I initially saw this on Kitta.net, on the colophon page. I though it looked really cool, so I took a gander at the javascript that does it. The comments indicated that I could swipe it for my own means, so I did just that.

I'm still not sure if I like the color, but that's pretty easy to fix; it's a stylesheet entry.

Update: If you're using IE and just see a rectangular box, you should know it looks even cooler in Firefox (or probably any Mozilla-based browser); the Mozilla rendering engine supports radii on stylesheet elements, so the "tooltip" actually has 3 round corners that you just can't see in IE.

I seem to have figured it all out. At least, I think I have. There's still some robustness checking I should do, in case specific files in my theme aren't present, but here are the steps I took to make what you see here into a wordpress theme.

1. First and foremost, create the style.css for your theme. You will need to make specific additions to the top of the stylesheet page, specifically the following portion:
   
/*
Name:
URI:
Description:
Author:
Author URI:
Template:
Version:
*/
Fill all of those fields out. For "Template", put the name of the directory you'll be installing your theme in. In my case, "Template" is "devlogic-condition". This will enable wp-blog-header.php and other files to actually locate your theme files and use your custom index, header, footer, and sidebar files.
2. Now, make a directory to hold the actual pages you use to display your site. This includes index.php, wp-comments*.php, wp-header.php, wp-footer.php, and wp-sidebar.php (if you're basing your theme off of the new "modular" page layout). Copy all of the files you modified (or plan on modifying) to a new directory, and then make a few small changes. In your theme's index.php file, you should ignore the warning at the top and delete the line "require('./wp-blog-header.php');". It's already called by the master index.php file in the webroot, and I'm pretty sure that calling it a second time does nothing more than increase the page load time.
   Then, modify all of the php files you just copied, thusly:
   find all of the lines that use the include() function, and modify the arguments. Change
   include(ABSPATH . '/filename.php');
   to
   include(ABSPATH . "wp-content/${wp_template}filename.php");
   This makes the modular system load your custom header, footer, and sidebar files. It took me a while to figure that out, let me tell you.
3. copy and/or move the directory everything's in into your wp-content/themes/ directory, and make sure the dir's name is the same as the value you entered for "template" in step 1.
4. Oh, yeah. Once everything's in place, go to the "Presentation" menu in wp-admin, and enable your theme. If everything worked correctly, you should be able to view your site with your theme instead of whatever was there before. The most dramatic way to see this actually work is to put your theme file into a fresh installation of wordpress 1.3cvs (or release, when it comes out); you will see everything with the nice "default" theme (or "Kubrick", if it's there), before enabling your own hard work (or your hacking of someone else's hard work, whatever).

It seems that with the Wordpress 1.3 nightlies (and, I assume, the CVS and alpha versions as well), the "blogfilename" option in the wp_options table isn't populated. I issued this statement in mysql_client to fix it:

update wp_options set option_value='index.php' where option_id=2;

and lo and behold: after a refresh the pages actually work correctly! Note: in my wp_options table, option_id 2 was also option_name 'blogfilename'. If you're going to try this, please make sure that YOUR option_id 2 is also option_name 'blogfilename'. That, or use this statement instead:

update wp_options set option_value='index.php' where option_name='blogfilename';

Of course, I thoroughly suggest you make a backup of your database before changing anything. If you mess up your blog by trying this without checking what your current values are, I can't be held responsible.

I'm sure there's an option in the wp-admin section to enter this value appropriately (and if not, I'm sure it'll be added soon), but I couldn't find it.

Now if I could only train myself to actually type "vmlinuz" instead of "vmlinux". That gets me every time.

Incidentally, I recently switched from devfs to udev.. Good stuff. It actually deals with the buggy usb-storage kernel module correctly: Before I switched, when I unplugged my Archos Jukebox, and then plugged it back in, I'd have to manually change the mount command, since the jukebox'd keep being assigned a new SCSI ID. Udev deals with this correctly: "/dev/sda1" is the first SCSI disk connected to the system, regardless of its actual host/bus/target/lun. This is, in my opinion, very useful.

Plus, it makes it so that I can use an automount daemon again, instead of mounting the drive by hand. Since I'm really lazy, this is a good thing.

So I went over to my local CompUSA and picked up a Philips DVP642/37. And man is it sweet. It's better than the Apex I had way back when (which has since gone the way of the dinosaurs): It's DivX certified, and can play just about anything I want. DVDs work perfectly, of course (I even found the region-free hack so I can play any DVD). VCDs and SVCDs work like a breeze. CDRs with mpeg files? No sweat. And of course it can play DivX movies that are burned onto CDRs as well. If I had a DVD burner, I suspect it'd also play DVDs full of DivX files (handy for my collection of Twin Peaks season 2 avi's).

So all in all, I look at this as a worthwhile purchase. For 70 bucks, I get a device that'll play just about anything I care to throw at it. Now I just need to find a reliable source of DivX movies that don't suck (unlike Usenet; people in newsgroups frequently have no taste in movies).

Memo to myself: make more frequent backups, dammit.

But everything just fell into place. I did need to make a few tweaks to a couple of files, but by and large there were no huge problems. Until I got the right driver loaded for my USB controller (the module filename had changed to uhci_hcd), my mouse was going WAY too fast for me; it was almost unusable.

But on the bright side, now that I've stopped using IDE-SCSI emulation, my CD burning is a bit faster. It also takes a LOT less CPU to burn now, which is good. I always hated turning off my mp3 player to burn CDs. I burned season 7, volume 6 of Good Eats earlier while refreshing headers in my newsreader, listening to MP3s, and chatting on AIM. Before the upgrade, the burn would have to be the only thing I was actively doing.

And with ALSA (instead of the OSS I had before), there's lots more mixer controls for my BS Live! card.

All in all, I call this upgrade successful.

Update: um, that's "SB Live!". Freudian typo, or just the regular kind? Who's to say?