web performance

Wallpaper: KDE – permanent type

Marios — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:05:03 +0000

This is the fourth and last wallpaper of the KDE wallpapers week. It is the less “clean” image in this series. I think that it doesn’t match up well with widgets but if you have a virtual desktop clean of plasmoids you will love it. It is so good it may even get you a girlfriend! :p

for 4:3 monitors
- KDE - permanent type - 1600x1200
for 5:4 monitors
- KDE - permanent type - 1280x1024
for 16:10 monitors
for 16:9 monitors
- KDE - permanent type - 1920x1080

KDE – permanent type by Marios Andreopoulos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.andmarios.com/lang/en/contact/.

KDE and the KDE logo are trademarks of KDE e.V.

Wallpaper: KDE logo textured

Marios — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:02:06 +0000

The third KDE wallpaper is here. It is a photo of a textured version of the KDE logo. If your monitor is too bright it may not look good.

for 4:3 monitors
- KDE logo textured - 1600x1200
for 5:4 monitors
- KDE logo textured - 1280x1024
for 16:10 monitors
for 16:9 monitors
- KDE logo textured - 1920x1080

KDE logo textured by Marios Andreopoulos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.andmarios.com/lang/en/contact/.

KDE and the KDE logo are trademarks of KDE e.V.

Wallpaper: powered by KDE – plain

Marios — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:17:54 +0000

As promised here is the plain version of the wallpaper. Again shot with the Canon 500D – EF 50mm f/1.8 and edited with GIMP.

for 4:3 monitors
- powered by KDE - plain - 1600x1200
for 5:4 monitors
- powered by KDE - plain - 1280x1024
for 16:10 monitors
for 16:9 monitors
- powered by KDE - plain - 1920x1080

powered by KDE – plain by Marios Andreopoulos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.andmarios.com/lang/en/contact/.

KDE is a trademark of KDE e.V.

KDE wallpapers week

Marios — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:32:02 +0000

It is official! This week is going to be my KDE wallpapers’ week.

I will post 4 KDE related wallpapers. The first one is already here and soon the rest will follow.

Wallpaper: powered by KDE

Marios — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:47:00 +0000

Yesterday I decided to play a bit with textures and the result was a KDE wallpaper! I love it and I hope you will like it too!

I will post a plain version without the colored straws soon.

For the photography savvy this photo was captured with my Canon EOS 500D and the EF 50mm f/1.8 (no mkII version here).

You can download it below at various resolutions. Since the files are quite large please respect my bandwidth and download only the ones you need. Each ratio comes from a different crop area of the original, so download the appropriate ratio for your monitor since you can’t get for example the 16:10 image if you crop the large 4:3 image. If you like it very much you can give it a vote over kde-look.

for 4:3 monitors
for 5:4 monitors
- powered by KDE - color - 1280x1024
for 16:10 monitors
for 16:9 monitors

powered by KDE – color by Marios Andreopoulos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.andmarios.com/lang/en/contact/.

New theme, new 404 page, new server and zero ads!

Marios — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 09:33:06 +0000

Quite some changes happened at the website in the last few hours and I want to write some lines about it.

new theme

As you can see I installed a new theme. I have fallen in love with it from the first moment I saw it. It is simple and elegant, perfect for a personal site. It may be a bit disorienting that the first post you see on the home page isn’t the most recent post in general but the most recent post in the featured articles category, but I prefer it that way.

This change wasn’t easy though. I had to make the theme xLanguage (multilingual) compatible, to fix an issue with international characters, to add some rss icons (borrowed from Atahualpa) and make some adjustments in the css file. So, although I know nothing of php, css and xhtml, I managed somehow to tamper with code in all these languages and make the theme work better than the original. Also I had to find new plug-ins, translate and adjust them too to my needs. Last I had to create two new logos (one English and one Greek), a favicon, seriously reorganize my categories and add thumbnails to my posts.

