Die Beste Aller Zeiten

Summer Camp

On August 28, 2007

Riding my motorbike on a nice day through a nice landscape often sets my mind into a contemplative mood – after I while I start to contemplate questions like “from thousands of possible hobbies, why did I choose the one that makes my lower backside hurt like hell?”. But it has been fun of course.

Over the weekend I was away for the 30th summer camp of the motorbike club Kuhle Wampe – an association of bike clubs from all over Germany and like the name suggests a somewhat left-leaning outfit (apart from lobbying for motorbike related interets like safer streets or better fuel effiency for bikes they do for example anti-racist work). But I heard little talk about politics – instead we were discussing motobikes, riding out, drinking beer and generally doing what a (female) friend of mine insists on refering to as “doing boys stuff”.

But I have promises to keep

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 19, 2007

In Joomla

I promised that I would have a version of the content item module for Joomla 1.5 to test by the end of the week and here I am (I’m aware that in some parts of the world the new week actually starts on sunday but I will cheerfully ignore the fact).

This seemed to install fine and mostly work on Joomla 1.5 RC1, but pleased by advised that this is for testing only. So if you want to help me then play around with the thing and send me some feedback, but please please don’t use it in a production site, especially since in the next and hopefully more stable version filenames will change to reflect name changes in Joomla (content items are now called articles). Actually if somebody has an idea for a good and descriptive name I would be grateful.

~~So, this is the Alpha-Release of the content item module for Joomla 1.5 RC1. This will not work with previous versions: mod_contentitem1.zip.~~ (By now there is a link to a download page in the sidebar).

Please send feedback by email or comment on this post.

And now please excuse me, I still have miles to go before I sleep.

Forty Signs of Rain

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 17, 2007

In Books, Science Fiction

Instead of dutifully working on Joomla module programming I spent the evening finishing Kim Stanley Robinsons Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in a trilogy on the consequences of (man-made) global warming.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about “the politics” in the book, which I found a bit odd – if you buy a book from a socialist writer on anthropogenic climate change you would expect it to be rife with politics, wouldn’t you, and it didn’t bother me in the least. But I found the book rather verbose (for example I learned a lot more about breastfeeding than I ever cared to know) and yet, while the life of the characters is described in much and often unneccessary detail I had trouble to tell some of the male main characters apart – they are all so remarkably unremarkable and similar.

But perhaps this is due to an artistic concept – I take it that Forty Signs of Rain is building the scenery and that things will get more lively in the sequels. The book introduces a number of characters who in some way are concerned with global warnings and what has been called the “war on science” – Charlie is a staff worker for an american senator, his wife Anna works for the National Science Foundation where she befriends the delegation from a small island nation that suffers from rising sea levels, and we learn about their private and professional lives, dinner partys, baby nursing, work conferences, grant comittees and lobbying work, until climate change ceases to be an academical question or the problem of tiny faraway nations when the coastal cities of Northern America are hit by a sudden flood.

Forty Signs, which could have lost a hundred of its 400 pages without much damage to the story, is still a good read, but in the end not really satisfying. It doesn’t stand very well on its own, and final judgement will depend on the quality of the sequels – Fifty Degrees Below is already waiting on the bedside table while Sixty Days and Counting is not yet available here in Germany. I doubt that KSR will make any proselytes with the series – those who deny anthropogenic global warming will simply dismiss the books as “too political” – but everybody who has accepted the scientific consensus will probably to some extent enjoy the book, which has the main fault that it’s outlook on a troubled future is perhaps to close to reality to be entertaining.

Joomla 1.5 Users, bear with me

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 14, 2007

In Joomla

I started this blog a week ago or so and by now I’m getting about 150 visitors a day, almost exclusivly from the Joomla Forum, so I assume somebody is watching what I’m doing 😉

I’m currently rummaging around in the innards of Joomla 1.5 – despite many Betas I haven’t had the time to get familiar with the new API, so currently I sometimes have trouble to find my way around. A lot of things have been vastly improved, and some other things got at least a lot more complicated from a programming POV, so in some ways 1.5 is a completely different beast than 1.0.xx.

The good news is that work on the Content Item Module for 1.5 is making some progress – things are working in principle, even if the actual code is for now a bit garish. I guess I will release an alpha version by the end of the week (unless those nasty paying customers use all of my time..). So bear with me, just a little bit longer.

