Here’s where I ran into a tiny problem. The headers — that is, the BIG colourful ones — have previously been static images, using a pretty font the name of which I can’t remember, because at some point in February my trusted laptop dies miserably, and with it went all the fonts I had downloaded. New categories meant a need for new page titles, so my first idea was to find the old font or one that looked like it and then let something like sIFR or FLIR render the headers.

It’s not easy to look for a font when you don’t know its name, because there’s so many of them. This, however, is what finally made me give up on my search for The Old Font: I introduce the charmingly but inappropriately named Migraine Serif.

Migraine Serif (and Champignon)

Can you blame me for falling in love?

Anyway, long story short, after playing around with the design for a bit, I decided that it would look way cooler with a script E, and so I searched and found Champignon, which is the other pretty font in the image. (Champignon is listed as ‘unknown licence’, but what the hell, I’m only using one letter, it can’t be that bad.)

So, the before/after section we have all been waiting for:

Thoughtbook: Before

Thoughtbook: After

Looks cool, right? *fishes for attention* There’s much more content now, yet (to me at least), it looks much cleaner, which is exactly what I like my designs to be like. As you may or may not have noticed, I also took the opportunity to restyle the sidebar, blockquotes, post headers and ‘meta text’ (the “by Erika on Saturday 18 April” etc) slightly while I was at it, and I found a plugin that lets me ‘AJAXify’ the blog front page, so that clicking “Continue reading” loads the rest of the post inline, instead of loading another page.

Besides redesigning the Thoughtbook, I chucked the previously static bits of my web site — namely, the CV, the portfolio and the front page — in with the rest, which was lots of fun, because I got to experiment with some Wordpress features that I didn’t even know existed beforehand. This way, I can update everything much more easily, and the file structure on my web space isn’t such a god-forsaken mess anymore. In particular, I like my new portfolio very much:

Portfolio: Before

Portfolio: After

Here, the difference is obvious. The old portfolio was, admittedly, functional, but terribly cluttered, with tons of little images and text. Now, clicking a picture brings up a ‘lightbox’ style overlay using AJAX, so we don’t need to have everything fighting for the same tiny space, and loading goes much quicker.

Well, that’s all from me for now. Can you tell I’m childishly proud of myself?

(Do feel free to comment on this post with any opinions on the new design that you might have, or any glitches or bugs that you have stumbled upon. I’m to excited to notice that sort of thing …)

Utmaningen består i att ta mitt “theme” för Wordpress och konvertera det till ett “theme” för Drupal. Återigen får jag erfara (jag satt och svor över samma fenomen för ett och ett halvt år sedan) hur snälla Drupal är mot programmerare, och hur förjävla idiotjävliga de är mot designers. De kan säga vad de vill, Wordpresstemat tog ca fem timmar att sätta ihop allt som allt; jag har nu suttit här i tolv jävla timmar med Drupal och inte fan ser det ut som nånting alls. Jag får huvudvärk på fanskapet. Det är en sak att systemet är annorlunda uppbyggt, men man skall väl för fan kunna tillåtas modifiera teckensnittet i kommentarsformuläret eller (läses med fördel på göteborgska)? Eller måste man ge sig in och gräva i deras sketna förbannade template.php och relativt avancerat stuff för en sådan enkel sak, som man i Wordpress ändrar med jävla HTML som vanliga människor? Jag får ryck!

Tyvärr börjar det bli lite för mycket kaos av sajten för att inte föra över den till någon bättre lösning än den nuvarande. Fan.

Angående projekt Blisomfolk, så har jag sovit illa — i bemärkelsen för mycket — de senaste dagarna. Sänggång vid tolvtiden de flesta nätter (dock inte idag), men insomnande först vid 2-3-tiden; väckarklocka ställd på halvnio, men uppvaknande tidig eftermiddag. Problemet är att jag inte har någonting planerat under dagarna nu under lovet, så veckans demon heter “En-timme-till-är-väl-ingen-fara”. Det faktum att jag kan tänka ungefär likadant även en vanlig dag när jag har föreläsningar hjälper förstås inte.

Dock har mathållningen varit helt okej.

And, if you also want blogging to remain free, please consider sending a picture of yourself with the words “Free blogger” to join the thousands at http://www.beppegrillo.it/iniziative/freeblogger/. Or have a look at http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/11/italian-bloggers-cal.html. The Web is, it seems, under more of a threat than ever.

