The seemingly spontaneous first paragraph

I’m writing this with help of the fantastic WordPress Front-End Editor plugin (which is going end up in WP Core, eventually – looking forward to it). It’s much easier to concentrate on writing when all you have in front of your eyes is the final version of the “product”, visually speaking. I’ve never gotten used to the full-screen variant of the WP editor, but this works just great for me.
When the plugin is completed, it’s going to be almost as gorgeous as Medium’s content editor.

“Somethingness Two”

I’ve modified my WordPress theme a bit, and I’m currently really satisfied with the look and feel of the website (which I haven’t been in a long time).

I’ve had a really hard time finding the right font, because most of them look like sh*t when font smoothing/clear type is off. I’m shortsighted, I wear eyeglasses, and I have astigmatism – reading with font smoothing turned on is a pain for me. So, after going through all (and I mean all of them) Google and TypeKit serif fonts, I’ve narrowed it down to three that looked pleasant to my eyes: Vollkorn, Volkhov and PT Serif. Initially, I went with Vollkorn: although it’s a lovely font, it doesn’t look that great in bold. Volkhov was my second choice, but after numerous comparisons I decided that I like PT Serif just a smidge better. For headings, I chose Lato; I think it complements PT Serif quite nicely.

Reads and Readability

And this font talk has now reminded me: I’ve asked the folks at Readability if they could offer some standard font in their options, for people like me. I hope they will, because in this age of information overload, I couldn’t live without a tool like Readability. I’m especially fond of its “Export to EPUB” feature, which makes it possible for me to easily transfer to and read all those saved for later articles on my Nook. Here’s a list of some of my favorite articles from the past few months.

On to reads…

I’ve finally read “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. It’s a book written in form of a report diary of a man called Charlie Gordon. His reports start a few weeks before he is scheduled to undergo an experimental surgery which should  increase his (very low) IQ. I really can’t tell you much more about the plot without spoiling it, but trust me: this book is one remarkable journey. Once I started, I couldn’t stop reading it and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

“The making of Karateka” is another great book I’ve read this year. It’s also written  in form of a diary, but this one is not fictional: it’s a collection of Jordan Mechner‘s diary entries from 1982-1984, while he was working on his game “Karateka”. The game received rave reviews and sold over 500 000 copies world-wide. While you may have never heard of “Karateka”, I’m sure you’ve heard of the game he made next, “Prince of Persia”.

If you’re fond of the Alien universe and don’t mind reading movie scripts, you won’t be disappointed by a fan-written script by Anil Jacob Kunnel, titled “Alien Planet“. I’ll steal the logline from the forum I found the download link on: “Following the events of Alien: Resurrection, Ellen Ripley is aboard an exploration vessel heading toward the Xenomorph homeworld, where she and the rest of the crew must struggle to survive.” It’s an exciting read, very well written and I wouldn’t mind a bit if it had been made into a movie. AvPGalaxy has a review of the script.

To conclude the reading list: I’m currently reading “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. I find it a bit difficult to follow at times because of the 1800’s language and some very long sentences, but it’s also way more interesting than I thought it would be.

Obsessed with moving pictures

To keep things short(er), I’ll just link you up with a list of movies I’ve found most enjoyable in 2013 (!important: some of them were released in 2012!)

On the series front, there were a few new shows I stuck to, some of them excellent (The Wrong Mans, The Fall, Broadchurch, Orphan Black), some surprisingly good (The Blacklist, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Sleepy Hollow) and some that are better than average and might improve in time (Almost Human). In semi-particular order, yesteryear’s favorites remain: Person of Interest, Castle, Psych, Awkward, Arrow, Big Bang Theory, The Neighbors, Supernatural, Grimm, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Continuum, and a guilty pleasure above all guilty pleasures: Revolution. I recently started watching Parks and Recreation and it has quickly become one of my all-time favorites.

Fringe and Breaking Bad both ended in 2013., unfortunately. Both Walters will be missed. I just hope there’s more good stuff where they came from.

I don’t feel like writing about music (at this moment)…

…but, please, do take a listen to these two beautiful, haunting soundtracks: The Grey (Marc Streitenfeld) and Monsters (Jon Hopkins). They are not that recent, but they are my favorites and I listen to them often.

