Purged my Google Contacts. It was already in ship shape with connected profiles (synced with not only Google+ but Facebook as well) and no duplicate contacts. Today I went a step further and deleted all contacts without a phone number. Now my Gmail Contacts is 333 large, with 49 contacts listed under ‘My Contacts’.
I haven’t stored any contact on my new phone, letting Android sync the Google Contacts. My phonebook (HTC People app) definitely feels lighter now! 🙂
India is a polio free country at this moment! This is like a war won. A moment to rejoice. Hats off to the efforts of the health workers – the unsung heroes. However, the government needs to continue the battle against polio with the same determination and stamina as polio will recur if the virus migrates from the wild or the neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it still occurs. I am glad that I have been a part of the pulse polio immunization programme twice during 2nd professional MBBS, when I got the opportunity to administer the oral polio vaccine to children.
Dr. Anjan Kr. Das, MCh is amazed that this event din’t find much space in the media. On his blog Reflections, he points out:
Certainly it was less discussed than Amitabh Bacchan’s health problems. It is a pity that while the media are in the forefront of criticism of the health authorities, workers and the government for their failures, they failed to pay tribute to the thousands of nameless warriors in the Indian health system who led and won the fight against polio.
In this tutorial I will tell you what code I have used to remove admin menus from the WordPress backend of a site with multiple users having near-admin rights. There I used a theme written by me almost from scratch and of course I din’t want anyone else to mess up my work by tinkering with the settings! More than that, I din’t want to confuse them with admin menus that they have no idea about. To achieve this keep-the-dashboard-simple mission I decided to do away with the entire set of Dashboard, Links, Appearance, Tools, Settings and Plugins menus. By a set I mean the menu and its submenus as well, obviously.
Without further ado, here’s the PHP:
function remove_menus () {
global $menu;
$restricted = array(__('Dashboard'), __('Links'), __('Appearance'), __('Tools'), __('Settings'), __('Plugins'));
end ($menu);
while (prev($menu)){
$value = explode(' ',$menu[key($menu)][0]);
if(in_array($value[0] != NULL?$value[0]:"" ,$restricted)){unset($menu[key($menu)]);}
}
}
add_action('admin_menu', 'remove_menus');
As you can see, I have entered the menus I want to discard under the $restricted array. I borrowed this code from the Hungred Dot Com and here’s is the link to the original article, which not only explains in detail the mechanism of action of the code but also tells you how you can gain even greater control on your admin menus to fine tune them to your requirements:
Remove WordPress Admin Menu Without Affecting WordPress Core System (Hungred Dot Com)
Remember the above code mentioned doesn’t remove actual admin pages, users can still visit the pages if they know the URL! That pretty much addresses my requirement but if you need to prevent access completely, refer to the relevant code given in the original guide I linked to.
I went out and watched HP7.1 today. For a non-reader like me it was pure cinematic exhilaration mostly and of course, an immensely beautiful Emma Watson. I did get confused by the flashbacks Harry kept seeing. Overall very good entertainment and the perfect movie for post exam prophylaxis (the 9th semester exams just ended in my college). My rating: 7/10. Read a very different sort of take on the movie here: Scepticemia: The musings of an Oslerphile
Beating Drupal and Joomla in a head-to-head competition, WordPress has just won the Open Source CMS Hall of Fame award this year. CMSes which have won the best CMS award once in the past get to contend in the hall of fame cateogry for the open source awards, that aim to recognize and encourage open source projects and are decided on the basis of public voting and ratings from a panel of judges. There was a tie between WordPress and Drupal and an extra independent judge was brought in for a decisive vote. Drupal came the runner-up and Joomla claimed the third spot.
Drupal is known for its solid architecture and being more developer-centric. WordPress on the other hand is all about ease of use where users get an ‘out of the box’ experience. Developers who like to get their hands dirty with coding would rather build on their own rather and no wonder they ridicule WordPress as a mere ‘blogging platform’!
