The first (and hopefully only) release candidate for the latest K2 is up and about, and it’s a milestone.
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I could pull out a plethora of reasons why the media manager in WordPress needs to be the focus of the next major release after WordPress 3.0, but honestly, this particular issue seems to say everything there is to say on the subject.
Seriously now; did anyone even bother testing it? How long has it been like that?
I love WordPress; I actually really do, but you can’t just throw the first media manager that crosses your path into WordPress core and think that’s that… And I’m not just talking about this either. I’ve looked at the code; I’ve reverse-engineered the code. It’s not pretty, but more importantly, it’s symptomatic of a whole heap of problems in WordPress in general.
A Snow Leopard-esque release would do wonders; though I have to wonder if it won’t break the back of those who take it upon themselves to try it?
Having the entire day laid bare before me, my biggest problem seems to be where to begin? Talk about a luxury problem, huh?
It’s honestly not an easy thing to come to terms with.
On the one hand it makes sense to start working full time with something as soon as possible, to secure some funding for the lean times.
On the other hand, since I’ve got a handful of months funded, what better way to burn through them than on the things I’ve been daydreaming while I’ve been stuck in a 9 to 5?
And I’ve had a lot of those day dreams. I mean, a lot.
Yes, people of the planet Earth and outlying satellites, I am as a matter of fact a ‘free agent’, even if this blog seems as inactive as ever, which would be because I spend my days basking in the sun, reading long-overdue books and experimenting with various outlandish fruit combinations for smoothies that’ll blow your socks right off and send tears of joy rolling down your cheeks.
Alright, so I’ve started reading some books, the other stuff I’ve only dipped by toes into. But I’m working on it.
But a I am a free agent, having had the opportune fortune of ending my 6+ year stint at Io Interactive by being escorted out the door along with some 30 other people who for various reasons found themselves down and out in Copenhagen on the single most beautiful spring day in a decade or more.
No, I’m not entirely sure what happened. I don’t think any of us are, including friends and colleagues left behind, but considering that I’m the least experienced of the developers let go — most of them having 10 years or more behind them — I’m left to wonder on my own what the overriding idea was…
But, as is always the case, the bad memories fade and the good persist, and much as I’ll miss the excitement of working on large-scale games like the Kane & Lynch series — where I spent most of my time — I’ll miss my friends there infinitely more. The banter, the heated TF2 matches, the coffee trains and the overarching eagerness to prove our meddle and just create great games.
So hurray for Facebook, Twitter, blogs, mail and Skype. These things truly shine when you suddenly find yourself going it alone.
Lucky for me, I’ve had it in mind to quit for quite some time, having made several preparations for doing so, and this quite literally couldn’t have happened at a more opportune time. Add to that the timing of having spring making its way into Denmark and me getting to soar my oates on some of those vanity projects I’ve been wanting to do for years, while Io continues to pay me for a few months more…
Things could be a lot worse.
Beyond that, my plan is to hook up with friends of mine for a pretty cool project we’re all very excited about. After that I’ll go the way of the modern-day ronin: The Freelance Web Designer.
Hopefully, this also means I’ll be able to find the time to blog some more, not to mention bringing out the next version of K2 within a foreseeable future.
Oh yeah, and then Red Dead Redemption is coming up in May, so…
I’ll expound on my plans in the near future; for now I just need to get them more organized as well as learn this new routine of not having an office to go to for a little while, which is probably the hardest part about not being employed. It’s surprising how fast time flies when you’re just milling about the house.
Goodbye Io, and thanks for all the fishcake.
While WordPress ships with jQuery, it’s often a few updates behind the latest version. Since jQuery 1.4 is just out, I wanted to use it with K2. That in and of itself is fairly easy, and a simply matter of deregistering the ‘jquery’ script and registering a new one. While looking for a proper solution I came across this rather crude way of going about it quite a lot, and it’s a horribly way of going about this, and will (and has probably) undoubtedly result in old plugins and themes blindly overwriting newer version of jQuery with their own, once new hotness, now old and busted version of jQuery.
Ugh.
This PHP code snippet checks to see if the passed version is later than the one currently registered, and makes sure we’re not in the admin (just to be sure).
If our version is indeed newer than the one currently registered, we go ahead and grab the idol… eh, swap jQuery’s.
/**
* Register a later version of jQuery if it’s later than the one currently in WordPress
*
* @param {String} our_version The version of jQuery we want to upgrade to if needed.
*/
function upgrade_jquery( our_version ) {
// We want to use the latest version of jQuery, but it may break something in
// the admin, so we only load it on the actual site.
global $wp_scripts;
if ( ( version_compare(our_version, $wp_scripts -> registered[jquery] -> ver) == 1 ) && !is_admin() ) :
wp_deregister_script(‘jquery’);
wp_register_script(‘jquery’,
get_bloginfo(‘template_directory’) . ‘/js/jquery.js’,
false, our_version);
endif;
}
add_action( ‘wp_head’, upgrade_jquery( ’1.4.1’ ) );
It sure would be neat if this was built straight into WordPress’ wp_register_script.
I’m lucky enough to have force-fed myself enough roleplaying games and science fiction comics to have picked up English to a level where I’m often more fluent in it, than I am in my mothertongue. And for the purposes of of blogging about those two particular subjects, whatever grammar, puntuation and structure snafus that happen to find their way onto this blog are less a real worry than they merely distracting (and at times embarrassing).
But if one were to take writing more seriously, be it for personal, academic or straight-up professional reasons, a friend of a friend of mine recently started a site that’ll do just that, hassle-free.
I don’t generally plug things on this site unless I truly like them. And until I tried Wordy, I honestly didn’t know what use I could have for it. But listen, Wordy gets it.
