The Akashic Field Chronicle

For anyone still reading this blog. No, seriously, I’ve been trying to post so bad, and I always run out of time. If only there was more than 24 hours in a day. Then, I guess I’ll have more time to procrastinate and still fail to blog. LOL.

Anyways, just some quick updates:

Summer

The school year is officially over. Yeah! My first school year ever (3 quarters to be exact). Oh, wait, what?! Summer’s only for undergrads and liberal arts majors?! Darn. Sad but true. I guess ‘the research’ never sleeps. Moving on then.

Moving Out

Lots of changes going on here, especially in the housing front. People moving, sublets being subleased, graduating and going elsewhere, getting jobs (what’s that?!). I am no exception of course. My contract at Weyburn Terrace ends at June 30th and I already have a new place around Santa Monica, thanks to my friend Allan Kelley.

• Pros:
  • Close to the beach!
  • Close to 3rd St. Promenade!
  • Close to a lot of other cool stuff!
  • A good deal cheaper
  • Weyburn just has this feeling of being part of the school. I feel like I’m always in school (sort of like a dorm)
  • Great people to share the house with.
• Cons:
  • Not so close to UCLA. I have to take a bus, and they are far apart and stops roughly every 2 blocks.
  • I have to say goodbye to the insanely fast UCLA residential internet access. Goodbye!
  • I really enjoy biking to school. If I still want to do that, I have to figure out how not to sweat

Overall a great blessing if I may say so.

Goodbye Weyburn! I will not miss your prohibitively steep roads.

WordPress 3.0

Speaking of updates, this blog has been updated. Woohoo. WordPress 3.0 is here. I haven’t really explored that much. So far, the only thing I’ve noticed is a slightly different color scheme. I’m sure a more thorough exploration will reveal what great new features these awesome developers have in store for us.

P.S. Oussama, another member of our lab just started a blog, which kinda reminded me that I also had one, which has recently fallen into neglect, thus prompting me to do this update post. Thanks and I’ll be watching your blog (ok, not really, but I’ll subscribe to your feed and in effect be watching your blog, only in a more efficient manner).

WordPress 2.7 has arrived and I updated this blog as soon as I can. The process was quick and painless.  I like what they’ve done to the interface, but it does take a little getting used to. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the time to post anything after the upgrade. Just look at the date on my previous one. That’s about 3 months without a single post. The only activity this blog has seen since then, is a couple of Russian comments that got through Akismet.

The Holidays are here, so I think new posts are in order. Besides the free time and the guilt at having to pay my webhost for nothing, I have another motivation for resurrecting this blog. In the next few weeks I want to focus on improving my writing skills. Everybody tells me the best way to do that is to practice. I just don’t see myself writing essays in a diary or something. So I plan to use my blog instead. I’m sure the web is filled with people who have nothing better to do than criticize my writing. If you feel like doing so, or you see an error here and there, just drop me a line. I won’t get mad. I’ll even thank you for it.

Why the sudden interest in writing you might ask? No, I haven’t given up on my M.S. and decided to become a writer instead. On the contrary, I’ve actually decided to go straight to a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. I have my reasons for doing this and I don’t want to dwell on them on this particular post. Its enough to say that I’m almost done with the application process.

When applying for Grad School in U.S. universities, you have to write a few essays about your qualifications and your plans upon getting your degree. They call it the statement of purpose. It’s hard to make one. Doing my SoP, I realized how much I sucked at writing. A fact that was further reinforced after someone, whose opinions I value very much, told me I need to work on my writing (and speaking) skills. The exact words, if I remember correctly, were: “Your writing skills are not proportionate to your intelligence”. Why thank you! At least I got the intelligent part right.

Seriously though, writing is my weakest link. A flaw that would be all the more crucial once I get into a U.S. university (hopefully next year). I’ve decided to do something about it and I’m going to start with this blog. I have other plans of course, but this is the first and easiest one. So if you read my blog ocassionally, and you think you could have written it better, just say so in the comments section. Hopefully with your help, I’ll start writing better in no time.

I had a little slack time (i.e. I was feeling lazy) and decided to hack me up one of those photo galleries that seem to be standard issue nowadays on most blogs. I’m not much of a photography expert. In fact, all I have is a point-and-shoot camera which isn’t even mine.

Still, I thought it would be great to have a photo gallery that’s integrated into my blog. That way, I could refer to pictures from my posts and also use a particular post to let people know if I’ve uploaded a new album. Kinda like how multiply.com does it, but with so much more control and right here on my blog.

Some guidelines

Here are a few issues I considered when building the gallery for my blog.

• I don’t really have a lot of webspace to host full albums in my own server. Good thing there are loads of services on the web that will do exactly that for you. A lot of people like Flickr, so I chose that and went ahead and created an account.
• I needed to find a plugin for werdpress that will do all the work for me. I’m not much of a web programmer so building one from scratch was definitely out of the question. Besides, with this great Flickr Plugin for WordPress, designing my own gallery was plain dumb.
• I wanted something that would allow me to create a blog post whenever a new album is uploaded to my account.
• It also has to be aesthetically pleasing and should look at home with my current theme.

My First Album

Here’s my very first album for my gallery. These pictures are from the recently held WordCamp Philippines 2008.

WordCamp Philippines 2008

Just go to the Gallery page (menu bar on top) to view my filckr sets (i.e. albums). Or click the picture above to go directly to that album.

