp.txt
# use ftp to upload the file to a designed directory
ftp ftp://username:password@host <<EOF
cd "path-to/a-directory/on-web-server"
put temp.txt
bye
EOF
# delete the text file on the local machine
rm temp.txt


Save the script into a directory, for instant, a home directory. After that, you need to update it periodically. How? Cron (scheduling service on unix-like operating system) does this work perfectly. Create a new text file with the following code.


# this runs once in one hour
0 * * * * /path-to-the-bash-script


And then, you need to tell cron to start. Type the following in Terminal:


> crontab /patht-to-the-cron-job-file


There’s one thing left. We need to write a server script (PHP, Perl, or ASP) to display the text file upload by the bash script. The following is a PHP script to display the text file.


<?php
$file = 'path-to-temp.txt';
$fh = fopen($file, 'r');
$content = fread($fh, filesize($file));
// do some decoration work here
// ......
echo $content;
?>


It’s done.

Kudos to wesg.ca.

Yes, I’m a wine lover. I like to try different wines from different places. I prefer red wine to white wine. I normally share a bottle or 2 once a week. Whenever I go to a supermarket in the weekend, I usually try to choose a different bottle. Any other wine lovers out there?

You might have seen this photo before. Yeah, I put it on the sidebar with a link to vote for it on JPGMag (www.jpgmag.com). Up to this point, you might have thought I won the competition or something. No, I didn’t and I’ve got a small number of votes compared to the last competition. Considering most of you (or maybe all of you?) couldn’t get to vote for it since you need to register to cast a vote, I would like to get some comments from you guys here. You can see other people’s photos in the same competition at http://www.jpgmag.com/themes/87.

Just to let you know that whether I’ll get negative or position comments, I still keep going for the competition. This means that if the comment is positive, I’ll be more confident about my photography skill and if the comment is negative I’ll know which parts need more work and I’ll try to make it better next time. Anyways, just be honest when you comment. 

Cheers :) 

PS. If you have a photo that you think it’s somewhat compelling, you really should put it into the next competition. Jpgmag is a really great community for people who love taking photo.

I’m proud to announce that this (vanda.com.kh) is my latest work in web design/development. I finished it 2 weeks ago but postponed posting it here until they actually updated some information on the website. 

Responsibilities: 

• Information architecture
• Site design (Wordpress theme)
• Development (wordpress plugins - admin plugin and visitor counter)

This is a speech by Dr. Katsushi Ikeuchi who carried out a project to digitally model Bayon Temple with his student students in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Enjoy watching!

Enjoying amazing ancient structures through Internet technologies is one of
the most promising methods to promote our culture and cultural heritage.
These technologies involve sensing, transmission, and display. In this talk,
I will briefly explain these three aspects, and then focus on sensing
issues, in particular, the technical challenges presented by sensing huge
outdoor structures. I will describe the technical challenges and how we
solved them as we confronted the difficult task of modeling the huge Bayon
Temple in the Angkor ruin in Cambodia. I will show the digital data we
obtained, including the entire structure of the temple, the hundred and
seventy-three faces of deities, and the hidden pediments. I will also
explain some of the technical issues involved in displaying the data we
obtained, using our virtual Aska as an example.

Source: Google Tech Talk, Speaker: Dr. Katsushi Ikeuchi