Ah, the nature of the Internet. It is impossible to find everything you want all the time. A possible corollary is that you sometimes find things you didn’t know you did want. An oxymoron? Possibly. But there it is.

Today I found a link to a person of unexpected familiarity — the granddaughter of world famous French explorer and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Jacques died in June of 1997 but in the 70’s he was a frequent visitor to my living room while growing up. He was an inspiration which nearly sent me into oceanography. (Nearly, I went the Electrical Engineering route instead – go figure.)

Alexandra Cousteau is the daughter of Philippe Cousteau. She is a third generation of this famous family and is continuing the family tradition of exploration, research, conservation, and understanding. And she has a website for her efforts: Blue Legacy. Glorious!

So I found something I didn’t know I wanted to know about. And I feel pretty good about it.

A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/) is a resource I make use of on a regular basis.  Today I find that they are looking for people like me.  They want to know what makes me tick.  Perhaps not precisely “Me” but a more generalized “me” from a wide range of places.  Brilliant, me thinks.

So, here’s the scoop.  They want to know about the folks who make the web work; web designers, web developers, graphic artists, coders, etc.  They this little survey, takes about five minutes, and they find everything out about you that you hoped you didn’t know.

Clever.

Scientist, researcher, author and otherwise deep thinker Arthur C. Clark has died. A man whom some have claimed helped inspire us into space, succumbed to breathing problems in the wake of Post Polio stressors. He was the author of over 100 books, mostly science fiction, and prominent in underwater research.

For me he was a man who transgressed the limitations of our society and thought deeply of questions that most of us don’t perceive as questions at all and if we do, have generally rotten answers.

He will be missed.

May the Great Bird of the Galaxy sit gently on your shoulders, Mr. Clark.

Books are one of my passions. I like ‘How To’ books, science fiction, non-fiction, engineering and science, suspense — books of many types. So I found this website called Shelfari and a plugin (BookList.php) that is supposed to show Shelfari lists here. And it didn’t work. Bummer. It crashed and bailed. It seems that it was written before PHP5 came out and some new additions to the NuSoap package. The major change is a change to the function call from ’soapclient’ to ‘nusoap_client’.

Well, dig out my old tool kit and get to work. First error was a parameter type mismatch. The first piece of solution for this was to install the latest NuSoap (nusoap 0.7.3 November 6, 2007) package. Replace everything in the plugin subdirectory ./nusoap. (Pay a bit of attention here as, I think, typically NuSoap wants to be in the subdirectory ./NuSoap.)

Next edit line 74 in classes.php (in the BookList plugin) from:

$client = new soapclient($requestURL, true); // true is for WSDL

to:

$client = new nusoap_client($requestURL, true); // true is for WSDL

This solved the crash problem and the plugin now correctly served up book lists from Shelfari.

The next problem has to do with the functionality of the widget shell. Chris Stanley worked up a nice little wrapper for use with WordPress/Automattic widgets. But I needed a widget to work with the BookList plugin and that provided a list of entries not a set of paragraphs. So…

In the netflix_widget.php file change lines 44-47 from:

echo $before_widget . $before_title . $title . $after_title . '<br />';
// Call Albert Banks' Netflix plugin
netflix();
echo $after_widget;

to (and rename to booklist_widget.php):

echo $before_widget . $before_title . $title . $after_title . "\n<ul class=\"booklistwidget\">\n";
// Call Shayne Holmes' BookList plugin
booklist();
echo "</ul>\n" . $after_widget;

And that’s it. BookList for widget ready templates.

Sorry – this site is not very active.

I use it for testing stuff related to PERL, javascript, css, site design and so on.

I have some thought about putting up some photos of my old Land Rover reconstruction projects as well as an Old house project that I am working on.