Content Item Module: New version for 1.0.xx scratched, work on 1.5 version starts

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 12, 2007

In Joomla

I was going to write a new version of the content item module that should have featured better code and a simple templating system. However it looks like nobody was troubled by mediocre code quality or missing features but that some people urgently need a version for Joomla 1.5, so I’ll scratch the new release for 1.0.xx and concentrate on a release for 1.5. This will still take a couple of days and will propably come with a reduced set of features (I think I’ll have to leave out the “merge” function in the first release), but at least you can be assured that ~~I will work~~ I’m working on it.

Shuttle Endeavour launched safely

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 9, 2007

In Space

As a child – a space junkie even back then – I used to watch space shuttle launches with religious zeal. Compared to non-reusable capsules like Apollo or Soyuz the Orbiter looked like the first real spacecraft (like, you know, one from those science fiction books) which very well may be one of the reasons it was built the way it was built (because engineers read science fiction, too).

I broke the habit when Challenger exploded in 1986. I loved the Shuttle (still do) , but watching astronauts die in real time was a bit too unnerving for my taste, and with every new launch I was afraid that fatal accidents would happen again – as alas one did in 2003.

Luckily NASA was less afraid. After a major overhaul (a.k.a Orbiter Major Modification period) Endeavour was launched yesterday at 6:36 p.m. (about 0.30 this morning here in Berlin), and this time I was watching again live on NASA TV. This was, after all, one of the very few remaining opportunities to see a Shuttle launch.

One member of the Endeavour crew is Barbara Radding Morgan, who used to teach in elementary school and was the backup candidate for the NASA Teacher in Space Program during the Challenger Mission when her colleaugue Christa McAuliffe perished in the explosion.

If anybody ever deserved to go to space it’s certainly her – Barbara Morgan absolutely rocks. She completed the necessary training to become a ‘real’ astronaut and has been assigned as a full-fledged mission specialist to the ST-118 Mission (go read the Interviews at the STS-118 Mission Pages). If the world absolutely needs heroes I think astronaut teachers are the best kind we can get.

Joomla 1.0.xx Multiple Component per Page Workaround

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 7, 2007

In Joomla

Since I wrote a Module for Joomla to display content items in module positions I’ve been asked if it could be used to display other components than com_content in module positions as well. No it can’t and it would be to much work to change this. I can, however, offer a workaround that did the trick for me:

Go to the Menu Manager and create a new Menu (but don’t publish it)
Create a blank template (a template with just a mainbody call) or download and install from here: blank.zip
In your new Menu create a Link to the item or component you want to display
Go to template manager and assign the blank template to the link you’ve just created.
Download mod_iframe.zip and install. This is a module that will insert an iframe in a module position and allow you to specify source url, height and width. Install the module.
enter the link you’ve just created as source, assign a position and publish.

Quite probably you will need to edit the template.css file for the blank template so fonts and colors will fit in your main template – remember that the content of the iframe is a page on it’s own, even if it’s embedded in another page, and will not be affected by changes from your standard css files.

Usually all links to other sites would open inside the iframe, which is most likely not what you want. So I added a small Javascript to the blank template that opens relative links and links on the same server within the frame and outgoing links in a new window or tab (the javascript adds a target attribute and it depends on the browser how this is handled).

I can say that it worked for me with a fresh installation of Joomla 1.0.12. If you get any errors feel free to contact me, I’ll see if I can help you.

First !

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 7, 2007

In Stuff

I really didn’t mean to do this. There are so many blogs already, there seemed to be no point in adding another one.

It’s not that I don’t like to write – I’m as vain as the next man, and seeing your thoughts in writing makes them look more important (which undoubtly is the reason why blogs are so popular). It’s just that the stuff I write is usually tailored to specific audiences – speeches at science fiction cons, manuals for software I wrote or adapted, occasional ghostwriting, stuff like that. I’m used to do things for a purpose, and writing for an undefined audience seemed purposeless.

Only I’m a web programmer, and occasionally I have to build sites in wordpress. And by now I have to adapt or write software for wordpress, and I need a place to test the stuff I wrote. So this is the purpose of the blog: testing facility, code bloat ground zero, room for improvement, whatever. And since I have to maintain the software anyway I just as well may write the occasional blog post.

English is not my mother tongue, and I guess it shows. However bad english is a sort of lingua franca among people people who do web stuff (programmers, would-be programmers, users, designers, you name it), and I expect that most people who’ll drop by will do so in search of some web stuff, namely for some code I wrote for the Joomla CMS. To add a further purpose to this blog I’ll add a FAQ for that module (you’ll find the beginning of it in the side bar).

I really didn’t mean to do this, there are so many blogs already. Yet here I am, and already I’m fighting the temptation to go all verbose on you. Count yourself lucky that I can’t wait to get my first post published.

End of first message 😉