Replacing titles with captions in WordPress gallery image links

Posted on by Brad

Recently I have installed a colorbox plugin onto this blog for image galleries.

This plugin overrides the default behaviour of an image gallery and replaces individual image pages with a simple in-page pop up of the image. It works quite nicely, however, one problem I have had is that it extracts the title attribute from the former page links rather than the caption of the image that it is displaying.

I have spent the last few days trying to figure out a way to get the behaviour I want out of the plugin. However, this has been much more difficult that expected, the code that generates the galleries in WordPress is buried deep in the code and isn’t as straight-forward as replacing title=getTitle with title=getCaption. Trying to edit the behaviour of the jquery on the colorbox plugin isn’t an option either as it is heavily optimised. And updating every database row to replace the title with the caption also isn’t very practical.

Instead the simple hack below will achieve what I want. It isn’t pretty and I am still looking for a better solution, but in the meantime after the page has been rendered the jquery quickly looks for galleries and replaces the titles in any links with the alt text from the image. This means that when an image loads in the colorbox it displays with a caption.

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
 $('.gallery img').each(function() { 
  $(this).parent().attr('title',$(this).attr('alt')); 
 });
});
</script>

Photos: Sculpture by the Sea 2012

Posted on by Brad

This morning I went down to Bondi Beach to check out Sculpture by the Sea.

I did a pretty good job of getting in before all the crowds, although, there was still many people along the coastal walk.

The photos below are just a mere sample of the many sculptures along the walk between Bondi and Tamarama and it is well worth checking out in person over the next three weeks.

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Bumblebee, Optimus, Hybrid Graphics, and Ubuntu

Posted on by Brad

For the last year or so I have been struggling with my laptop overheating under Ubuntu. Upon upgrading to the latest beta of Ubuntu 12.10 I have managed to completely solve the heating problem and as a result increased my battery life by more than an hour.

Two different problems have caused the heating problem. The first, a power-regression bug on i7 processors was resolved in Ubuntu 12.04 with an updated kernel.

The second is caused by the Nvidia Optimus Hybrid Graphics card in my laptop not being properly controlled by Ubuntu. Problems with Hybrid Graphics under linux are well documented and there are quite a few different “solutions” available, however, I have been unable to get any to work until now.

A few months back I installed the Bumblebee project, and despite the packages successfully installing, the hybrid graphics card never worked and battery life remained terrible.

Upon upgrading to the latest Ubuntu beta I noticed a problem in the logs during the install of one of the bumblebee packages: bbswitch-dkms

The package would “successfully” install, however, the terminal output would show that the kernel module was never built.

The problem lies in missing kernel header packages. While the Ubuntu Wiki pages do not detail any requirement for the installation of kernel headers other sites do, however, these other sites only focus on the kernel headers for the currently installed kernel. And, if you update the kernel without new headers, it is possible that the kernel module will no longer work and the overheating problem will return.

This is how I setup my system so that I would always have the latest official Ubuntu kernel and headers with bumblebee working:

1. Install the linux-headers-generic package:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic

2. Setup the Bumblebee PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable

3. Update the package information:
sudo apt-get update

4. Install the bbswitch-dkms package:
sudo apt-get install bbswitch-dkms

Before moving on make sure that the output from the above command shows that the module was successfully installed.

5. Install the rest of Bumblebee:
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia

6. Restart and then test if Bumblebee is working:
a) glxgears
b) optirun glxgears

The second command runs the opengl test using the Optimus graphics card and the output in terminal of the FPS should be much greater than the previous command. Bumblebee should now be successfully installed and you should notice a large decrease in CPU heat and an increase in battery life.

In my opinion during the install of the bbswitch-dkms package a check should be made for the required kernel headers to build the kernel module, if the packages aren’t found a proper error and suggested solution, such as the installation of the headers package should be suggested. A silent fail that keeps the rest of the installation running only provides the end user that false hope that things are working fine.