The long story boiled down is that the ThickBox can find a “group” of images if you pass it common name in the rel param in your a tag. For instance:

<a href=”http://mikebrum.com/full_image.jpg” class=”thickbox” rel=”anyString”><img src=”http://mikebrum.com/thumb_image.jpg” /></a>

That’s simple enough. Any link that has the rel param set to “anyString” will be shown with Thickbox having “next” and “prev” links so you don’t have to view, close, open the next by hand. Very handy feature, for sure!

However, if the rel param happens to have a space in it, this appears to break completely, resulting in the image not being displayed. I’m sure there’s some degree of bug on Thickbox’s side, but I decided to fix it on the NextGEN Gallery side since that’s code I’m far more familiar with.

The fix is rather simple. In <your_WP_root>/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/lib/image.php, find the line:

function get_thumbcode($galleryname = ”) {

Immediately under that, add the following two lines:

 // Fix thickbox failure when $galleryname has a space in it
$galleryname = preg_replace( ‘/\s+/’, ”, $galleryname );

And that’s it. That strips the whitespace from the $galleryname variable which is what’s passed on to the code that populates the rel param in image links for Thickbox.

Just keep in mind that if you make this change on your server, your changes will be overwritten when you perform your next update — so make a note and be sure to apply this fix again after you upgrade.

The power issue aside, let me summarize how awesome my current situation is: I’m sitting in a chair, while flying 34,000 feet in the air, while talking to people hundreds and thousands of miles away via the internet.

If that’s not enough to BLOW PEOPLE’S MINDS, I don’t know what is.

Think about trying to explain this to your grandparents when they were teenagers. They simply couldn’t comprehend everything beyond people being able to fly. Then, think about telling their grandparents.

To quote Arthur C. Clarke:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Think about that for just a minute and realize how true it is. Imagine something as commonplace as television and how it’d appear to someone from the 1400′s. Not only would their mind be blown, but you’d also be considered a demon or a witch. These are people that thought magnets had special quasi-magical properties… and we have people living 170-280 miles above the surface of the Earth in orbit.

Simply incredible.

At the end of the day, I think what’s important to remember is to try not to take things for granted. We live in increasingly incredible times. What would be considered impossible just 20 years ago is not only possible, but commonplace for so many people.

With the integration with my MacBook, all the Mail settings (I pull down from 3 different servers) and all of my contacts were imported without issue.

Battery life can definitely wind down with hours of app use, but I don’t think that anyone should expect otherwise. On the flip-side, the iPhone seems to charge rather quickly, so while it’s a PITA to have to stop and charge it, it luckily doesn’t end up being a problem.

At the end of this week, I’ll be in Portland and away from my laptop a lot more. We’ll see how that works out. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Boston, which I’m excited about.

Later, if this goes smoothly, I’ll figure out how it works with images. Definitely neat!

I was asked to take a survey in my email this morning. Surprising for only being awake 15 minutes, I felt like contributing.

Apple Feedback Survey Screen Shot

Click for a larger image.

Seriously, this is one of the biggest things that drives me nuts about the Apple store. I just want to go in and make a purchase — like any other normal store in the world. I don’t want “an experience”. I also don’t want to sit around while some young 20 something tries to make small talk with me and fails miserably.

I just want to say “this isn’t working because you’re an Apple Store employee and I’m not nor want to be one”.

…but I’m sure it’d just be a waste of time — like the entirety of the Apple Store “experience”.

After eliminating any environmental factors, I went code diving. I finally isolated the issue (which I’m still surprised at — it was in no way obvious) and spec’ed out the scope of the changes that were needed.

As I mentioned above, these are win32 binaries — so I then had to set up a dev environment locally before I could recompile any of them. What makes this more fun is that I’m a Mac and Linux user at home — so I had to kick up a VM (thank you VMWare Fusion!) to do all of that work in. Only then could I actually make my changes and spin up some new binaries for testing and deployment to the webserver.

What a pain in the ass!

But after all is said and done, I got everything working and everyone seems to be a lot happier. I definitely feel like a super hero.

Being the nerd that I am, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at other models that people have been making – both Technic models and any assortment of random stuff that people make.

And OMFG is some of the stuff people make AMAZING!!!

Seriously, some of the things people create with nothing but a bunch of Lego bricks is unreal. Mind blowingly impressive.

The sad thing that I’ve realized is that by being “out of the loop” for so many years, I’m not only horribly out of practice, but I don’t have the majority of the cool new pieces that have really allowed people to take Lego model making to a whole new level.

I think I’m just going to have to start branching out begin getting additional sets beyond Technic to supplement my 25+ year old basic Lego bricks so I have better model making options. I’ll just have to add it to one of my wishlists!

