You can View the Demo here. Or download it here (188kB).

I used the following jQuery plugins:

• Hover Intent (so there’s a bit of delay in triggering the columns)
• Easing (for the caption animation)
• Color Animations (for the column backgrounds)

With everything put together the actual javascript file is only about 5kB - so nice and compact. Please feel free to adapt or improve it!

The Biographical Info field in the author’s profile would seem the logical choice but it only accepts plain text, whereas I wanted links as well. So instead, here is a quick way to display the author’s biography using a Wordpress Custom Field.

In your theme, open up single.php and after <div class="entry">...</div>, add the following (sorry about the borked layout):


<?php if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'Bio', true) ): // Only show if Bio key is set ?>
<div class="author">
<span class="gravatar">
<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), '40' ); // Display the author's gravatar at 40x40px ?>
</span>
<div class="bio">
<h3>Author: <?php the_author_nickname(); // Can use the_author() instead ?></h3>
<p><?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'Bio', true); // Show Bio ?></p>
</div>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>


Add some CSS to the box to float the author’s picture and tie in with your blog theme:

<style>
.author {margin-top:10px;padding:10px;border:1px solid #EECF9F;background-color:#FDF4E5;}
.author h3 {color:#513810;margin-left:6px;}
.gravatar{margin-right:10px;float:left;}
.bio {margin-left:45px;}
</style>

Now when you’re writing a post, add a new custom field with the Name Bio and type a little bit about the author in the Value field (the author box will only show on the post if there is a Bio custom field). Publish or update the post and that’s it! Below your post you should now have something like:

Extra:
1. In your post template, you could change the line Posted by author to an anchor link for the bio box instead i.e. Posted by <a href="#author">author</a>.

2. If you don’t want to have multiple registered Wordpress users but still want to have different contributing authors with a biography for each, try combining with this function. It allows you to define a guest author as a Custom Field.

For example, a comparison of the Voyager missions or the ingredients of Coke or a list of Saturn’s moons. You tend to get better results with more technical queries. Apparently, more extensive pop-culture data will come later to answer such burning questions as ‘how many Harry Potter books have been sold?’

Oh, and the query ‘what is the meaning of life?’ returned the correct answer of 42. Go try it out!

Second thing is this interesting article on the unfortunate truth of Internet companies: that the vast majority of their userbase growth is in countries where attempts to monetise off advertising alone are effectively useless. Have a read: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit.

With the exception of Google (who IS an advertising company), most of the big, popular sites are only being propped up by venture capitalists. For example, Digg lost $4 million on $6.4 million of revenue in the first three quarters of 2008*, Google has yet to earn back it’s $1.65 billion investment in YouTube, and Facebook sure isn’t turning a profit*.

This is actually something that I’d wondered about before, as living in Australia a lot of Internet advertising I’m exposed to is clearly and wholly targeted at Americans. I wonder how long this subsidised global networking will last. Will we look back in 10 years with nostalgic memories of all those ad-subsidised services vying for our attention and the existence of easily accessible, massively powerful bases of knowledge like Wolfram|Alpha? Another burst in the Dot-Com bubble where all the advertisers bail? Could a donations system like Wikipedia’s ever work for social networking?

Kathmandu (March 2009):
“Hey man, where you from?” Greets a young Nepali guy in a black sports jacket and grabs my hand to shake it.
“Australia,” I reply.
“Ah. My brother lives in Sydney. Come, I’ll show you the temples.”

Flying into Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, I knew that I’d once again stepped out of my cosy comfort zone. Into the cultural deep end of India’s little sibling to the North - from its low plains of Terrai to its awe-inspiring Himalayan peaks.

Our Boeing 777 touched down on a runway barely wide enough for its wheels and I got my visa on arrival. Out in the chaotic, claustrophobic streets of Kathmandu, I had flashbacks of Hanoi. This city is infused with a real Lived In quality, awkwardly retrofitted to accommodate the luxuries of electricity and motorised transport. Every inch of dusty, broken bitumen is shared by a weaving mesh of pedestrians, rickshaws, suicidal motorcyclists and cows grazing on phantom grass. A beeping, grinding mosaic that somehow manages to remain functional.

