An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

Well the other week I was looking around the web for some RAM as the 512mb of RAM on my 15″ Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz was really starting to get to me, looked at Crucial and they wanted over $300 for 1GB but I was prepared to pay that come payday as from Apple direct it was more like $500.

Then a bit later I surfed over to Newegg just as part of my daily web surfing and right there on the front page was RAM with the same specs as I had been looking at for a measily $130 per 1GB stick so I read all the views that had a good deal of happy Powerbook users some with the exact sme model as me so even though I didn’t really have the $$$ until payday in a few days I said to hell with it and promptly added two of those babies to an order, yes that is right 2GB!

However I’ve realized now that FedEx must deliberately hold packages back these days so they get delivered in the timeframe you paid for and you never get it earlier so it isn’t a hit or miss affair any longer so I ended up having to wait over the weekend until yesterday to get my hands on it. In the meantime though I headed over to the Apple Store in the Galleria to grab Tiger, iLife 05 and a Lacie D2 Extreme 250GB External Drive although I was dissappointed to discover that they don’t do EDU discounts in store and I had deliberately not ordered online just so I could get immediate satisfaction come the weekend so I wasted my money just to satisfy that urge.

So now my Powerbook is running Tiger (10.4.1 after the recent update), iLife ‘05 and has a wonderful 2GB of RAM to boot plus a nice amount of highspeed Firewire 800 External Storage! It makes a huge difference with the RAM, Safari literally flies now, Tiger helped some with that as well but the RAM really gave it a kick in the pants, you would be amazed at how much your local computer has to do with how fast web pages render, it isn’t all to do with higher speed internet.

So far with Tiger I’m digging Spotlight mainly for application launching to replace Butler that I was using with Panther, although there must be a way to get the default result to be the Top Hit as at the moment it annoyingly defaults to “Show All”, I want to be able to Apple + SPACE, type what I want then hit enter without having to hit an arrow key. I haven’t really got a lot of actual data on my Powerbook though as most of my email is either in Gmail or my work’s Exchange server where the Powerbook is strictly personal so I haven’t really had a need to use Spotlight for data yet but I had a few experiments and I was impressed with what it could do, even if you know where a file is it is faster to use Spotlight to find it.

I’m also feeling the love with the Dashboard, being able to instantly overlay (the 2GB RAM helps with that a lot) all that handy info is really convenient and the built-in RSS feed support in Safari is pretty nifty as well and in some cases is better than browsing the actual page but where the RSS really shines is with the RSS screensaver, just set it to one of the RSS feeds you have bookmarked and if you lay idle for long enough for your screensaver to activate you will be dazzled with the latest headlines from your favorite site with some really nifty transition effects for the text.

Tiger also feels a lot more responsive although I only played with Tiger for a few hours before putting in the 2GB of RAM so I can’t comment too much on the speed improvements however it was quite noticable. The only problem I had with Tiger was at first I tried an Archive & Install after backing up everything I needed and it failed for some reason so I said to hell with it and did a clean install that worked great.

The External Drive is also going well although sometimes when I connect it, it will take a long time to mount (like 10 mins), it did this with Panther as well so I don’t think it is Spotlight related, my guess at the moment is that those times it took so long the disk wasn’t cleanly unmounted so it is doing it’s error checking before mounting. Oh well if it continues being a problem I will look more into it but right now there is no need to.

As I use Tiger more I will post my thoughts here.

This one certainly caught me off guard but apparently next month there are going to be some International One Day cricket matches held in Houston at the Astrodome. I was bored so I was just looking at Ticketmaster to see if there was anything upcoming that I wanted to goto when I saw Cricket listed, so I had a co-worker check my sanity, then looked again and well I wasn’t imagining it!

Apparently a group named Cricket World International (CWI), has arranged 3 matches along with a special dinner between the 16th and 19th of June. I am hoping that the event turns out to be better quality than their website though, who does professional websites like that in Frontpage 4? It just looks awful, especially with those rediculous Java buttons. (If anyone from CWI is reading this I’ll volunteer to redesign your site in exchange for some free tickets…).

There is only one Aussie listed as playing though, Michael Bevan but hey I’m not complaining, it’s Cricket a sport that is distinctly not American and if they have VB and meat pies on offer I will be in heaven!

Okay finally here it is, the first draft of my instructions on how to implement the above CSS based dropdown menu:

0. You might want to upgrade to a recent nightly just so you have a similar codebase to me
1. First set up your Pages in Wordpress to be some sort of hierarchy otherwise using the menu doesn’t make sense
2. Edit your theme’s header.php inserting the below code within the head tags somewhere:
<!--[if IE]>
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
html {
behavior: url(http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/default/csshover.htc);
font-size: 70%;
}
#menu ul li {float: left; width: 100%;}
#menu ul li a {height: 1%;}
#menu a, #menu h2 {
font: bold 0.7em/1.4em arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}
</style>
< ![endif]–>

This is to work around problems in Internet Explorer and make sure the menu works there, you can download the required file here.

Note: It is very important that this file is served from the exact same domain as your blog if you reference it from www.yourdomain.com and users view your site just by yourdomain.com it will not be included due to security in Internet Explorer.

3. Then add:

<style type="text/css">
@import “http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/default/multimenu.css”;
</style>

Downloading the file from here.

4. Then download the modified template-functions-post.txt and either place that in your wordpress/wp-includes directory (after renaming it to .php of course) or edit your existing file looking at the //jb comments in my modified version (the comments aren’t verbose at all yet)

5. Go back to editing your themes header.php and within the header div, just after the headerimg div paste the following:

<div id="menu">
<?php wp_list_pages(false,false,false,false); ?>
</div>

And I think that is it, if you’re interested in this then please give it a go and let me know how you go, if you have any problems with it then please just contact me and I will help you out as soon as I can!

Partly as an exercise for future installs and partly so I could work out exactly what I modified in order to get the dropdown CSS menu above to work using the wp_list_pages function I have just upgraded to the latest Wordpress nightly build, which was kind of strange as the latest build was from the 6th May and here in the US (Central time) it is only the 5th of May…. I upgraded from the future, cool!

Anyway the upgrade seems to have gone off without a hitch but if you notice any general weirdness (excepting myself that is…) then please let me know and I’ll look into it.

For those keen to get their hands on the dropdown CSS menu code you only need to wait a little while longer, I commented all my changes (only about a handful) this time so I’ll document those and the CSS you need in to a bit of a tutorial probably over the weekend sometime.