It’s on-demand copy-editing, and it’s ultra slick. No hassles, no clutter, no crap. I took it for a test-run on a chapter from a book another friend of mine is writing, and the experience couldn’t have been better. If for nothing else, you should check it out just to marvel at the elegance of how they’ve set up the site and how clear their process and goal is.
Particularly interesting to some of us, is that they’re working specifically on a WordPress plugin, which should make it even easier to use. They’ve also got a blog (in Danish).
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some K2 code to clean up.
I met up for an interview with the gracious Tina Daunt in Santa Monica (oh wonderful Santa Monica) during our US roadtrip, first slated for the LA Times, before they started firing people left and right, now up at Huffington Post.
The new 2010 theme is slowly starting to take shape, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what that’ll be about. Meanwhile my, until recently, neglected second child, K2—a spiritual followup of sorts to Kubrick — just went 1.0 before the holidays, and we’re well on our way towards a great 1.1 release.
I’ve got a couple of other projects I should have started a long time ago coming in 2010, and I can’t wait to unveil them as we get nearer to summer. Yes, one of them is a new WordPress theme.
It was great, while it lasted, honestly pretty crazy for a while, and I very much enjoyed it; but its retirement is timely, if not overdue.
Kubrick, by the way, was born in the summer of 2004, which makes it almost five six years old this year. I would never have thought it could have lived for this long.
Thanks Stanley. And sorry.
Even though I intended to blog some more over the holidays, I instead spent most of the time glued to the computer working in various capacities on K2.
I feel I squandered the trust of the community, by having been too casual about K2 in the past. K2 has been first with a whole bunch of features and functionality, we had a rather large and very active community and a solid codebase, yet mostly due to me having other priorities it’s atrophied somewhat.
The good news is that we put out our 1.0 and subsequently our 1.0.2 over the holidays.
And the great news is we’re already up to having nine languages1 in our new localization repository which puts us well on our way towards the 1.1 release which is of course geared towards localization. We’ve got some pretty cool ideas in the pipeline for the roadmap after that, but more on that later.
Meanwhile, it’s been a while since I did any web design of significance, and I think I’d forgotten a little bit how fun it is (as long as Internet Explorer isn’t invited to the party that is). This has also meant getting reacquainted with the tools of the trade, old and new, and where I used to use TextMate for pretty much everything, I tried switching to Coda (I had a license, even though I’d hardly ever used it), and I’m now a full convert. Those Panic guys know a thing or two about software.
Cinch is another little app that’s been making my life a lot easier, especially since Chrome for OS X still doesn’t have the same functionality that the Windows version has had for a year or more, and since Apple refuses to acknowledge the need for a maximize button.
Now if only I could find a great app for resizing windows in a sane manner.
It took long enough, but K2 just went 1.0. Oh what a feeling. Now to get the localization effort in a row and ready for 1.1.
K2 has been a fun project for a number of reasons, but most of all I’ve been happily surprised at how the entirely lax and cell-like development process has worked out. I recently picked up the reins again and started going through our bugs, weeding out where I could and organizing what was left, in an effort to get to a 1.0 release as soon as possible. So now’s the time to tell us if something’s broken or missing.
Read more over at the K2 site.
It’s an exciting time to be a Pixar/Lucasfilm nerd, to be sure. Michael Rubin let me know — and posted about—that Loren Carpenter, co-founder of Pixar, put a copy Vol Libre, his 1980 CG fractal mountain short, online for our viewing pleasure. And it’s quite something.
Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo
The audience erupted. The entire hall was off their feet and hollering. They wanted to see it again. “They had never seen anything like it,” recalled Ed Catmull. Loren was beaming.
“There was a strategy in this,” said Loren, “because I new Ed and Alvy were going to be in the front row of the room when I was giving the talk.” Everyone at Siggraph knew about Ed and Alvy and the aggregation at Lucasfilm. They were already rock stars Ed and Alvy walked up to Loren Carpenter after the film and asked if he could start in October.
- Page 77, Droidmaker.
Though it’s only related to Loren Carpenter and not so much Vol Libre, Chapter 2 of Out of Control by Kevin Kelly has a very interesting mass-experiment by Loren Carpenter which is worth reading as well. And incidentally, this coincides with the release of the, as usual, wonderful trailer for Toy Story 1 and 2 in 3D.
I’m sorry for this past week’s permission-problem-outage, but despite having vacation, it’s been everything but quiet around here. And before we get on to other business, let me just take one more opportunity to congratulate Rasmus and Anna-Vera on their wedding this weekend, it was fantastic!
It took me long enough, but I finally found a ‘copy’ of the March 14, 1999 episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio, with Steven Spielberg.
Can’t buy it, can’t rent it, can’t catch it on TV… Halleluja for the internet.
It’s true, I did. And this is where I would cue the dissonant choral music that builds to the crescendo of civilization taking a step up the ladder; which, by the way, had Rikke trying so very hard to suppress her laughter at its pompousness… Foiled, again!
These things are hard to gauge, and even perhaps overly self-centered, at least by Danish standards. But between Kubrick, through various endeavors, like the Latest Comments plugin and Live Archives (and its successor) and up to K2, I hope my time in the world of blogging has left a mark of some kind; an echo of sorts, for low-level interaction designers, like myself, to not merely lemming their way through the craft, even if it’s on a hobby-level.
I came across this cover (here), for Science Fiction Monthly, volume 1, issue 2, released in February 1974. The art is by one of my favorites, Chris Foss, a science fiction artist mostly known for his outlandish and colorful spaceships. He was one of the artists Ridley Scott brought over from the scuttled Dune project, to Alien. And you might recognize his style from the game Homeworld, to which he was a major inspiration (as thanked in the credits).
Does it remind you of anything? Such as…