Integrating Gallery into MovableType – a tutorial. Another project pointer.

The discussion in the forum is about getting recent or random images from Gallery and displaying them inline on MT, a pretty cool idea but not quite what I’m looking for.

The thread originator has his tutorial here and in the body of the piece says, “The basic idea here is that we’re using the MT template system to dynamically create the header and footer wrappers that Gallery will insert around it’s content.”

To which I say, that is an approach that holds some promise. It’s still a blanket solution though; and additionally it appears to simply replace MT functionality with Gallery photo albums.

The ideal would be to have Gallery-ness apply only to specified posts or categories. hmmm.

I should note that the recent updates to Gallery include the very welcome additions of an ‘offline mode,’ which enables cold-HTML duplication of a given Gallery’s content, useful for burning CDs from Gallery (a Good Thing) and a reasonably robust skinning capability, unfortunately not directly accessible in the admin or guest UI and possibly not assignable on an album-by-album basis.

David Raynes: SubCategories is an MT plugin to enable nested categories. I don’t have time to implement this today but clearly my categories have gotten out of hand; hopefully this will help. I hope not to have to re-categorize everything.

macosxhints – AvantGo is back on Mac OS X for USB Palm devices (via a third party project), plus a longish troubleshooting discussion. File under ‘next week, for sure.’

Without going into detail, as I’m pressed for time, may I say I’ve finally investigated the local workgroup sharing features of OS X, and I couldn’t be happier. All the boxen now have printing. All the boxen now have access to the music library. Everything works smoothly over wireless. Very nice indeed.

I am truly the king of the late adopters.

argh – an external harddrive apparently slept last night, eventually snoozing the whole box. sorry for the apparent down time.

Sans specifics, the telephone chat is for a company that looks like it’s doing some really cool stuff. Homework, hooo!

I applied for another seventy-odd jobs today. I did get one response from a h00man – someone at an agency noticed that I was systematically applying to each listed postition on their intake board that matched my skillset (which is unusually broad, driving the large number of positions I’m submitting for) and dropped a polite little note asking me to cool it.

When I first moved here, I would scour the want ads in the paper and enter the contact information into a database for each position, as well as the title, a note, and the date I saw the ad. Then I’d do a mail merge and print off a cover letter and resume for each job listing, using dbase II and WordStar on my old Kaypro. I had a nightmarishly loud teletype-style printer (a Juki) that took about two minutes to print each sheet of paper. I believe I averaged about forty jobs a week, so each print run went on for about two-and-two-thirds hours.

Eventually I upgraded to a little dot-matrix printer.

As I recall, I got one interview, which led to a job as an art historian, of all the crazy things – actually using my degree! – with a startup that was attempting to develop an automated insurance-and-collatteral vaulation system for art collections based on scanning and databasing the art-auction results for everything, everywhere, since the beginning of time.

Extrapolating from that experience, I’ll keep my seventy-a-week average – maybe even expanding on it – going for about four months, and I expect one inteview to result. Bear in mind that Viv has actually laid down the law: I have to get a job. Just lookin’ doesn’t produce revenue.

UPDATE: Crazy, I already have a phone chat request. Cross your fingers!

Today, the NYT covers the growth in wireless internet access hotspots, pointing out some websites used to collate and track hotspot locales. I missed wi-fihospotlist,com leading up to the DC trip but did find the cited jiwire.com – not that it helped much. Neither of these sites provide much in the way of ad-hoc hotspot listings of the type that I primarily saw on that Alexandria-to-Mt. Vernon wardrive I mentioned the other day.

So here’s the LazyWeb thing: 802.11b and 802.11g are reserved radio frequencies with a very well defined spectrum, right?

Shouldn’t a radio-sensing geographic surveillance satellite be able to develop a frequency-specific map of any given area such that a direct visualization of wi-fi coverage could be developed and presented with relative ease?

Furthermore, isn’t it possible that the data allready exists and just needs to be extracted from somewhere within NASA?

Finally, if the data exists currently, couldn’t a historical map could be developed and maintained such that over time one one could watch the coverage grow?

Inquiring minds want to know!

(As an aside, when did the Times start linking in the body of a story? I mean, about time and all, but I’m still surprised to see it.)

So, while traveling recently, I grabbed the iBook to wardrive from Arlington, Virginia (effectively a part of downtown D.C., but outside the district proper) to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. It’s a sixteen mile drive, and runs from dense urban core to suburban Virginia.

I had no idea what I was going to see. From our hotel I was able to see a wireless network called ‘rubberchicken’ but it was password protected. I didn’t have any heavy-duty hacktools and didn’t propose to crack others’ security anyway.

Here in Seattle, if I take the iBook outside, I can see up to five unsecured wireless access points, just standing on my back porch. I figured that in the D.C. region, people would be likely to be somewhat more security conscious and that the overall density of the coverage would be less.

In the event, both assumptions were borne out, although the density was not really that much lower.

The first place I located a different wireless node than ‘rubberchicken’ was as we passed the Iwo Jima memorial, about a block beyond the densely constructed neighborhood of high-rises where our hotel was located. It was a default name – ‘linksys,’ I think – and I believe it was an open node, although we drove by it quickly enough that I was unable to verify that I had good access.

From then on, the nodes came so thick and fast, and we traveled by them so rapidly, that I was unable to either enumerate or test them all. The whole distance to Mount Vernon, with the exception of a mile or two stretch along a river and at the historic site itself, we were never out of coverage. The one time we hit a stop light – in a small community just outside the site, possibly the town of Mount Vernon – I was immediately able to connect to the web and this web site.

Sadly, there was no coverage at Mount Vernon proppah – I was quite hoping I could in fact see the web from George’s very door. I must admit that I did not carry the laptop about the premises, and so my remarks can truly only apply to the parking lot.

Additionally, it allows me to cherish my illusions. As I stood before the tomb, I found the idea that the bones of George and Martha vibrate to the wash of 802.11b radio waves somehow satisfying.

On November 25, this site hosted 764 visitors. Was it the stuffing, or Ellen’s paintings? We shall likely never know. Good thing the new machinery was in place.