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The functional, half-functional and now-defunct gadgets accumulated over the years has given rise to a tangle of wires that is getting impossible to control. It’s as if the overwhelming wire mess has got a life of its own and its entire dust-hogging, cobweb-gathering being is only aimed at making life difficult for me. Plugging in the external hard drive or feeling up the scanner usb cable to see if it is plugged is well nigh impossible. Even pulling the mouse is a tug of war these days! The printer is not working anymore and I need to print some admit cards. I have set my eyes on wireless printers, no prizes for guessing! Suggestions on wifi printers are hereby sought from one and all.

Conventional healthcare system has taken a bikini approach to women’s health giving emphasis on the breast and the reproductive system. A greater awareness among women regarding heart disease is the need of the hour. Heart disease is not only the leading cause of death in US women but more women are dying of heart disease every year than men¹! In fact, research regarding heart disease has mostly considered it as a male disease, with poor participation rates of women. It is important to understand that heart disease in women is not a man’s disease; heart disease in women acts quite different than in men². Only recently heart disease in women is being looked at seriously and gender-specific research is being carried out.

1 Lloyd-Jones D, Adams R, Brown T,. et al. Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics 2010 Update: A Report from the American Heart Assocaition Statistics Committee and Stroke Statistics Subcomittee. Circulation. 2010; 121:e155.

2 Johnson SM, Karvonen CA, Phelps CL, Set al. Assessment of Analysis by Gender in the Cochrane Reviews as Related to Treatment of Cardiovascular Disease. J Women’s Health. June 1, 2003, 12(5):449-457.

The reason why many couples seem to conceive while they are on holiday in a beach may have been explained by scientists: sunlight might be good for a man’s sperm.

New research has indicated that Vitamin D – which is produced by the human body when it is exposed to sun – is critical to the production of sperm, and that a lack of the nutrient may be linked to male infertility.

The findings, from a team at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, suggest that boosting Vitamin D production, either by increasing exposure to sunlight or by taking dietary supplements, might improve fertility among men.

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.

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!