Tsaiberspace

This plugin allows you to cross-post to your Facebook account directly from your WordPress blog:

The Facebook app that this plugin works with will display a mini-version of your blog’s first page (a list of the most recent blog posts):

Requirements:

• A Facebook profile :).
• Privileges to install WordPress plugins on your blog. In particular, this means that wordpress.com bloggers are left out. Sorry :(. Bloggers using wordpress.com should check out the WordPress Facebook app.

Installation instructions are at wordpress.org.

For problem reports or feature requests, please first check the FAQ or Other Notes, then use the Wordbook Discussion Board.

To be notified of updates (this plugin is still rather young), do one or more of the following:

• Subscribe to the comment feed.
• Leave a comment and check the box next to “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”.
• Monitor the Wordbook Discussion Board.

WP Authors provides an “Authors” widget in the sidebar, useful for identifying all the different authors in a multi-author blog. This widget used to be present in the Widgets plugin for WordPress-2.1, but was removed for WordPress-2.2.

Installation is the usual for a sidebar widget:

• Download the zip file.
• Unzip it into wp-content/plugins (or upload the wp-authors.php file into the wp-content/plugins directory on the web server).
• Go to the WordPress “Plugins” control panel and activate “WP Authors”.
• Go to the WordPress “Presentation” control panel and configure the widgets; add “Authors” to the sidebar.

I’ve written this a sidebar widget for WordPress-2.2.

This plugin is not necessary for WordPress-2.1, because it is already included in the Widgets plugin for WordPress-2.1.

If you like this plugin (or if you don’t), please leave a comment with a link to your website.

Now I’m only 8 years behind on my reading.

I liked the Sorcerer’s Stone better.

My comparison is much akin to that between the “first” (episodes IV-VI) and “third” (episodes I-III) trilogies of Star Wars. In IV-VI, we have simple good-vs.-evil stories. Then in I-III, we have more complicated stories about politics and disputes over trade routes.

The Chamber of Secrets is undoubtedly a darker story, but I can’t help but think it could have done so without introducing the complications of “governors” and the “board” and politics behind appointing the head of Hogwart’s. The Sorcerer’s Stone had child protagonists more in the vein of the Hardy Boys or Scooby-Doo; The Chamber of Secrets felt more desperate in having to resort to a child hero.

I’m about 10 years behind on my reading.

I saw the movie first. I liked the book better. I know they’re supposed to be children’s books, but I couldn’t help but feel they were too much Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-ish. On the plus side, I didn’t have to read pages and pages of oompa-loompa lyrics.

WP Chiclets provides a set of RSS chiclet buttons in the sidebar; it automatically customizes itself to a blog and its feed URL. There are a bunch of “chiclet creator” websites that will generate HTML for you, but I couldn’t find any sidebar widgets to do this without requiring hand-editing of templates.

Installation is the usual for a sidebar widget:

• Download the zip file.
• Unzip it into wp-content/plugins (or upload the wp-chiclets.php file into the wp-content/plugins directory on the web server).
• Look for “WP Chiclets” in the WordPress “Plugins” control panel and activate it.
• Go to the WordPress “Presentation” control panel and configure the widgets; add the “WP Chiclets” to the sidebar somewhere.

There are no code- or template-editing requirements to use this plugin; the links and logos will appear in the sidebar, automatically customized to the blog, wrapped up in standard widget CSS for easy styling.

I’ve written this a sidebar widget for WordPress-2.2; I don’t know if it will work with older versions. If you like it (or if you don’t), please leave a comment with a link to your website.

The name and website of this hole-in-the-wall place sound like a bad Hong Kong comedy-action flick:

But it’s no joke. There are two rooms here (that I could see). In the back room are a few people seated around a round table making dumplings and buns by hand. In the front room (the store) are a bunch of freezers with the wares: Shanghai dumplings (xiao long bao), dumplings (jiaozi), wontons, and pot stickers. And they are all delicious.

They are more expensive (about $6 for a bag of about 21-25 dumplings) than the stuff you can find in supermarkets ($3-5/bag), but it is worth it:

• The dumplings are better constructed; they don’t disintegrate in boiling water as the supermarket stuff is wont to do.
• The dumplings are bigger.
• The dumplings do taste better.
• The store is closer to home; we don’t have to drive so far.

