I think I’ve developed a certain addiction to information – I work on a computer all day, but when I get home I turn the computer on and keep clicking.

After a while it’s not even research or stuff I have to do – there becomes something comforting in typing, clicking of the keyboard, pointing with the mouse, and seeing various colored pixels wash over the screen.  Flickr and YouTube for visuals, MySpace and Facebook for brief snippets of friends’ lives and photos.  It’s like drinking a coffee with a lot of sugar; I know it’s not substantial or necessarily good for me, but it gives me a little rush during the day.

For a while there, I had gotten into the habit of reading a book in the evenings, so that my rush of information wouldn’t keep me up at night.  Even now I’m typing this a bit late at night; I’ll get back to my book after finishing up with a few blog posts and YouTube searches.

Here’s a neat video of a computer-generated Alfred Molina, as he’s rendered in the new PS3 engine:

I can see it’s Alfred Molina, and I can see it’s not a human, but I’m not as creeped out by his face. I do think the eye twitches and blinks help sell the reality of the face.

It looks like the Uncanny Valley (the idea that at a certain point, a fully lifelike robot gets incredibly creepy) is getting shallower.

Awesome – the classic children’s television show The Electric Company is now on iTunes!

What’s next – Today’s Special? Tranzor Z? Starblazers?

This opens up whole new possibilities for iTunes – selling classic TV for nostalgic Gen X’ers and beyond. Relive the Saturday Mornings of your childhood, at only $2 a download.

As some people may know, I created an online photo gallery at www.kerryandwillie.com/gallery/ for my sister’s upcoming wedding. 

Late this evening my mom pointed out that you could only see a small square image if you clicked on a photo.  So instead of seeing the big photo (shown at bottom), you’d see the small photo (shown below).

  

Not good, and Gallery offers little support for small problems like this.  I found a solution so I figured I’d share it here.

I began by Googling “gallery menalto thumbnail” and came up with this page:

Not sure if this is a feature or a bug, so I’m posting here

If you set the permissions on a gallery such that guests can only see the resized images, and the original image is smaller than the resize limit, then when the guest clicks on the thumbnail, they only get to see the thumbnail again, rather than the larger image. E.g. if the resized file is max 800 x 800, and the original image is 640 x 480, then the 640×480 image can never be seen by the guest – only the thumbnail.

http://gallery.menalto.com/node/42042

So, I knew it had to do something with the “resized images.”  I now thought, “WTF are resized images???”  There’s little to no documentation on what they are, but playing around with the Gallery admin form showed that you could see the original image was still there, but “guests” (i.e. people not logged in) could only see the thumbnail view.  So clearly there had to be some setting that would let guests see the original image.

With Gallery, you can set permissions on individual images or on an album.  As it turns out, you need to follow a ridiculously non-intuitive series of clicks to fix the problem.  The steps I took were:

1. Log in and go to the album with the “thumbnail” issue.
2. Click on “Edit Permissions.”
3. Click on “Remove” to the right of “View resized version(s).”
4. Scroll down below ‘New Group Permissions.”  Click in the text box, type “Everybody,” and select “[core] View original version”.  Click “Add Permission” to add this permission to the album

Basically what this does is let “Everyone” (i.e. all guests, who aren’t logged in) to view the original image.  For some reason, this fixes the problem.

Drupal has a wonderful “code snippet” at http://drupal.org/node/53089 that lets you organize your categories by vocabulary. I’m implemented it on my online portfolio and love the way people can browse between related projects.

I’m really liking Drupal. It started as a way for me to organize my portfolio, but now I’d like to convert my whole site (including this WordPress blog) over.  Best to convert things now, before I get so many posts on WordPress that the conversion becomes a big project.

Next big step: picking a theme.  Foundation seems to be the easiest to set up and modify, although it requires the most work to design.  Still, I think a somewhat original design helps sell my design skills more than a prebuilt theme.

For now, I’m going to focus on the content of the site – at this point, having actual content that explains my projects is more important than worrying about the style.  The content can always be styled later.