Some Issues

The plugin worked great for my needs but of course there are some minor kinks that needed (or still needs) a little tweaking to be workable.

• Your Flickr API key (needed for the installation) won’t work until about 5 mins. after you create it. I was so excited to make it work that I thought something was wrong when Flickr was complaining that my key was invalid. Apparently, you just had to wait a bit.
• The look and feel of the default template was just not working for my theme. The album view was a bit cluttered for my tastes, showing all the pictures as thumbnails. I just wanted a single photo as cover for the album. A few changes in some php and css files ironed it out really well.
• I still think the look is a bit too bare but my web styling know-how is not enough to improve it significantly. So for now, I’ll just have to be satisfied with it.
• When clicking on the cover picture (at the Gallery page), you are directed to the specific page for that picture. It would have been better if it directed you to the album page, since that’s the use of a cover page.
• Uploading big pictures is too slow using my connection (and a bit costly in terms of my free flickr.com bandwidth limit). So I downloaded the jUploadr program (available sourceforge.net) which automatically resizes as well as uploads your pictures to flickr.

Head on over to my gallery section and test drive it. Don’t forget to comment on this post if you encounter any bugs or if you have any suggestions on how I can improve it’s look/usability.

Edit:

Possible show-stopper (thanks scion) – Flickr non-pro only allows 3 photosets, after that, you have to pay 25$ for 1 year. Unfortunately, the plugin I use tracks these photosets to group pictures into albums. Darn. So I guess, I’ll have to be content with a max of 3 albums for now.

Plan of action:

• Just use photosets for the 3 most recent albums
• Tag older albums so that they are still grouped somehow
• Figure out a better way!!! (if you know a solution, please comment. Note that I don’t want to host my own pics due to limited space and I don’t want to manually link every single picture)
• Get lots of MONEY from a kind soul and upgrade to Flickr pro (haha. I seriously doubt this one)

Edit: Edit:

Flickr now allows more than 3 photosets so this isn’t an issue anymore.

Just got home from WordCamp Philippines 2008, held at the College of St. Benilde earlier today. This whole day event was so much fun! Aside from that, it’s sort of a little historical too, being the very first WordCamp in South East Asia. For those not familliar with it, WordCamps are basically venues where WordPress users and developers hailing from a somewhat relatively small geographical region (say a country like the Philippines) can gather and talk about this outstanding piece of software.

The Event

Besides being fun, the whole thing was a really great learning experience. Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress platform was there for a short talk about the state of WordPress and some Q&A towards the end. He had a really really light character and seemed to be a very approachable guy. I really should go to more of these kinds of gatherings. It’s definitely a great way of enriching and cultivating my inner geek. Ooops, maybe I should edit that out, because I don’t think I have an “inner” geek. I’m probably geek inside-out. Haha. So much to learn today and I’m really glad that Wilson told me to register for WordCamp in the first place. Funny thing though, Wil doesn’t even have his own blog (yet).

Stuff I Learned

It won’t be like me at all if I didn’t take the opportunity to share with you folks some of the things I learned (and as I said, there’s a lot). There so much stuff that I can’t even figure out how to put it all in this post. So, to save up on time, I’ll just pile them up in a bulleted list:

• Indonesians Rock – apparently, the second most used language in WordPress, after English, is Indonesian. Cool.
• WordPress is so much more - I already knew that, but seeing companies using WordPress for corporate sites is simply amazing. You can’t even tell that some of the websites are made with wordpress. Like this one.
• Tons of SEO plugins - a really hot topic in today’s WordCamp was Search Engine Optimization. Just do a google search on WordPress Plugins for SEO to streamline your blog for search engines.
• WordPress is actually very profitable – a lot of people think that there’s no money in Open Source. I guess this just proves how wrong they are. Just the licensing of Akismet alone is already a lot of money.
• Some folks really take blogging seriously – I wasn’t really familiar with the concept of Pro-Blogging, but it seems, some folks earn decent (or maybe indecent) amounts of money off of their blogs. Wow. I’d be satisfied if I could just earn enough to pay for my webhost and domain.
• Custom Fields for CMS – using WordPress to manage web content becomes really easy by using custom fields in your post. You could attach additional content to a post such as a logo, an audio file, an excerpt to sort of customize the way each post will be presented. This is especially useful if you want to use WordPress to build a website other than a blog.
• A whole lot more - which I’ll just share when I get to apply them.

Photos

Here are some pics from the event:

Matt, Wilson and Me

Matt, Wilson and Me Again

My Sister with Free Chowking Food

Freebies Galore

For absolutely 0 pesos, I got the folloing:

• A cool mug from NuffNang.com
• A small cloth bag with the WordCamp Philippines Logo
• Chowking Lunch
• Two wordpress stickers (round and square) which I now proudly sport on my laptop
• Free blog advertising (care of wilson)

For a little bit more, I got:

• A really really cool shirt which I showed in this post. According to Matt, it’s one of the best designs he has seen so far from any WordCamp.

I can’t wait for the next one!

With any luck, (i.e. if I managed to follow this howto properly), all the guys at Multiply should see this post as if it were from Multiply. If by any chance, you are in multiply, and you are reading this. Woohoo!!! Success. Otherwise… Just move along.

Thanks to Scion for suggesting that I cross post to multiply. This way, I get a “wider” audience (at least in the Philippines).