That’s it for this blog post. Need fulfilled, I guess. I think I’ll write more soon; about music and audio libraries for composers, maybe about web stuff, or about awesomeness of WDTV Live assisted by Plex.

Happy New Year ;)

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File Gallery 1.7.5.1 is out – news: drag+drop upload and thumb regeneration, fixes: MSIE insert position bug http://t.co/x1O9Zeqw #wordpress

— Bruno Babi? (@aesqe) June 25, 2012

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To sum up the past 12 months:

• Unity of Command, the game I’ve made sound effects and composed music for, is out! It’s a pretty awesome turn-based WWII strategy, and a demo is available if you’re interested. Check it out at http://unityofcommand.net/
• File Gallery‘s download counter is almost at 100 000, and v1.7.5 could be out sooner than you think. I’ll try to answer some of the more urgent e-mails and forum posts next week.
• I’ve become very intimate with Javascript and I kind of love it.
• I’ve been reading a lot about game development, game physics, best practices, etc. in the past few months. It’s… complex. So much ground to cover, so many different approaches, so time-consuming. It’s frustrating, but I enjoy it (most days o.O).
• Brlog related: we’ve won some awards, created our first iPhone app, helped create an exhibition and pushed a few new websites out.
• nothing new on the music front, but I’ll post a Unity of Command preview mix soon

Gotta go to the store, brb.

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This is just a quick filter you can use in this case:

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I’m 31.

I love the world, I hate the world.

Gonna go take a shower now.

In other news: WordPress File Gallery 1.5RC1 is out.

Be a sport and help me test the plugin, OK? I’ve been working on it for almost two years now, and I think it’s ready to be “set free” :)

cheers ;)

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Also, I might post some new music next week. Maybe even some very old music. Like, ten years old. We’ll see.

I’ll be 31 in 11 days, and I’m quite looking forward to it.

And how about those Winchester boys wondering around in Heaven, huh? God, I love that show :)

And happy Easter, to those of you who celebrate it.

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Anyways, I’ve been “active” on a subpage, working on my “File Gallery” plugin for WordPress.

It took me a while to realize that people who have subscribed to my RSS feed have no idea about this plugin because its “home” is a page. It’s not included in the feed. I’m a moron.

So, the time here is currently 0:03 and I’m very tired.

But you’ve expected some kind of lame excuse for a short post from me, so this is no surprise.

Anywho…

WordPress File Gallery plugin is ready for testing – go go go!

ps: I’m alive and well, and working at Brlog ;)

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And then all hell will break loose.

Possibly.

Not.

:|

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Anyways, I was working on ZagrebDox for the whole month of February and it kind of took all of my time and energy, but ended up being a really nice project because I’ve, once again, learned a lot of new things about WordPress.

I’ve also learned a few new things about MySQL and how to crash your hosting provider’s shared server.

What happened:

• the site has over 300 pages (each with at least 3 attachments)  and I’ve used a permalink structure which started with %category% – this combination produced waaay too many rewrite rules
• there was a 20MB database size limit
• for some reason, the wp_options->rewrite_rules field got duplicated ~10 times, and the database had grown to 50MB in no time
• combine that with the 20MB limit and what you get is a bunch of never-ending transactions
• so the server went kabang! and the site was promptly moved to another one

To solve the problem, I’ve changed the permalink structure to begin with %year%, disabled creation of rewrite rules for attachments (thanks to Johan Eenfeldt – his code has made my number of queries per page drop from ~3900 to ~90), set the number of post revisions to 2, and then repaired and optimized the database which now stands happily still at 5.7MB.

I don’t know how rewrite_rules field got duplicated, I haven’t used any plugins that would mess with it, so I’m still in the dark about that. What I do know is: you can’t host over 700 sites on one single server and expect everything to go smoothly until the end of days. Not to mention that the only available transport protocol is fsockopen which made the admin area a bit slow until I’ve blocked all the others…

There’s been some other stuff I’ve worked on, but I’ll put that in another post.

It’s lunch time. And I miss Ma.gnolia…

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Go fill it out and put these three as priorities at the bottom:

1. Improve custom fields
2. Post templates/post types
3. Do not auto-correct in HTML editor

Thank you! :D

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