The WordPress blogging script is supplied with two themes, Classic and Default. The Default theme is based on Kubrick by Michael Heilemann and comes with an image header graphic with a blue gradient in a white frame. This post explains how to put an image into the blue gradient area so that the white frame is kept visible, so that the rest of the theme looks consistent.

I use Ubuntu on my home computer, so I’ve used the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to edit the header. GIMP is available for Mac OS X and Windows as well and is free to download. There is even a version that you can run from a pen drive without installing the application on your hard drive.

A close look at the Kubrick theme in action on my own web site shows the white frame with curved corners.

There is actually a further grey frame around the white frame. The grey frame is matched to the background colour of the Web page, so you can’t see the join. Loading the header into the GIMP shows the white frame on the grey background.

We need to select the central blue image and then paste another image into the selection. The problem is that the central blue area has a gradient from dark to lighter blue, and this gradient makes it hard to select the central area directly. I’ve worked out how to select the white frame and the grey background and then invert the selection, so that the central area is selected.

To load the header into GIMP, you need to find the header file, called kubrickheader.jpg. The file is in the images folder, inside the Default theme folder, itself inside the wp-themes folder. The wp-themes folder is inside the wp-content folder in the top level of the WordPress application. I would suggest that you make a copy of the kubrickheader.jpg file to save having to download the WordPress zip file again.

• Load the kubrickheader.jpg into GIMP.
• Click on the Fuzzy Select Tool
• Click on the grey outer background of the image
• You should see the ‘ants’ moving around the image showing the region that has been selected.
• If you zoom up to (say) 400% you will notice that the selection area does not quite reach to the end of the grey area, it ends as the gradient begins to move towards a darker grey thin line that sets off the white frame

• Use the Select | Grow command to move the selection boundary inwards towards the white frame. We want the seection to cross into the white frame by enough pixels so that the corners are within the selection region, but not so far that the selection boundary impinges on the blue gradient. I used 9 pixels for the amount of ‘growth’.

• You can see how the selection boundary now reaches into the white frame

• Now click the Fuzzy Select Tool and press and hold the shift key to extend the selection
• Click on the white frame outside the selected region, and when you release the mouse, the selection boundary should reach the end of the white frame. As you can see, the selection boundary stops as soon as the boundary reaches the anti-aliased pixels that start the blue gradient area

• Next, you need to ‘invert’ the selection. Just go to the Select menu and choose the Invert command. You will notice that the ‘ants’ are marching around the outside of the blue gradient area.

Now all you have to do is to

• open your background image in GIMP and select or scale the image to 760 by 200 pixels.
• select all on your image and
• switch to the kubrickheader image window
• Chose Edit | Paste Into to copy the image into the central area
• Save the image as an XCF file (GIMP format). Then you can change the image again, as the copied image has its own layer.
• Then save a copy as a jpg file. This jpg will become your new header

Then upload the modified kubrickheader.jpg file to the appropriate folder on your WordPress installation using your favourite ftp program or the file manager on your Web site control panel.

t-mobile 3G above…

3G coverage.

No brainer, if you live in Scotland, you need a wired connection. What surprised me was the fractal holes in the Birmingham conurbation area on t-mobile (my current web’n’walk modem) and the contrast with 3G, the best provider nationally.

The Register chronicles the difficult process by which these large scale maps were made public. I want a Web site I can pop a postcode in and get coverage maps down to antenna level. I want an efficient market.

I find it really quaint that I can use a modem dial script with a USB modem in a minimal linux install on a flea powered web book. AT Hayes codes in a terminal window… bosting.

“Despite my passion for software I’ve been very interested in being outdoors and blending better my physical presence with the real world. If I could I’d prefer to just spend all my time outdoors; doing work such as annotating the real world with appropriate meta-data.”Anselm Hook’s use this interview

Anselm Hook’s personal site has colour coded rectangles showing recent additions (scroll down a bit). This is taking me back to an old idea (before I started using WordPress),a fridge magnet interface. I need to improve my JavaScript, so watch this space over the summer. The second level linking is simple as well, just pages, no huge archive list. Food for thought.

FunnelBrain looked fun when I saw it on Jane’s E-learning Pick of the Day.

Alas, the site only works with MSIE 7+ and Firefox 3+. That cuts out Apple users, which is getting on for 20% of the 19-25 market in the US, and about one in 10 here. It also means we can’t use the site in the drop in IT centres at my college (XP/MSIE6), and we can’t use it in any of the Art/Media/Design areas (Apple).

If you want to design a collaborative site for use by students and teachers, you need to understand that teachers will not select technologies that exclude the one or two students in their class who do not have modern computers, or who can only access the Internet in public access facilities (which tend to have older operating systems and Web browsers).

You also need to understand popular Linux distributions if you want any users in Africa or large parts of South America. I’m on Debian with Iceweasel and the site can’t even work out that Iceweasel is Firefox!

My solution is above, including the question. When I was spending spring afternoons in the pavilion doing maths homework, I hit on the idea of only using the sine ratio, Pythagoras’ result and the sine rule to solve these problems as it reduced the amount of things I needed to remember. I’ve used sine rule in the large triangle and then found the inclination of the road. This was a nostalgic exercise, and, as a result of not being able to find my Godfrey and Siddons or a scientific calculator to hand, I found myself using Wolfram Alpha to look up the trig ratios.

Steve Nicholson’s solution from daringfireball.net. This solution has gone for ‘projecting’ the pole shadow onto the horizontal and then solved the small triangle using sine rule.

I’ve used Wolfram Alpha on the projector all this week with various Maths classes, mostly level 2. We are covering topics like ‘trial and improvement’ solution of equations and plotting quadratic graphs. The general response has been positive, and students have been quick to recognise that ‘you still have to understand the steps’, that just getting the answer has limited value in itself.

‘Searching’ on terms like “4.5Kg + 500g” produces answers in terms of both the units used. Terms like “y = 3x + 1” produce graphs, but you can’t alter the x or y range, and Alpha picks intervals that contains important features like zero crossings.

One group of three mature students who have GCSE and want to study AS Maths next year used Wolfram Alpha for half an hour in an IT session (it was my differentiation activity as most of the class were looking at BBC Bitesize pages or on s-cool for interactive equation solving activities). They solved an equation, admired the exact solution, and this lead onto research for the cubic formula. The statistics search lead to speculation about the impact of systems like Wolfram Alpha that can cross reference large quantities of information from a variety of sources. I’ll be revising my Mathematica commands to work out how to take the mean temperature figures for a number of UK cities over a period of time (smoothed means?) and to plot them geographically to show the gradient from North to South. A graphing task lead to the accidental discovery that Mathematica regards capital Y used in an expression as meaning the Bessel function, and it takes a guess at the order. Graphs need to be specified using lower case y and x variables!

I’ll work out more ways of using this system in the classroom. Searching on “prime factors of 68128” gives a list of the prime factors, so there could be activities early next academic year.