Years ago when I first tinkered with Drupal what struck me first was its unappealing UI whereas the UI has always been WP’s forte. As against the ‘famous 5-minute’ install WordPress is known for, it took me a long time to get the hang of Drupal. Getting things done in Drupal can be quite complicated, I found out, and required a good deal of messing with code, something I yearned to do but never had the time actually and I grew up fiddling with WordPress.
WordPress can boast about dwarfing Drupal in terms of popularity: version 3 was downloaded 23,586,240 times! Add to that 15 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com. Despite not being as popular, Drupal runs the biggest websites – White House, Economist, Firefox are all powered by Drupal. Among noted WordPress adopters are Los Angeles Times blogs, Adobe Blog, TED blog, New York Times Blogs to name a few! Even the D7UX project blog runs on WordPress 😉 If you are wondering all these are blogs and not full blown websites, hold your breath and see this university portal running on WordPress – http://www.queens.unimelb.edu.au/– to get an example of what WP is capable of.
Over the years one has witnessed WP trying to become and behave more like a CMS; the support for custom content types is a major step in that direction. Drupal doesn’t want to sit idle either. Drupal 7, which is in the pipeline, seeks to improve their user interface and make Drupal a much more user friendly experience. Needless to say, both are moving towards the ultimate CMS nirvana but as of now, riding high on its popularity WordPress is the numero uno CMS out there!
For me the mouse pointer speed is always set at the maximum. Using a slow mouse is like waste of time to me. Enough said! I’m sure most power users would agree with that.
So how fast do you like your mouse pointer across the screen? Do comment!
Cross-posted on Bong Buzz
It is a matter of great shame that in the recent few weeks there has been several attacks on doctors on duty in government hospitals all over the state. In most of these cases, the junior doctors had to bear the brunt of mob fury save for a few instances where the most senior and respected professors too were not unscathed.
I am apalled, to say the least, at the irresponsibility of the media! They are ever ready to cook up sensational stories of negligence and always blaming the doctors for whatever goes wrong in the government hospitals. Is it because doctors are easy targets? The tone of the media suggests that it is alright to beat up doctors, as if it is hardly an issue! As if they need to be reminded that it is never a solution and that law exists in the country. There’s no mention of the complete police inaction, hardly it goes in print that the perpetrators of crime are never brought to book (or even if the police does arrest someone, they never frame a strong case). Lack of police action after the crime has only encouraged this dangerous trend. The police inaction can often be attributed to political pressure from local leaders to protect their supporters.
Largely owing to this permissive attitude of the political system, police inaction and a media selling sensational stories, abusing doctors seems to have become a trend and it has assumed dangerous proportions! This is getting chronic! Outsiders are getting inside the hospital premises, abusing doctors with the filthiest of languages, assaulting them & damaging government property.
There has been so many incidents of mob fury in hospitals in the recent weeks that one can easily lose count. Last Saturday, the doctor on duty and an attendant were severely beaten up at SSKM after a motorcyclist with a critical head injury succumbed to death. Only yesterday another episode of mob fury unfolded at CNMC. Some relatives of a woman stormed into the labour room to inquire about the gender of the baby. As the doctor on duty was busy with other patients, he asked the relatives to wait who lost patience and manhandled the doctor! They also tried to ransack the labour room. Few weeks ago, in NBMC one of our beloved professors was beaten up by hooligans, supposedly the relatives of an expired newborn. One of the clinicians we always look up to, Sir was left with a haematoma under his right eye!
I am about to become an intern (junior doctor) in a few months and I can only wonder. Ruffians beating up doctors in hospital premises and yet no police action! Which century are we living in? What country is this? Unless there is this minimum security to ward off outsiders, how can doctors work in govt hospitals?
Please also listen to this podcast on Bong Buzz: Save our Doctors.
Cross-posted on Bong Buzz
I don’t know about the other states but as far as WB is concerned, the very practice of ransacking hospitals and assaulting doctors only reflects the how sad the state of affairs are in this state! Thanks to three decades of Commie rule that have championed mediocrity in all spheres of the society!