I quickly become utterly lost in the maze of streets while checking out Durbar Square today. A holy man insists on daubing a third eye on my forehead, stooping men trail in step and whisper, “want hashish?” in my ear, and everyone offers to be your tour guide. People will make a living from anything they have available. I saw an old homeless guy sitting on the sidewalk of a busy street with a battered set of bathroom scales in front of him. For a small fee you could weigh yourself. Most peculiar though are the tiger balm salesmen, who draws right up in front of you with his arms folded. Startlingly, like a quick-draw gunman, he flourishes half a dozen vials of the pungent ointment in his clutched hands that he’s been concealing in his jacket. Barely do I register what the man is selling before he’s melted into the crowd again.

After an hour or two of ambling passed markets and temples I finally stumble across Chhetrapati chowk, a landmark that I recognise, and make it back to the place where I’m staying. Getting lost in a foreign city is the best way to experience it. Or at least that’s how I always seem to experience it. Stumbling down back alleys of daily life; attempting to get some lunch at a local market with my typical first-day vocabulary of “hello”, “thank you” and “water, please”.

The entire country of Nepal has been facing power shortages, as most of their electricity is bought from India. So for sixteen-plus hours per day there’s no power. And you never know which sixteen hours they are going to be. As I sit here in my hotel room and can hear the diesel generator purring away outside - just enough to power the lights, which sporadically flicker. Not enough for the TV in the corner, covered by a tea cosy, or the supposed hot-water showers. Oh yes, and they have a severe fuel shortage as well. It must be nearly time to light a candle. Welcome to the capital city.

I have met an American guy, Henry, in Kathmandu who’s keen to go trekking in the Annapurna region. Good news since that’s where I’m heading too. So we are teaming up to walk the Annapurna Sanctuary trek. This trail goes right up into the heart of the Annapurna mountain range – a mighty circular massif to the north-west of Nepal.

We’ve decided to forgo taking a guide or porter, which every second person on the street seems to consider vital accessories and enthusiastically pushes. Getting the mandatory park permit proves elusive though, as none of the tourist places we ask in nor taxi drivers seem to know where the permit office is! Strange, considering that trekking in the Himalayas is one of the big draws to Nepal. But we finally sort everything out; it’s 2000 rupees and 4 passport photos for our permits.

Time for a quick repacking then it’s a full day’s bus ride to Pokhara and an early morning start up the foothills.

Our bus trundles out of the Kathmandu suburbs with a newspaper salesmen sitting next to us, trying to sell a the daily paper for 100 rupees (AU$2) when the price on the top clearly says it is 3 rupees.  A few goats sit idly on the roof of a bus as we pass, lumbering up the valley. To the west of the Kathmandu valley, the main highway winds its way precariously down and around the terraced hillsides, following the river.

It’s not long into the trip before we see the first road accident. A minibus had gone off the road and rolled at least 100m down the steep cliff onto the near bank of a river. A crowd of people were forming at the top as we passed so it must have been pretty recent. You get used to seeing road accidents in Asia, since they seem to occur far more frequently than in Australia. One scene that I remember most vividly is of a motorbike collision in Vietnam where a bloodstained sheet covered a body on the side of the road. The mangled remains of the bike were a stark contrast to a spotless pair of red high-heels that jutted out from one end of the sheet.

But enough of that! Our bus didn’t crash and the rest of the ride through the Himalayan foothills was quite enjoyable. When the first mountaineers came to Nepal in the 1950s, this journey from Kathmandu to Pokhara was a 10-day pony trek. We have it so much easier.

Pokhara:
In Pokhara, as all the postcards and wall hangings are keen to show, if you look out over Phewa Lake you’ll see the majestic peaks of Annapurna mountain range and their perfect reflections in the water below. To our disappointment, this wasn’t the view that greeted us. The height of the dry season meant a dusty, hazy atmosphere obscures everything. Not to worry, we would see the mountains soon enough. Unsurprisingly, our hotel had no hot water so I tenuously ventured under a cold tap for my last shower for a quite a while.

Day 1:
The next morning we organised a taxi to take us for a 30-minute drive up to the start of the Annapurna Sanctuary trek at Phedi. Here the track greeted us with a steep ascent up stone steps to the village of Dhampus - just a small taste of the terrain yet to come.

The route always well marked and is heavily used by the local people living up here in the villages. On the first day, we met many locals and the path often meandered through terraced fields or across somebody’s back porch. When we came to the checkpoint to enter the park, silly me had forgotten to pack my park permit. It was an inconvenient bookmark in my guidebook that I’d left back at the hotel. So, without any passport photos, I had to plead for a new one. It cost twice as much but it was either that or back to Pokhara alone. I justified it by being thankful that we didn’t book a guide. The locals along the track are always friendly and helpful, even if they try to sell you something in the process of asking directions.

