WordPress 2.5
April 6, 2008 - Miscellaneous
Just installed WordPress 2.5 which was released a couple of days ago… I shouldn’t have done so.
The upgrade was pretty easy and at first glance everything seemed to have worked well but after digging a bit deeper I found loads of problems. The search isn’t working as expected, the gallery was totally screwed up and worst of all is that WordPress seems to postprocess every tiny bit of content to add linebreaks and paragraphs and whatnot. The whole source is a total mess now which doesn’t validate properly and I can’t find the darned function which is responsible for this crap.
Oh well, removed the search for now and have the gallery at least running again. Looks like it’s going to take some time to have everything working properly again.
The new backend looks nice, though. Very clean and well arranged. If it weren’t for all these problems I’d really like it.
Update: Looks like I was able to fix most of the problems. The search is still not working like I want it to but it’s working.
Castles and Ruins
March 27, 2008 - Miscellaneous, Photography
Spent the easter holidays together with my girlfriend at her parents place in Rhineland-Palatinate or Rheinland-Pfalz as a proper German would call it. As Rhineland-Palatinate is Germany’s leading producer of wine we consumed a whole multi-colored galaxy of them. If I remember correctly that is, my memory might not be 100%ly correct on this.
All in all it was pretty nice and lots of fun albeit a bit exhausting with almost all relatives of my girlfriend around. I don’t think it would’ve been different with my relatives, though.
To escape the family for a couple of hours and to make the trip a tad more interesting we visited a couple of castles and ruins nearby although the weather wasn’t really encouraging: Cold, cloudy, rainy, snowy, everything but warm and sunny.
I uploaded some photos of the castles and ruins we visited to my gallery for anyone interested.
Diplomacy
February 5, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games, Miscellaneous
Always wanted to write an entry about one of my favorite hobbies but somehow didn’t come around to do it or was just too lazy to write something up. I guess it’s time to change that now.
Diplomacy is a strategic board game (Yes, board game, that means no computers involved you nerds!) released in the late 1950s. The difference to other board games is that it heavily relies on negotiations with the other players and there’s no luck by rolling dice or anything involved like there is in games like Risk for example.
Diplomacy is played with seven players where each player controlls one major European power (England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia and Turkey) on the brink of World War I. The goal of the game is to gain control over the majority of Europe by defeating the other players.
The rules are really simple, what makes the game interesting is the negotiations with other players, trying to convince them that you know what’s best for Europe. There are thousands of articles on Diplomacy already so before I bore you I’d rather give you some hints on where to learn more:
- Diplomatic Pouch - Ressource for rules, strategy articles and more
- Wikipedia - Nice primer covering the most basic facts
- Diplomatic Corps - Global Diplomacy network - A bit outdated :(
- Google - The answer to stuff, the intraweb and everything
There are a lot of online communities around where you can play Diplomacy by e-mail, in my humble opinion you should definatly try it one day. It really is interesting and fun to play. To extend the play by e-mail experience there are loads of face-to-face tournaments all around the world for example the World Diplomacy Convention 2008 which takes place in Austria this year.
If you’re interested feel free to have a look at a game I’m currently playing as Turkey in the Diplomacy Nations World Cup which is held by the French community Stabbeurfou. Wish me luck, I might need it…
Praha
August 13, 2007 - Miscellaneous
As some of you heard already I was on holidays for a week. To escape the boringness at home and to relax properly, me and my girlfriend went to Prague.
Prague really is a beautiful city. Luckily it managed to get through the World War II pretty well and next to nothing was destroyed so there are a lot of old buildings creating a great atmosphere. It’s a blast for anyone interested in architecture, even I felt the urge to map in times and that means a lot at the moment. I took a lot of pictures over there, a selection can be found over at my new Flickr account.
Apart from the architecture both food and drinks were pretty good, and cheap! Half a litre of tasty Pilsner Urquell was only about 1 € for example, that made me smile.
Now go have a look at the photos I took and if you ever have the chance to go there do it, it’s worth it.
Sturgeon’s Law
July 10, 2007 - Miscellaneous
I read an interview with Tim O’Reilly in the german magazin Spiegel the other day where he talked about the quality of online communities and Web 2.0 in general. All in all it was a pretty interesting read, especially as I agree with him on almost everything said, he kinda invented it afterall.
The best part of it was Tim O’Reilly quoting Sturgeon’s Law which I didn’t knew up to then. Theodore Sturgeon was an american science fiction author and when once told Ninety percent of science fiction is crap he replied with what is now known as Sturgeon’s Law:
Ninety percent of everything is crap.
According to Wikipedia the original quote is a bit different and this one is just derived from it but I like it better this way.
Huzzah! Snow!
February 9, 2007 - Miscellaneous
We finally had some snow here yesterday, for the first time in this winter and as it seems for the last time too. Today there was nothing left of it, everything melted away. :(
Below are two photos I’ve taken from the window of my office with my mobile phone, one of yesterday and one of today. I so wish to have a proper digital camera…
this page is valid XHTML and CSS as well as powered by WordPress
posts are also available as an RSS 2.0 Feed
RSS 2.0 Feed
del.icio.us Bookmark