Only recently in North Bengal Medical College, a newborn with umbilical sepsis and consequent septicaemia was admitted in the hospital. The baby died and all hell broke loose. Hooligans came armed and at night they assaulted one of our very favourite professors who is a clinician par excellence, surely one of our idols, a great teacher and a dedicated doctor! While I empathise with the grieving relatives, there is no point in beating up doctors regardless of whoever is at fault. That is no solution and totally barbaric! Shall I say that the general masses are too primitive? Even more painful was to read the newspapers the following day! The media totally downplayed the assault story and brewed up a sensational story of negligence and we got to read what was only the half-truth.
Last year, there was another death of a baby despite best efforts and a mob of 200 people who entered our college campus in trucks carried out a mayhem in the Paediatrics department destroying whatever fell in their way. They also managed to ransack the ObGyn department which fell on the way. In Paediatrics they badly beat up housestaff doctors 2 of whom were ladies.
If there has been any negligence it is due to a total administrative failure! I mean why blame doctors if rats are eating up babies in the nursery! If the technicians at Pathology and Biochemistry refuse to take up test samples beyond a few hours of the day stipulated by their wish how can the doctors back up the diagnosis of so many patients in a govt hospital like ours!
When a doctor is assaulted and prevented from doing his duty, this automatically sends several other patients admitted under him at peril in govt hospitals which are understaffed anyway!
Life thousands of years ago must have been difficult. Guess what, today studies took a backseat as I played Civilization 4: Beyond The Sword. So for a greater part of the day I found myself struggling with the game.
My favourite genres happen to be RTS (Real-time strategy) and CMS (constrution and management simulation). Among CMS, the city-building subgenre more specifically. Make no mistake, I am no diehard gamer. The few games I have ever played on the computer are (the years indicate when I played them):
As you can see, I ain’t much into action. Max Payne being the only exception. But then, it is a beautiful game with a compelling storyline! I am more into srategy games than anything. Two great city-building games I have played are Tropico and Zeus: The Master of Olympus.
I already know all the exciting things about Civilization series from the distant memories I have from reading Digit years back. That it is turn-based and strategy gaming at it’s best. My initial thoughts on the game aren’t promising though! I like the way most things are automated. I just give an order to construct a wall or barrack in a city and it gets done. What lets me down is the combat! I am totally clueless with this one-to-one combat. But it is supposed to be one of the greatest games out there! What I’m missing? A lot of Googling din’t come to any help either. Apparently some mod would let me enjoy one-to-many combat. But I am feeling kinda download-weary. So here I am struggling in 1500 B.C.
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to display meta description and meta keyword tags on the author pages of your Thesis website. Not just Thesis users, this guide is just as good for any WordPress installation (as no Thesis hooks are being used).
Let me give here the code I am using on Bong Buzz, a group blog maintained by me and my friends, to show meta description and meta keywords tags on author pages. More specifically, with this code you can:
function authormeta() {
if (is_author ()) {
global $wp_query;
$curauth = $wp_query->get_queried_object();
$desc = substr($curauth->description,0,160);
echo '<meta name="description" content="'. $desc .'" />';
echo '<meta name="keywords" content="'. get_bloginfo('name') .', '. $curauth->user_nicename .'" />';
}
}
add_action('wp_head', 'authormeta');
Code explanation
Assigning the author into the variable $curauth and then using it in certain tags to retrieve and display desired user information. Using the substr PHP function to return only the first 160 characters. 160 because that’s the maximum size of meta description tag allowed by Google; 165 for Yahoo and 200+ for MSN.
Bottomline
Thesis not letting you specify meta description tags for author pages has been a major disappointment with users running multi-author blogs. For any standard group blog written by a handful of talented writers who care about their online identity, having meta description tags for author pages is a must. A recent study put the percentage of adults who google their names at 57% and if your blog is slightly popular, a writer in your blog team will get his/her author page on the first page of Google results when searching with his/her name. Which is all very good. Now the bad part – the snippet of the result looks totally ugly with random words picked up from the page by Google. To get meaningful and decent snippets on search engines, you need well written meta description tags for author pages on your website, be it running Thesis or not.
Warning: Direct copy-pasting of code from this page can give you invalid characters.