Holy shit. The desert and panorama demos are especially amazing.

(via Kottke)

I’ve switched the site over from a very customized Grid Focus theme to Titan by the Theme Foundry. I found it after searching through many pages of the WordPress theme directory. What I especially like about it are the colors as well as the layout.

It also comes with extensive options for customizing what goes where, especially in the sidebar and the header, which was a nice surprise. I originally intended to design my own theme, but that is honestly too much work.

(via)

Happy New Year.

As for updating plugins, it was less than pleasant. I seem to remember WordPress directly downloading the plugin ZIP files (presumably with fopen and etc) and writing the files directly. In recent releases, however, installing with FTP seems to be the only option.

To say this doesn’t always end well would be an understatement. Sometimes it makes WordPress unusable for minutes, and I say only WordPress because everything else served from the same web server works fine in the meanwhile. And there seems to be a weird bug that causes a mdawaffe-test.zip file to download instead of the actual plugin, which caused some irritation too.

In the end I just opened SSH up and used wget and did it myself…

I’m not sure why they got rid of the original system, but I suppose the security risk of making all of wp-content writable could be part of it. Then again, I haven’t really kept up with WordPress at all since I left.

I’ve gotten my hands on a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Not like it could have been worse than Vista. The upgrade process went completely smoothly, copying all my programs, settings and files over from my Vista installation. I’m still planning to install a clean version, but first I need a hard drive and more RAM (more on that later).

• Speed — for all the reports of improvements over Vista (which slowed down on a regular basis), it doesn’t seem that much faster. Start up and shut down times are only marginally faster, and Windows Explorer seems a bit faster (especially with large folders of videos). So far, Flash seems to be the most problematic — Firefox slows up a lot when I’m watching Flash movies.
• Taskbar — the redesigned taskbar was pretty weird until I changed it to small icons, so it matches about the height of the previous taskbars. So far, the new icons aren’t too great of an improvement — the running applications are indistinguishable from the quick launch buttons. That said, the new system tray is great.

To be honest, there doesn’t seem to be many groundbreaking changes.

64-bit

One large change with Windows 7 has been that Microsoft has been promoting 64-bit a lot more. I decided not to go immediately switch to 64-bit since that would have required a clean install, and I didn’t have the resources to back up. Not to mention I only have 4 GB of RAM, which makes 64-bit a lot less worth it.

My plan is, however, to buy a new hard drive (already done at a Black Friday sale) and 4 more gigabytes of RAM (not yet done). Once this is done, I’ll install a clean version of Windows 7 64-bit and experience the magic (drivers and programs not working with 64-bit).