How was I to know that I had been uncharacteristically stupid when, sometime in May last year, I wrote “foreach ($bookmarklets as $id => $values)” in the tiny script that inserts the bookmarking-and-sharing icons at the bottom of each post? Perhaps by figuring that a variable name like “id” was bound to be taken already. Either way, that error caused wp-comments-post.php to try to insert every comment to the post with numerical ID “yahoo”. Fun eh?

Anyway, it seems to be sorted now that I’ve renamed the variable. You can comment! Yay!

So why did I install it? Because I know that it does its job. It does syntax highlighting on all languages that I’ll ever need and probably 200 more, it’s comparatively light-weight and stable and it does tabs. I don’t require much from an editor. But please, please explain to me why absolutely nothing works as anywhere else. You cannot select text with Shift+arrow keys. You cannot use the normal/commonest cut-copy-paste commands. What does “+x mean anyway? I know there’s some command that takes you from editing to command mode or something like that, but since I don’t have any ViM geeks around at the moment, I’ve spent the last twelve hours or so with my right hand on the touchpad just in case I need to copy something. Or move. Or save. Or anything really. Even counting Dreamweaver crashes, I could have accomplished three times as much with that and Windows XP.

Don’t give me RTFMs or “Google is your friend”s or whatever. It’s an editor, for heaven’s sake. How difficult can it be to add a “Toggle Windows-style shortcuts” feature to some menu? What’s so deeply wrong with usability? Things can work and still be comprehensible, you know.

I know what I like about Maths, what I like about programming and what I like about reading whodunnits. This is not a new discovery, but it’s been made particularly clear to me this week. It’s the riddles, the curious problems, the casse-têtes that keep cropping up, that fascinate me. Because whenever I manage to solve one of them, I am the king of the world (disregarding gender implications for the moment).

The very extraordinary thing about Maths though, is that even when you aren’t able to find a solution, in fact you might just be able to prove that your problem doesn’t have one, which is just as wonderful as solving it, since you’ve still achieved something useful. (If I’m making a web application and I run into problems that I can’t solve, that’s more likely to imply that I ought to take an evening class in Java, or maybe make this thing server-side instead, than anything else.)

The moment of illumination? Well, let’s start Wednesday morning, 8 o’clock; tutorial for course M1.7 “Groupes et géométrie” in the basement of the SHA building at UPV-Metz (the French like abbreviations). “M1.7″ means that this is the course labelled “7″ in year 1 of the Master programme, which in turn means that I shouldn’t strictly have to do this course, which means that if I understand nothing whatsoever of it, that ought to be fine. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t feel like an utter imbecile for two hours, dumbly taking notes of how everyone else had answered the tutorial questions, without even understanding what I was meant to be proving. Let’s just say I almost cried out of frustration on the way up the stairs.

Move on to Wednesday afternoon, about 4 o’clock, in room 415 at the end of the corridor at the top of the MIM building: tutorial for course 5.8 “Equations différentielles et stabilité”, the 5 in the course code implying that the course takes place in semester 5 — that is, year 3 — of the Bachelor programme; rather more appropriate for yours truly. Here, I recognised a lot from the crash course in differential equations that we did last semester in Aberdeen, so that made me feel significantly less stupid. Thursday and Friday though — tutorials in courses 3.2 and 3.1, second-year courses in geometry and analysis, respectively, made me bounce up and down. Not only could I solve the problems; the results were actually rather interesting! OK, 2^nd year is slightly below my level, but hey, let me have some sort of a warm-up.

Today, with a sinking feeling, I dug up the tutorial sheet for “Groupes et géométrie” and decided that I should make a brave attempt at the first part (out of four) of the first exercise. Perhaps not a big deal; I suppose that exercise was their — the Master students’ — warm-up. It took me three pages of scribbles before I arrived at the five-line proof (I bet it can be made shorter if expressed more clearly), but you know, I made it, and I am now the king of the world. Next Wednesday I will have prepared some ideas, at least, for the relevant exercises, and even if I probably won’t dare to open my mouth, I will feel very good about myself.

Later this afternoon, I spent some hours in the library geeking out completely over Wikipedia articles on the alternating group An and homothetic transformations (and some applications). Erika is back in the classroom (or lecture theatre as it were), and this makes her very happy indeed.