Ian Lewis' Blog

Today I finally updated my website and gave it a new look. I hope everyone likes it. The theme is a customized version of Foppe Hemminga's simple zen theme. I thought it would work well since I wanted a theme that where the header would expand no matter what resolution you view it at and wasn't a fixed pixel size. The fact that's it's a zen theme and I live in Japan just makes it all the better. There are still some rough edges to work out but they should be fixed within the week.

With this upgrade I finally updated to the latest version of b2evolution. I had been using an old version for far longer than was safe but I had a number of customizations made that made upgrading difficult. I made the somewhat silly decision a while back to implement my English and Japanese blogs as one blog and customize b2evo to display the posts that matched the user's language settings on the site and via the browser. I wanted a more uniform way of updating the site but this had the unfortunate effect of making it so that I couldn't upgrade without splitting my blogs up with a database script. In the end it works much better maintaining them as two blogs.

It may come as a disappointment to some of the b2evolution developers since they seemed to like the plugins I wrote for b2evo, but I've pretty much decided that I am going to defect and convert my blog to wordpress. With b2evolution I have had to write and have to maintain plugins to get features that already exist in wordpress plugins that integrate with gallery2 and show images using lightbox. I have also had to hack b2evo quite a bit to achieve the multi-language features that I wanted because a plugin isn't possible given the limited plugin API in b2evo. Basically maintaining my b2evo blog has been a pain especially when it comes to upgrading since my site contains a non-trivially modified version of b2evo. All of those changes need to be merged with new versions when they come out.

So I decided I will convert to wordpress since I can get gallery2 integration in a plugin, multiple langage posts/translations in a plugin, and I also will get the wordpress features like widgets that the b2evo folks have been coding for the next version to play catch up with wordpress.

Though it sounds nice it's still not as easy as it sounds as gengo, which supports the multi-language features in wordpress, has a developer who seems to have been absent since around May and it isn't compatible with the newest version of wordpress which came out on Tuesday. So either I have to install the previous version of wordpress and wait until gengo can get it's act together or hack gengo to work on wordpress 2.3.

Hey everyone,

The logins for my website have been updated so registering for a login is slightly different. Those of you who have already registered with the gallery already have a login created for you with the same user and password but those who have not registered will need to register via the register link on the right side of this page.

You will be sent and e-mail to confirm the login so you will need to click on the link in the e-mail. The e-mail is there so that I don't get to many spammers registering logins with my website.

After that you will be registered but since anyone can register with the site I will need to review it and give you permission to see all blog posts and photos. If you know me in real life then it's almost certain that I will add you. Internet users are free to register but may not see some of my more personal posts and photos.

Once you have a login you can enjoy all the benefits of the website including setting your language preferences to Japanese or English, and subscribing to get e-mails when I type new posts. I hope that those of you who are my friends and family can use it to keep in touch with me easier. (Those in the know can also use RSS).

Setting your profile is pretty easy. Just click on the "Profile" link on the after you have logged in. You will then be able to change your name and e-mail.

You can also subscribe to get an e-mail when I write something new. This might be easier for some folks to keep in touch since they probably check their e-mail more often than my website. You can subscribe by clicking on the "Subscribe" link on the right side under the "Profile" link. On this page you can check the "Posts" check box under "Blog Subscriptions".

Be sure to check the e-mail setting at the top of the Subscriptions page.

Sorry about the hassle with signing in but I wanted to allow my friends to keep in touch with me better while maintaining their privacy. See you!

From now on, for privacy reasons I decided to change my gallery so that pictures of most friends and family can only be viewed by those who are registered. I realized that taking pictures of friends and posting them so that anyone on the internet can see it makes some people uncomfortable so those pictures will only be viewable by registered users.

So if you want to be able to view those pictures please use the registration link on the top right of the gallery page and create a login. It should be pretty easy and you shouldn't have to log in each time on the website so I encourage my friends and family to use it.