The good thing is that I love the result and that is what matters.

new 404 page

This was a sudden inspiration. I tried to make a photograph that had some “contrast” and when I saw the result 404 came to my mind. Check it here: http://www.andmarios.com/error

new server

Same hosting company, new server. The old one had some lag so they transfered me to a new one. I haven’t decided upon it’s speed yet. In the noon it was really fast, like a local install. In the night… oh my god, it was like the site was served from the ENIAC (first computer ever made) through a 14.4kbps modem on an analog line distant call! It seems though that the problem isn’t from the web host but from OTE, my internet provider as I just tried to connect through my university (by vpn) and the site appears very fast. OTE is by far the most expensive internet provider in Greece so they better fix it soon.

zero ads

Two weeks ago I introduced some ads. I hate ads but I thought that if they can compensate for the web site’s costs it would be nice. This site costs about 110€ a year (hosting, domain name, theme). Thankfully the ads didn’t got me even one cent in two weeks so I removed them without hesitation. I am not going to sell my self for a few cents, I am way more expensive google! :p

That’s all folks! If you find a bug or a usability issue on the new site just let me know!

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1025&message=34046251&changemode=1

wordpress, atahualpa, xLanguage and widget titles translation

Wallpaper: Water Drops

Marios — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:37:06 +0000

Some days ago I tried to do some water drop shots because they are easy to do, fun and the results, although not original, are most of the time satisfying.

This is one of the better shots and since I was asked for it this is a wallpaper version. It is fairly large, 1920×1200 pixels, so you can scale it down and/or crop it to fit to your monitor (this happens automatically from your OS, no need for special graphics software). Click to view, right click -> open link to see it at full size, right click -> save link as to save it on your computer.

FrontAccounting ERP, are you interested in a Greek Translation? (Greek)

Marios — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:04:23 +0000

This article is available only in Greek. It is about the Greek Translation of FrontAccounting ERP. If you want to see it select the Greek language.

wordpress, atahualpa, xLanguage and widget titles translation

Marios — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:31:49 +0000

My site is implemented in wordpress. I use the very nice atahualpa theme from bytesforall and a special plugin for multilingual websites, xLanguage from Sam Wong.

Multilingual support is very important for many people and I hope wordpress will support directly multilingual sites in the future. Currently xLanguage is the best approach in my opinion and I have tried most -if not all- multilingual wordpress plugins.

Of course nothing is perfect and the atahualpa and xLanguage combination do not escape from this rule. There are some small problems when you use them together, some titles (widget titles for example) do not get translated. The fix is considered simple but if you have no knowledge of php or coding in general it will give you a hard time. This is especially true since nobody has posted a solution on the internet. As my moto goes, if it isn’t on the internet then someone should put it there, I will give you an example of how I fixed this for the BFA Recent Comments widget as can be seen at my home page.

The Fix

It all starts with a “light” read – you can skip it though. Sam Wong explains at his blog how you can add xLanguage support to themes and widgets that do not work out the box. Just rollover to the widget title customization section.

You may have noticed that the easy way (adding hooks from your site’s admin panel) does not work. We have to go for the second easiest way and that includes a text editor. Yay!

I will show you how to do it for the BFA Recent Comments widget and hopefully you will manage to do it for the rest of your widgets.

First you have to find where the php function file for the widget you want to fix rests. This is easy. Just look in the functions directory in atahualpa’s catalog. In your wordpress installation that would be:

wordpress_directory/wp-content/themes/atahualpa/functions

The file we need is not surpisingly called bfa_recent_comments.php. If you manage your site remotely just download the file to your computer. Also now would be a good time to back up this file, just in case.

Open bfa_recent_comments.php with your text editor. It is php code alright but no need to get alarmed. Move down until you reach the section with the Fetch our parameters comment. This is for my version at line 61. After that some variables assignments take place. What we are interested in is the $bfa_rc_title variable. In this variable our widget title is stored. Had we opened the bfa_popular_posts.php file which implements the BFA Popular Posts widget, the variable we would look for would be $bfa_pp_title so I hope you get the point.

The critical line looks like this:

$bfa_rc_title = $bfa_rc_options['bfa_rc_title'];

What we need to do is to apply the localization filter as Sam Wong describes at his site. Just change the line to look like this:

$bfa_rc_title = apply_filters('localization',$bfa_rc_options['bfa_rc_title']);

That’s it! Save the file and upload it to your site (if needed) to replace the original one. Now your BFA Recent Posts widget title supports xLanguage translation!

Nespresso Art

Marios — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:31:51 +0000

For the next few months I have to abstain from alcohol and most types of coffee. Espresso (Lungo) is one of the few types of coffee I am still allowed to drink – in moderation of course. Thus I got myself a Nespresso machine since I am too lazy for a more traditional espresso machine.

Deeply affected by this sudden change in my life, I grabbed my camera and with a little help from GIMP I created the image below: