Wednesday, 02 August 2006, 20:34:06 EDT
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We have been upgrading the wireless access points around campus the past few weeks. The new access points are dumb terminals that talk to an access point server. The server manages all aspects of the devices; what ESSIDs they have, the channels they broadcast on, etceteras. There is a software package that is used to connect to the server and manage it, and the devices. The company only provides it for Windows (2000 SP4 and later) and two Linux distributions — SuSE 9.1 and Red Hat WS 3. So, today I loaded Windows XP on a Dell laptop so that I can manage these access points. As I was installing the software I noticed that they wrote it in Java! Why they don't have a Mac OS X client is beyond me. It makes no sense to write something in a language that was designed to generate programs that can run on any platform and only offer it on two. Oh well, maybe one day they will wake up and realize their stupidity.
Since I installed Windows on a machine I intend to use only rarely, I installed the latest Internet Explorer 7 beta. After a little testing, I determined that IE7 will display this site correctly (mostly) if the stylesheet is sent to it. It does what Opera 8 was doing; it shoves the buttons off to the right a little too far, but that is acceptable. So I am not sending the stylesheet to IE7. Internet Explorer 6 and earlier will still get only the HTML.
I don't recommend you upgrade IE to version seven just yet. It will be forced on you soon enough via an automatic update. It is still a beta, and people have had problems uninstalling it. But, if you are an Internet Explorer user, you should soon get to view this site as the rest of the reader ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 07 February 2006, 14:09:18 EDT
It has been over six months since the last release of winfo. Today, there is a new release. If you don't have an Intel based Macintosh, there is no reason for you to download this new release. The only change between 0.4 and 0.5 is that the program has been compiled as a "universal binary." In other words, it will run on a PPC or Intel Macintoshes. I wanted to include a new feature or two but I just don't have the time. I am close to being able to include the wireless card's IP address in the information but not close enough to put off the universal binary release. The MacBook Pro machines should be shipping soon and I want early adopters to be able to use winfo if they so desire. However, I have no idea if it will even work. I don't have an Intel based Mac on which to test it. So, if you have one and can test it for me I would appreciate some feedback. It would be nice to know if it works or blows up. I imagine it will work without any issues, but stranger things have happened.
Also, if you are using Opera to read this web site, and a ... (view rest)
Friday, 05 August 2005, 20:13:16 EDT
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New design. How do you like it?
I started this design last Friday when I got home from work. I worked on it all day Saturday and then as much as possible during the week. When I wasn't working on this new design I was preparing for my calculus final. I rewrote the whole of the HTML and CSS from scratch. Doing so allowed me to cut out a whole lot of unnecessary markup and styles. If I may boast for a second, the way I wrote the new stylesheets is amazingly clean and the markup is almost pretty, minus the spacing as a result of the template engine. Okay, boasting over. Every page has been updated in either content, appearance (aside from the overall theme), or both — including the rarely used search page! Okay, that is a lie, the archives page didn't change but that is the only page. While I was at it I even fixed the news feeds. I threw away the third party class I was using to generate them and wrote my own implementation. So, the dates are correct on the feeds now. Rejoice.
More so than ever before you need a browser that supports CSS2 very well to view this site. While Internet Explorer mostly gets it right, it leaves out quite a bit and gets just as much wrong. I extensively tested this new design with Safari, Firefox, and Opera. Opera has a small problem with the width of the view port but works well enough for the ten people that use it; seriously, Opera only hit this site sixty-four times last month. If you are using Opera and haven't ever changed the user agent string from Internet Explorer to Opera then wake up and fix it. I digress; the reason you need to use a decent browser is because the stylesheets are a good bit more complex than the old ones. I moved all of the navigation content to the bottom of the markup so that search engines can rank the pages better and textmode browsers can view the content first. What that means is all the buttons to the side, more on those in a second, the menu at the top and the archives link, along with the feeds links, load last but are positioned first, visually, on the page.
While working on the design I came across several things that Safari gets right which Firefox doesn't. For example, I really wanted to use upper case Roman numerals on the links page. Safari numbered the links correctly whereas Firefox labeled every one of them as "0" which isn't even a Roman numeral. I also wanted to put a text shadow on the menu text but Firefox doesn't even support the "text-shadow" CSS property. I don't know if it is just the poor version of Firefox for OS X, but Firefox doesn't even scroll the content window on this page smoothly. There are a few more things that I can't remember right now. Basically, Firefox turned out to be disappointing but it is still worlds better than Internet Explorer.
About the buttons, I have been wanting to add them for a long time but there wasn't anywhere in the design to add them. The number of buttons is going to grow slightly over time so you might as well learn to live with them. Actually, if you really don't want to see them then they can be turned off by adding the right code to your browser's default stylesheet. The buttons are all contained within a single element with an id named, appropriately, "buttons". If any of that makes sense to you then go for it; I won't be telling you how to do it. I could really use any revenue generated by people using the clickthru ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 12 October 2004, 13:19:42 EDT
A quick little update about some web site happenings.
It seems that some of the writing I have done here qualify for credit in one of my courses this semester. All I have to do is print the posts that I feel qualify and turn them in with the rest of my work. So, I tweaked the print stylesheet a bit more over the past couple days. First, I changed it so that comments will always have a page break before them; this means that you can print just one post. All you have to do is view the "comments" for a post and print all but the pages that have comments. Second, I set the stylesheet to expand links when printing. Anywhere there is a link in the post the URI will be shown in parantheses to the right of the "link." This feature will only work with browsers that have decent CSS support such as Firefox and Opera. This should help the printed posts make more sense.
Also, I am now assured that adding the license to the content of this web site was the proper thing to do. When I got in from lunch this afternoon I had an email asking for permission to use a couple of the photographs in my gallery. I of course have ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 01 September 2004, 21:57:10 EDT
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I would like to thank everyone who wished my birthday well yesterday. I was greeted with "happy birthday" just about every where I went and that was strange for me as it has not happened in a long time. It is odd how such a small thing can make a day better. That and the time spent with friends Saturday evening was certainly a good end to my twenty-fifth year. Yes, that is right, I have lived a quarter century now; it is amazing how quickly the time is starting to pass.
Any way, let's get on with the geek portion of the post shall we? It seems that Firefox is slated to reach version 1.0 on October 11. This release is going to incorporate some really nice new features. If you are not yet using Firefox I don't know what is wrong with you. The browser is really living up to its namesake (it used to be called Phoenix) - it is ... (view rest)
Thursday, 25 September 2003, 00:53:00 EDT
If you are viewing this site in Internet Explorer you have probably noticed that these news items are not centered and are not as wide as one would think they should be. It seems that Internet Explorer's !Doctype support does not like the XHTML !DOCTYPE definition. Don't know what I mean by !DOCTYPE? Read here.
Basically, I am not going to go out of my way to make IE work like it should. I know of a way to get the site to look proper with IE but then I have to maintain two stylesheets. If you want to view this site as it should be get a more standards compliant browser like Mozil ... (view rest)
Saturday, 16 August 2003, 22:22:19 EDT
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I just fixed up a couple of the style sheets for this page to look more like it should in Internet Explorer. Some of you may be wondering why a horizontal scroll bar shows up in Internet Explorer when it doesn't with other browsers such as Mozilla or Opera. I will tell you why, it is because Internet Explorer has shitty standards support. I designed the page to fit in the width of your browser ... (view rest)