As soon as we walked in, the storekeeper looked at Patrika and asked her if she spoke Chinese (in Chinese, of course). She started to shy away, but we then realized he just wanted to know which language he should use (he speaks perfectly understandable English) to gush about his dumplings, how everything in the store is fresh and hand-made, not sitting in some supermarket freezer for months with preservatives (”Ugh, I don’t know how people eat that stuff”). Pretty entertaining.

My first WordPress plugin: all it does is add all the little logos at the end of each post to enable easy submission to various online bookmarking services. It is actually nothing new; googling for “wordpress bookmarks plugin” turns up lots of stuff of varying quality, supporting different sets of bookmarking sites. They either have way too many little icons of sites I haven’t heard of, they don’t include a site or two that I like, they don’t look as minimalistic as I would like, or they are just stale and haven’t been updated to work with WordPress-2.2. The Share This plugin from alexking.org is nice, but it requires two clicks to bookmark something (one to dropdown the icon, and another to click the bookmark). So I wrote my own.

Installation is the usual simple steps for installing a plugin:

• Download the zip file.
• Unzip it into wp-content/plugins (or upload the slashdigglicious.php file into the wp-content/plugins directory on your web server).
• Look for “Slashdigglicious” in the WordPress “Plugins” control panel and activate it.

There are no code- or template-editing requirements to use this plugin; the links and logos will automatically appear at the end of each post, wrapped up in <span class="slashdigglicious"> for easy CSS styling.

I’ve written this for WordPress-2.2; I don’t know if it will work with older versions. If you like it (or if you don’t), please leave a comment with a link to your website.

What a coincidence from the company lending library! The acknowledgements page of Robert Buettner’s Orphanage references Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (believe it or not, all these books really were just grabbed off the shelf).

So does the rest of the book. It is a decent read, but it follows the same formula of the above-referenced works:

• A juvenile delinquent gets shipped off to basic training; dramatic boot-camp accident straightens him out.
• More nifty exoskeletons.
• Humanity fighting a hive-mind enemy.
• A twist at the end.

But … whereas the earlier two books seemed OK on their own, Orphange seemed formulaic, more derived from those works than influenced by them.

One of the cool things about my current workplace is the “lending library”: employees just drop off and pick up books. And since this is a high-tech company populated by geeks like me, the reading selection is heavily skewed towards my interests: science-fiction, fantasy, and Tom Clancy (in addition to the correctly-assumed collection of technical books).

Last weekend I read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I intended it to last me my plane flight out and back; it was disappointing only because after the first chapter I got sucked into what I thought would be an epic space opera, only to finish the book before the plane landed at my destination, leaving me with no book for the flight back home. It has some neat ideas about interstellar warfare, in particular, time dilation, which figures prominently in Ender’s Game.

Yesterday I picked up Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, also a quick read (I finished it last night). After chasing down Heinlein, the book, and the movie (Wikipedia is great for this kind of thing), I’ve decided I like both the book and the movie, each on their own merits. The movie is standard Paul Verhoeven fare, emphasizing the romance and action (with an essentially Aryan cast) at the expense of Heinlein’s philosophy (and ethnically-diverse cast). Heinlein’s book, despite being written in 1959, has ideas in it that are still very cool even now (in particular, the mobile exoskeleton).

What struck me most was the similarity between the books (well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I haven’t read anything in a very long time). They both, in the first person, follow the main character’s path through:

• Basic military training (emphasizing the difficulties of operating a powered exoskeleton) and graduation.
• Some episodic R&R and temporary “return” to (and rejection of) civilian life.
• An indefinite term of military service in a species-vs.-species war to extinction.
• A twist at the end. Their respective twists aren’t even really Old Boy- or Sixth Sense-caliber, but they are “twisty” enough to warrant “no spoiler” protection.

This is a timely article, because I just started reading Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (yes, the book that inspired the movies).

• Citizenship classes try out newer, harder test
• Current test questions
• Pilot test questions