Very minor site update to report.  Gallery2 is updated and correctly integrated with Wordpress 2.7 and the WPG2 plugin.  Also using an updated image processing library so things should be speedier now.

To check out our wedding pictures online (working correctly finally): go here.  Also notice there is a fancy slideshow plugin enabled now.

Finally got around to cleaning things up on my website.  Upgraded Gallery2 and Wordpress.  I also started separating my Twitter Tweets as a separate category so the daily digests will keep from cluttering the main page and my RSS feeds.  Thanks to this article for explaining how.

Though I haven’t made it all the way through my reading from 2007, I will finish it off soon enough.  In 2008 I haven’t been reading as much so there is less to write about.  The backlog of posts published today are:

1. "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" by Jim Gray
2. "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston
3. "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun
4. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini
5. "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri

It feels good to be blogging again, even if it is mostly for my own archival purposes.  Lots of pictures to upload, there are a handful of draft posts that I really want to get back to and finish off - some actual content from inside my head.  I realized recently that the reason for my lack of blogging was the lack of free offline blogging tools on Mac OS X.  This sounds strange, but I feel most compelled to write new content when I am not online.  Once I’m online there is always other stuff to do.  Introspection time is often reserved to offline time.  Now that I have a new Windows box I use everyday again (Lenovo ThinkCentre M-Series) I installed Windows Live Writer and have been using it more and more.

The look and feel of the site is totally stale, no rounded edges and fixed width are annoying me.  One of these weekends I’ll revamp the theme for the site.

Thanks to everyone for putting up with my daily Twitter posts in RSS etc - won’t have to worry about that anymore.

There are those orphan pictures that need to be on the website, but do not belong in any particular album. I have a couple from recent months that I need to upload. Thanks to the convenience of Live Writer (blog), I am throwing them into this post and calling it a day.

Dinner with friends before watching “Casino: Royale”

Taken on November 18, 2006.

In the picture, from left to right: Matt, Gina, Brian, Stephanie, Shaina, Kevin, Shanna (Derek was out of town), Vaishail, Achint, Rajat.

This was the first time time I had seen many of these folks in several months. Tony and Jessica were missed, but I am still getting used to the idea of them getting a sitter and such in order to come out during the evenings.

Sachin’s Bachelor Party

There are a few more pictures, but this is the one I like the most (and is best for public consumption). The party was on December 2, 2006.

Note: Clicking on each will bring the picture in its full size in a new window. Save this picture to your computer and use a service like Shutterfly or Snapfish (what Costco uses) to get prints made.

I finally wrote up posts and uploaded pictures for the last six months’ activities. Since this will go unnoticed for those using an RSS reader to keep in touch - I decided to write a post that lists these updates. I will try my best to keep my posts more current in the future.

Travel and Hiking posts, oldest to newest:

1. Hiking Mt. Pilchuck - Pictures, August 19, 2006
2. Tool Concert at the Gorge - Pictures, August 27, 2006
3. Vancouver BC - Labor Day - Pictures, September 1, 2006
4. Oktoberfest - Pictures, September 22, 2006
5. Frank weds Stephanie - Pictures, October 21, 2006
6. Philadelphia, Doylestown, and New York - Pictures, November 6, 2006
7. India December Trip - Pictures - December 2006

Recent readings (again oldest to newest):

1. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
2. Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories
3. Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
4. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference
5. Haunted
6. Gandhi
7. Spouse
8. The Inheritance of Loss
9. Freakonomics: A Rogue Scientist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
10. Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
11. The Kite Runner
12. Transmission

Funny sometimes how you forget to read documentation when everything up to this point has been point and click. So far with WordPress, I’ve essentially used Fantastico to install and upgrade the WordPress installation. Then using the elaborate UI from Wordpress I’ve installed/configured all the plugins being used on the site.

This system worked great, until I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. Suddenly, to my surprise, my entire website started failing due to some obscure (or so it seemed to me) error. I did my fair share of searching, and finally realized that wp-cache is what is causing the problem.

I disabled wp-cache (the hard way, by commenting out lines in wp-settings.php that worked with it) and then my site came back to life. However, I really liked the performance boost of using wp-cache (it was a visible boost in performance when I had it going on WordPress 2.07).

A few days more passed, and finally tonight I went looking for an updated wp-cache plugin. Sure enough, there was one. This time I installed it and again my site fell apart. Instead of the quick and easy remove route I went through before, I decided to read some more docs on this updated plugin.

Sure enough, there was a missing symbolic link that was described in the documentation. Until now I had not read each plugin’s documentation, so this was a bit of a shock to me - but it was clearly defined and easy to implement.

After getting wp-cache installed using the plugin’s documentation - my site came back to life, I re-enabled wp-cache, and ever since I’ve seen that noticeable improvement in performance.

So, go me for reading the documentation - finally.

My Pictures from Matt & Gina’s wedding pictures from recent hiking and trips (here, here, and here) have finally been uploaded. Took me a long time to get Wordpress to play nicely with Gallery2, and to export using Picasa2.

I finally got around to polishing off the look for my website. Since I barely know what I’m doing when mucking with Wordpress or Gallery2 (or the technologies they are using - mostly CSS) - it took me significantly longer getting a unified look to my site than it should have. However, when it is all said and done (and it is almost all done), I am very happy with the results. Now it is your turn to tell me what you think. Leave a comment to let me know. Make sure to notice the integration with the Photo Gallery section of the site.

I am using a reasonably modified Wordpress Dxx theme, along with the Gallery2 WPG2 theme, which has been reasonably heavily modified as well. On top of these modifications, I added Matt’s Intelligent Menu system, and finally did more CSS mangling to get everything to look reasonably clean.

I finally got around to updating my site’s versions of Wordpress and Gallery2. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the fine print about the Gallery 2.1 upgrade demolishing all previously working themes and modules. (Odd that a “minor” 0.1 update would incur such wrath on previously working themes, but alas, I cannot complain for not being diligent with my preparation prior to the upgrade.)

Anyway, I had to do some manual surgery to Gallery’s db in order to eliminate my now busted Wordpress theme. So, now I don’t have the “fancy”, er, barely working, links from the Gallery to the main Wordpress page. I also don’t have the same CSS page - so the fonts are incorrect. Hopefully this weekend I’ll sort it all out. Maybe I’ll use the WPG2 modules/themes. Maybe I’ll role my own. Maybe I’ll do nothing and have a social life instead. Maybe you’ll have to wait to find out.

I recently migrated this website from being hosted in my garage to being hosted by site5.com.

The migration was relatively painless, using some scripts to import my Blosxom entries into WordPress, and importing my Gallery1 photo gallery into Gallery2.

If you find bugs with the site now (I still have some work to get Gallery2 to integrate better with WordPress and to get an overall look+feel going) please let me know.