Posts in Category: blog
Alt to Legend (v0.50)
Installation.
Simply download the plugin, unzip it and copy the php file in the plugin directory of your wordpress installation. Then activate it from the admin panel. You can customize the behavior of Alt-2-Legend from a new panel that will appear under the ‘Option’ page in the admin panel.
How to use.
Once your plugin is installed, it is ready to use. Simply insert an image in your post as you normally do and provide a description in the title textbox of the popup window. The text specified in the alt field or title field (your choice) will appear under the image. You can then decide the relative position of the images in the posts under the option page in the admin panel. Image can float always left, always right or according to the align parameter (meaning different post by post if you wish so).
Version.
Current version of the plugin is 0.5, released on 5.10.2009. The plugin has been tested only on WP 2.7.1. If you have other experience on other versions of WP please leave a comment here.
License.
The plug-in is released under GPL license, meaning it’s free. If you like it or if you need help feel free to leave a comment here – and hopefully I will get some monetary feedback from the people who will find interesting ads to click on.
History.
V0.1
-First release
V0.2
-Add a preview pane in the admin panel
-Add a easy-update link in the admin panel
-Set the width of the box sourrounding the image as big as the image itself
V0.3
-Fixed the ‘use no border’ bug
-Use local/relative URI for images hosted on localserver (solves error:
getimagesize(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration )
-Image can float constantly left, constantly right or left/right according to the align parameter
V0.35
-Fixed several bugs
-Add the padding and margin settings to adjust border of the image
V0.4
-Works with an unlimited number of images -Image box will fit also when image is resized using the width parameter
V0.5
-Will work only if image tag contains the magic word “alt2legend”.
E.g.:<img src="image.jpg" alt="This is a caption" alt2legend />
Also, included in wordpress plugin repository.
Take a look also to my other plugin, fancy-pullquotes.
Gattaca’s time.
X PRIZE Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Santa Monica, CA. They gained popularity few years ago when they listed and subsequently awarded the Ansari X Prize. They offered US$10mln to the first private institution that would be able to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The price was awarded in 2004 and had a lot of echo. After that success, the X-Prize fondation grew stronger so that now they can efford to offer a new batch of prizes, related to different disciplines. One of them is the Archon X Prize for Genomics that also happened to be the largest medical prize in history. The prize is described as
A multi-million dollar incentive to create technology that can successfully map 100 human genomes in 10 days. The prize is designed to usher in a new era of personalized preventative medicine and stimulate new avenues of research and development of medical sciences.
What does it take to make a good Scientist?
I just saw something on the weekly edition of Nature Jobs that made me very happy. It is something that I was waiting to see since a long time. In May 2006 Georgia Chenevix-Trench felt like sharing some of her wisdom with the youngest public of the journal Nature. In the (often embarrassing) portion of the journal called Nature Jobs, she published a Decalogue with “tips for students”; goal of the letter was to provide prospective PhD students with rules of thumbs that would help out having a successful career. Sadly enough most of them were embracing the concept of hard work and only marginally important skills such as creativity, imagination, collaborative science.
A puzzle worth a Nobel Prize.
Once again, it’s Nobel Prize time. The first prize to be awarded, as expected, was for Physiology and Medicine and went to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire. Mello and Fire were awarded for their discovery of
a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information
namely what is now known as RNA interference or RNAi. Uncommonly for a Nobel Prize, this year’s award came relatively soon after the discovery to which is referred. The paper describing Fire’s and Mello’s work was published in 1998 on Nature. This has been interpreted as a sign of the outstanding importance of their discovery since usually it takes decades for a work to be recognized valuable of such an award. Now, the very fact that someone is publishing a work that is so important to inaugurate a brand new field from scratch is definitely rare and it is something that every scientist dream about. It does happen periodically and many times is, indeed, well recognized for instance with a Nobel Prize. What is very rare, though, it’s the discovery to come out of the blue, completely unexpected. Was this the case for Fire’s Work (he was the corresponding author in the paper)?
All In The Mind
All In The Mind is a wonderful Radio program broadcasted weekly on ABC National Radio in Australia. You can listen at the radio show live if you live in that part of the world or simply download the mp3 files and listen at them from your computer. On the website you can also find transcript of the transmission, in case your english is not excellent and you need some sort of subtitles. The program is also reachable through iTunes so that automatic downloading from week to week is possible in an automatic way. Whatever your choice, I do recommend you hook on it since All in The Mind is one of the best science program you’ll ever experience. All in The Mind describes itself as
a program about the mind, brain and behaviour. From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting – All in the Mind explores the human condition through the mind’s eye.
Natasha Mitchell is leading the discussions always in a brillant way; she is not just an ordinary science journalist being actually a scientist herself having studied ingeneering and gone through a PhD in engineering. We all know it is not straight forward to talk about science to non scientists but at the same time we are all well aware of how important this is. All in The Mind really does a good job such that contents are not only enjoyable to non experts but to scientists too. All programs focus on one topic, of course: the mistery of the human mind. It may sound reductive but I believe we got enough material to talk about!
Why is email addictive?
Did it ever happen to you to find yourself hitting the “get new mail” button over and over just as if it was something you cannot help but doing? Email addiction (also known as Emailoholism) seems to be a common experience for so many people working with computers and internet access. Some statistics say it might be of interest of at least 6% of internet users, meaning millions of people. Mindhacks features a wonderful, clear, article about it: here. The bottomline is that whenever we look compulsively for new email we actually obey to some reward-conditioning in our brain, as much as rats in a cage in a learning experiment.