So I sit here writing this in a little guesthouse in the village of Tolka, watching a storm roll in from the south. The altitude is 1700m, with a good view of the misty valley and the silhouettes of hillsides that slice across it, looking like a child’s paper cutouts. At one point the terraced stacks of fields across the valley are severed by the massive Vee-shape of a rockslide. We ascended to 2200m today, which sounds trivial on paper but the constantly changing gradient and endless stone steps are tough on the legs. I feel like I should have prepared more for this. And with typical male bravado, we’ve pushed ourselves hard the first day.

A playful black dog keeps coming into my room and nudging my hand for affection. The roof in this place sprung a leak during the heavy thunderstorm this afternoon and the linoleum floor now consists of pools of icy water and muddy dog footprints. I’m hoping the rain eases off during the night.

My mind seems naturally clearer up here in the Himalayas, where life is simple and the glimpse of snowy peaks as the clouds disperse makes you feel so small and humble. Perhaps that is why people climb mountains. An arduous journey that forces you to focus entirely on the next footfall and the next breath to the exclusion of all else. So close to our primal man where trivialities cease and all that matters is survival. Don’t need a shrine or mantra for that.

Continued in Part 2…

Happily, there’s a couple of ways to get flowery, flowing letters without using any sort of images or graphics. Firstly there’s the Flash option of sIFR but I’m pretty against using Flash unless absolutely necessary.

A nicer option is Typeface. It allows you to convert true type fonts into a javascript file that is included on your page. Then you can use this font-family in your CSS for any page element. Here’s an example to show you what I mean (oh boo not working property, check the other link).

Nice, isn’t it.

I’ve changed career paths—no longer a materials scientist, I’m now doing web development. Yay! We’ll see how this works out. I’m delving heavily into the CakePHP framework and finding it to be great for rapid development. A very, very nice experience with it so far, and there’s plenty of documentation which is good.

I, I, I…too many sentences are starting with that pronoun in this belated blog post! I want to try to write more often but the things I think of either seem too ranty or too much like a forum post. So in the latter’s vein, here’s an interesting article about Snipers—Cowardly assassins or surgical soldiers?

I’ve bought my plane ticket to go trekking in Nepal in March so I’m researching the best gear to get. My list so far is a good 45-50L backpack, a compact sleeping bag, a small torch, some good lightweight pants and maybe a multitool? Not thinking about shoes or boots, since I climbed up Mt Kinabalu barefoot last year, simple sneakers should probably suffice for the Anapurna trail (maybe not the Everest Basecamp trek but it will be summer). Anyone got any good ideas or particular trekking gear I should be checking out?

Update: I’ve found the perfect pack. A 55L Black Wolf Mckinley rucksack.

The stitching is very good quality (as you’d expect from Black Wolf) and feels rugged. In stark contrast to my $20 pair of ‘hiking’ shoes… There’s a neat ‘Micro Glide’ adjustable harness along with more belts, buckles and attachment points than I’m ever going to need. Even what looks like ski pole clips on the front. I’m pretty happy with it so far. Lets see how it holds up in the wild…

Above: James Bond’s car radar* and the now ubiquitous GPS

I remember watching the James Bond Goldfinger where Q was explaining some of the more advanced features of his modified Aston Martin for James - A radar tracking device. Wow. Quips James, “ingenious, and useful too. Allow a man to stop off for a quick one en-route.”

How far we’ve come that the gadgets that we take for granted today far surpass those of the early super-spy (well ok, so I’m still waiting for my ejector seat). The radar tracking device from Goldfinger looks incredibly archaic compared to today’s satellite navigation and GPS systems.

*Sorry, I couldn’t find a screenshot.

Change of Times

Above: Hiding a short, encoded message inside of a coin [left] and hiding multiple DVDs of data in the same coin [right]

Another interesting spy gadget, this time used by real sleuths in the 1950’s, was secret messages hidden in hollow nickel coins. Now the concept seems almost trivial with the size of MicroSD cards these days. Indeed, someone has produced an updated version of the classic hidden message coins, which allows you to carry gigabytes worth of data in loose change.

So now you too can smuggle classified Soviet data through secruity checkpoints!

Smart Phone

Operator: “What number are you calling?”
Smart: “I’m calling Control, Operator…”
Operator: “You have dialed incorrectly. Give me your name and address and your dime will be refunded.”
Smart: “Operator, I’m calling from my shoe!”
Operator: “What is the number of your shoe?”
Smart: “It’s an unlisted shoe, Operator!”

Above: Maxwell Smart trying to reach Control on his ShoePhone and its evolution into the modern mobile phone

And of course, Maxwell Smart single-footedly invented the mobile phone. His telephone, cleverly disguised into a shoe was surely the inspiration of the Nokias of the world. So let us all pay homage to the totally iconic ShoePhone! I reckon you could probably make one of these - though the abuse the phone would take being stomped on all the time could be a problem… (on second thoughts, probably about as much as a drunken night on the town).

In a Blue Moon

Funny how so much of the technology predictions of the past were based around transportation—flying cars, tube-based transport, jet-packs, space colonies—yet it is one area that has been stagnant by comparison. We are still being propelled along by the internal combustion engine and have yet to reach space cheaply (though we’re close).

Above: The Apollo Lunar capsule [top] and Verne’s manned projectile to the Moon [bottom]

An exception from the past is prehaps Jules Verne and his remarkably accurate predictions about getting to the moon, in 1856. He predicted details like the size, weight and velocity of a capsule required to reach the moon over 100 years before the first US Apollo missions and before modern rocketry. Pretty amazing.

I wonder if the internet as we know it will be passe in 50 years?

Ah money, the necessary evil.

I watched Zeitgeist: Addendum recently, a documentary about the monetary establishment and its amazingly overt power over the world. I highly recommend watching this documentary—scoff at some of the conjectures by all means but try to keep an open mind. You can watch it here (or grab the torrent).

Of course, it is always good to have a healthy dose of scepticism. What I like to do with a film like this (such as Michael Moore films or An Inconvenient Truth) is sit there and try to absorb it all first, no matter how far fetched the ideas presented might be. And then do a double take. If you’re constantly thinking ‘naa, that’s bullshit’ in your mind all the way through, you can never hope to expand your horizon. Like one of those annoying people in a conversation who continuously interrupt to pull you up on pedantic little points without actually listening to the overall train of thought.

And now for the (hypocritical) pedantic points…

Firstly, something that most conspiracy theorists get wrong is that they assume the powers-that-be are smart, organised and incapable of misjudgment. To err is human. Surely chaos dictates that not everything is contrived. Can war be a by-product of personal rivalry or rash, hot-headed decisions?

One of the interesting and controversial topics near the end of the film was about addressing the problems that arise by being enslaved by a monetary system. In a nutshell these amount to poverty, debt, wage-slave, inequality, war, crime and plundering of natural resources.

The Venus Project proposes an alternative to the monetary system, which is built on the foundations of sustainability and sharing of resources.

While I very much like with the premise of The Venus Project, it feels a little too optimistic. They argue that since scarcity is the inherent property that drives profit—the root of capitalism—and creates the problems stemming from inequality; abundance should alleviate them. That is, if we have the tools to create an abundance of basic necessities for all humans then we would no longer have the desire to steal, fight or exhibit corrupt behaviour—all products of a system geared towards selfish gain. That the ultimate goal is not material possessions gained through sacrifice, but establishments of bonds, connections—to kin, to the natural world.

They don’t factor in a key issue, that people are fallible. Stupid, selfish and fearful. Connectedness and symbiosis are philosophical concepts that goes over most people’s heads. Sure we recognise the drive to love thy neighbour, but how do you get the majority to overcome self-serving motives and laziness and all the dark emotions lurking unvoiced behind wary eyes? Even without money, some will continue to have more status and better women than the rest of us. Inequality is inherent in all systems and hence trade.

On the one hand, the technology to automate our lives and create abundance is, for the first time in history, almost feasible. But swaying the masses to conform to a system without coercion, like herding cats, seems futile. Emotionally, we haven’t come very far from our cavemen ancestors and without institutions to instill fear and demand servitude, most societies would fall into anarchy.

I would sincerely love to see a system like this where there is no control-freak master and no ignorant slaves. But will it ever be possible? How flawed were the implementations of the ideals of Communism that Karl Marx envisaged? I truly respect the optimism of the Venus Project and am keen to learn more about it. But like a nagging toddler, the question lingers—who will clean the toilets?

I feel so outta practice, better go on another trip eh.