Archive for July, 2007

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

Posted by Nalin in General on July 29th, 2007

I finished reading this last night and it left me with mixed feelings. I was happy to have finally finished reading all the Harry Potter novels, but I didn’t really enjoy the last book much. I had figured that after all these years, at 17, Harry Potter would be closer to being a proper hero, not the usual messed up dude, who can’t survive without his friends help. I was expecting him to take more responsibility and see his buddies relying on him.

But, the story was good. There is a good and reasonable (?) explanation for everything that happens. It does get quite complicated during the end with the reasoning for how he survives or why elder wand belongs to him, but then again, this series stopped being children’s novel a long time ago. I was quite ready to see Harry die, but because I had seen Bedazzled, I thought this self-less act of offering himself to he-who-must-not-be-named, would eventually save him :-) .

One thing that I really liked was that Rowling inserted the last chapter with describing Harry’s life 19 years later. It just makes a lot of sense as this way, no one is going to expect her to write another Harry Potter 8. I just hope someone else doesn’t start writing about how Harry saves the world again at 45, which has been the case with Robert Ludlum’s character Jason Bourne.

In the end, I have loved reading Harry Potter novels more than anything else I have ever read.

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Multiple IE on your PC

Posted by Nalin in Applications, Windows on July 28th, 2007

Download: Multiple IE Installer

I have been getting quite a few complaints now that my Wordpress theme HemingwayEx is not working well with IE6. I had a standalone installation of IE6 that would crash every time I tried opening the slidebar on my theme and I thought that it was just a bug in IE6.

But apparently it is not. I thought of looking for another IE6 installer that would allow me to have IE6 and IE7 running at the same time. I came across Multiple IE Installer, that allows one to install any IE 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6. I used it to install IE 5.5 and IE6 after I had installed IE7.

So, now I can see that my theme doesn’t support IE5.5 at all, IE6 crashes because of a java script and IE7 doesn’t crash, but has other issues with the HemingwayEx Sildebar :-( . Well, now onto debugging the theme…

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The Bourne Trilogy

Posted by Nalin in Fun, Movies on July 22nd, 2007

“Cain is for Charlie, and Delta is for Cain“

I finally finished reading all the three Robert Ludlum’s novels written around the fictional character Jason Bourne a.k.a David Webb… Having watched the first two movies, I just had to read the novels before I went for Bourne Ultimatum on 3rd August.

But, once I started reading the first novel, I realized that the movies, though based on the same lines, are still completely different from the novels. For example, in Bourne Supremacy, the novel takes Bourne to Hong Kong and his wife is very much alive, but in the movie, his wife is killed in the first 15 minutes itself and he never goes far east.

I really liked reading Bourne Identity, but didn’t like Bourne Ultimatum at all… Considering that the movies are just amazing, it was a little difficult to read these novels in beginning. I got really interested in Identity, only after about the first 150 pages. The way Ludlum tries to get the reader to understand Jason’s mental state is really amazing. Also, Ludlum’s use of a lot of French (in Identity) and Chinese (in Supremacy) makes the novel a lot more realistic (but annoying to read at times).

I didn’t like Bourne Ultimatum because it was too long and winding, with a lot of plots and sub-plots that were loosely related to each other. Jason Bourne is 50+ in this novel and knowing that it’s just a bit to hard to imagine him doing all that is written in the novel. Also, so much information was repeated over and over again. I just ended up skipping a lot of pages in the end…

Anyways, so much for the novels…. the movies have been quite amazing. I am really looking forward to the last movie in the Bourne Trilogy. The first two were just amazing and I want to see what’s Bourne up to now…

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Say Hello to HemingwayEx 1.0

Posted by Nalin in Miscellaneous on July 15th, 2007

After about 4 months of inactivity little activity, I finally sat down sometime back and updated HemingwayEx. Added some much needed new features and squashed some old bugs. Again, a lot of help came from many others who have liked this forum and were nice enough to report bugs and give ideas of what more can be done with the theme.

Anyways, with this relase, HemingwayEx has made a major jump. The theme is now Widgetized. Users can now go to the options page and set whether they want to use the old blocks system or use widgets for sidebars. I have also added a font size changer and added comment numbering.

Going forward, I am planning on making the theme more customizable and adding internationalization support. Also, will work on adding more user styles.

Here are the pseudo release notes / changelog:

Version: 1.0
Release date: Jul 14, 2007
Release Notes: I have fixed a few more bugs. Also added some major features into the theme.

Added Features

  • Widgetized the theme. User can switch between using Hemingway Blocks System or Widgetized Sidebars.
  • Added a font size changer. Now viewers can increase / decrease the size of font by clicking on a few links just below the search form. Credit goes to this simple and easy tutorial.
  • Numbered comments, that look (IMHO) cool.
  • Added an Asides Widget to be used when theme is being used in widgetized mode. The functionality is the same as the Asides block previously added to HemingwayEx.
  • Added a new block WordSpew, thanks to Darwin.

Bug Fixes

  • Simple CSS fixes to style.css
  • Added more properties to white.css
  • Removed all PHP short tags. I think this time I got ‘em all.
  • Fixed bugs pointed out by Darwin

Tested on : Wordpress 2.1 and Wordpress 2.2.1 with IE6, IE7 and Firefox

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