Recently I added a small applet which displays news stories that I am sharing from Google Reader. With Google Reader you can share news stories and blog entries that you think are important publicly. I thought it was pretty cool so I added it to the page here.

The news stories that I tend to share will probably concern three topics, Environmentalism, Technology, and Japan related news. If you have a chance, check it out.

I recently got a reader for the computer to read photos from my cell phone's SD card. I just published a bunch of new photos from this Fall in Japan. You can check them out here!

For those of you who can speak/read Japanese, a Japanese version of the website is available. Just click on the link in the navigation bar on the right side here

I modified b2evolution to accept a language parameter so that you can display only Japanese or English posts as well as display the navigation and other info in Japanese. It works well. There are a couple loopholes but you shouldn't really run into those.

Check out the photos here!!

Just recently Google Calendar has allowed calendar users to display their calendars publicly. This has been something I've been looking forward to since now people I know can see when I'm busy. You could do this previously with Yahoo Calendar and was lacking in Google's version.

Though Yahoo allowed users to publicly publish calendars, Google went a step farther and allowed users to imbed calendars in webpages, so I went ahead and imbeded it here. It uses a >iframe< tag to imbed the calendar in the webpage. Which I'm having trouble getting to render well in Internet Explorer. In fact I'm having trouble trying to get Internet explorer to not lock up when browsing the imbeded calendar. Strangely enough, if you press the forward arrow on the calendar to move forward a month, it seems to do ok. But, if you hit the back arrow, it locks up Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is also not rendering the width of the calendar correctly. It seems that it's making it too wide within the box that it's contained in. Firefox of course renders it perfectly.

Anyway, the imbeded calendar is pretty cool. If you are logged into google calendar it even shows it with the correct permissions.

I use b2evolution for my blog on my home page. Recently someone from work tried to leave me a comment here and got the message

MySQL error!

Unknown column 'comment_author_ID' in 'field list'(Errno=1054)

Your query:
INSERT INTO evo_comments( comment_post_ID, comment_type, comment_author_ID, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url, comment_author_IP, comment_date, comment_content) VALUES( 156, 'comment', 1, NULL, NULL, NULL,'68.100.33.135','2006-05-22 20:36:39', 'test comment' )

While this seems simple enough to fix, I wonder why b2evolution wouldn't recognize that this field is missing and create it when upgrading. Perhaps I was upgrading from too old a version and it didn't think it should have to update this field. I dunno. I suppose this has been a problem since I upgraded b2evolution sometimes late last year. In any case, all I had to do was use PHPMyAdmin and do the query

ALTER TABLE evo_comments add comment_author_ID int(11)

and now it works. So visitors should be able to add comments again.

I just finished putting up photos from mine and Reiko's trip to DC with Wes and Kelly as well as our trip to New York, the National Zoo and our trip to DC to see the cherry trees. You can check out all of the albums in the gallery.

We took a lot of pictures and I don't have all of the photos that Reiko took up yet but I hope to have them up soon. I still have to upload the photos from our Meetup picnic over the weekend at Great Falls Park. I hope to have them up sometime soon.

I've updated the website to use some new software and such. The main page here looks pretty much the same but I've made a few tweaks. Anyway, I've been using really old versions of software for a while so it's about time I upgraded.

You may notice that the gallery looks new. I'm using the new version 2 of gallery. I think it looks pretty slick but functionally it's the same as before. I still need to do some tweaking and customizing throughout the site but it's looking pretty good so far I think.

Added some new photos that Dennis took at the picnic a couple weeks ago.

This site has a new URL http://www.ianlewis.org/

I just tried it out today and it seems to be working. Finally I won't have to use that old crappy url http://jet9.hasweb.com/~python/

I added some photos from the 4th of July to the gallery.

I added a little page to my website for my book list. It has all the books I've (recently) read, am reading, and want to read.

I just added a couple new screenshots of my home machine and my laptop to the Screenshots gallery. Totally cool stuff. Well not that cool, but check them out anyway.