A few Google searches have revealed this fun tool: cleanup-maildir.

USAGE
cleanup-maildir [OPTION].. COMMAND FOLDERNAME..

DESCRIPTION
Cleans up old messages in FOLDERNAME; the exact action taken
depends on COMMAND.  (See next section.)
Note that FOLDERNAME is a name such as ‘Drafts’, and the
corresponding maildir path is determined using the values of
maildir-root, folder-prefix, and folder-seperator.

COMMANDS
archive – move old messages to subfolders based on message date
trash   – move old message to trash folder
delete  – permanently delete old messages

There it is in a nutshell. Not only will this let you totally cleanup a maildir mailbox, but since it’s just a single python script, it’ll let you automate any archiving or deletion tasks to your heart’s content — either as a single user or as an admin keeping an entire system under control.

It’s worth bouncing off of the project page for some examples and for a direct download link for the script. Just “save as” and copy the script to the host with your mailbox.

Keep in mind that you need python installed. I’m currently testing it with version 2.4.5 and I’ve not run into any trouble.

Definitely a good tool to keep around for just these situations!

The only problem that I had was that either people couldn’t count or they had a different idea on the classic haiku format (three lines with five, seven and five syllables, respectively). Thinking that there was no meaningful way to check the number of syllables in a word via code, I never pursued it any further and just left it as-is.

For no real reason beyond random inspiration, I revisited this idea and came up with a pretty decent function that will take a word and simply return the number of syllables.

Here’s what the code looks like:

function count_syllables($word) {

$word = strtolower($word);

// Regex Patterns Needed
$triples = “dn\’t|eau|iou|ouy|you|bl$”;
$doubles = “ai|ae|ay|au|ea|ee|ei|eu|ey|ie|ii|io|oa|oe|oi|oo|ou|oy|ue|uy|ya|ye|yi|yo|yu”;
$singles = “a|e|i|o|u|y”;
$vowels = “/(“.$triples.”|”.$doubles.”|”.$singles.”)/”;
$trailing_e = “/e$/”; $trailing_s = “/s$/”;

// Cleaning up word endings
$word = preg_replace($trailing_s, “”, $word);
$word = preg_replace($trailing_e, “”, $word);

// Count # of “vowels”
preg_match_all($vowels, $word, $matches );

$syl_count = count($matches[0]);
return $syl_count;
}

It works based on the following assumptions:

• The number of syllables a word has is equal to the number of “vowel sounds” in the word
• A “vowel sound” can be defined largely by series of consecutive vowels (greater than or equal to one) with a few exceptions
• There are certain instances in which a “vowel sound” doesn’t indicate a new syllable

The letter groupings defined in $triples, $doubles and $singles (which get concatenated into the pattern in $vowels) are the summation of these assumptions. To handle the third point, I remove trailing “s” and “e” letters from words. Since I’ve removed any “e” from the end of words and the suffix “-able” is two syllables, I look for the pattern “bl$” to account for these discrepancies.

Also, to account for contractions, I’ve found that the string “n’t” preceded by the letter “d” typically should count as a vowel sound. Just finding the string “n’t” in a word doesn’t necessarily count as a vowel sound by itself. This allows us to properly differentiate between the contraction such as “can’t” and “couldn’t”.

For the most part, I’ve matched up any two-vowel pair with the exception of “ia”. This allows us to treat “i” and “a” as single vowels in words like “pliable” where they’d be otherwise be treated as a single vowel sound if the pair “ia” was added to the regex pattern.

I’m sure there’s all sorts of additional edge cases that I’m missing. And additionally, any non-English word has a chance of not abiding by these rules. The good thing is that if there’s any glaring holes, you can add new vowel sounds to the patterns above. Since preg_match_all() “short circuits” on a successful match (meaning that it will start at the next character after a match is found and start at the beginning of the match string), be sure to add them at an appropriate spot in the list. This also explains why the “larger” patterns should probably come first.

All-in-all, the function is fairly tight and small for what it does. With a minor caveat that there may be exceptions to the results it returns for weird edge cases, this should provide sufficiently accurate and efficient results for most casual use.

Not that long ago, I shot a time-lapse of a Lego 8294 Excavator build. It was a fun learning experience (the shoot), but more than a little work.

I currently have a new Lego 8265 Front Loader sealed in its box sitting just behind me that I need to assemble. I haven’t been able to pull the hours and work through it. I want to do another time-lapse because the first one seemed to be well received. However, the time logistics have me wondering if it’s worth putting off the build (which I want to get to because I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now!) to shoot the time-lapse or not.

I guess I can always go back and shoot a build later — I just hate having it sit there ignored, but I don’t have a ton of free time right now.