Saturday, 25 October 2008, 19:23:17 EDT
The last time this site got a visual refresh was in 2006. Welcome to 2008! If you're a regular, and you don't see any change in this site, hit the refresh button. You still have the old style sheets loaded.
This visual refresh is really just some updated colors (very similar to the old ones), and a slight re-work of the layout. The old style was difficult to read; particularly at higher resolutions. I'm not really a fan of the content-in-the-middle design, but it does compress the width and make it easier to read.
Internet Explorer (version 7) is still a bit wonky. It doesn't work well with the content overflow. The vertical scroll bar it produces doesn't encompass all of the content until you scroll all the way to the bottom. Very odd, and very hard to describe; if you have IE7, try it for yourself.
Firefox, Opera, and Safari all work well. Who would have guessed, right? I haven't had any problems with the scrolling in Firefox 3. They seem to have fixed their renderer so that it will actually scroll smoothly now. Camino 1.6 is not even generating a scroll bar, but it still scrolls if you use a mouse wheel or the arrow keys. Weird.
Overall, I like the new design. It's clean, and ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 25 April 2007, 19:53:16 EDT
After writing the previous post, UsenetServer.com was shown to me. For only two dollars more than Giganews' 25GB/month service, they provide the same number of concurrent connections as Giganews, unlimited bandwidth, free SSL support, and are local to Atlanta. Oh, and they remove the X-Trace header from your posts adding just a little more anonymity. The downside? They index fewer groups and the retention is currently nineteen days fewer than Giganews. Personally, I think it is a good tradeoff for the money. I'm quite positive that UsenetServer indexes any group I could ever want to read, and if they don't, they will add it if requested.
So, I've replaced the Giganews button with a UsenetSever button and removed the previous referral links. If you were considering usenet access after my previous post, b ... (view rest)
Monday, 16 April 2007, 10:05:03 EDT
First, I would like to express my appreciation for all the words of comfort everyone has expressed to me; via this site and other methods. I don't know what to say other than thank you.
Moving on, I added another button to the list of buttons. As with the Bluehost button, the Giganews one puts a little money in my pocket if you sign up for their service through my links. With Giganews, I don't see any money unless you stay with them for ninety days. I don't really expect to ever get anything out of putting the link up, but it's worth a shot, I suppose.
Until recently, I've been using BitTorrent (BT) to download missed episodes of television shows. BT is really nice when the torrent is well seeded, but that hardly ever happens. That, combined with limited peer-to-peer traffic on campus, makes for some really long downloads. I'm talking about days, not hours. I got sick of it, knowing that the files I want would be available on the Usenet. In days of old, ISPs and major universities provided Usenet access. Nowadays, most ISPs write off Usenet services as low priority since most of their users don't even know what it is. Speedfactory, for example, use to provide access but it was slow and had horrible data retention. They flirted with better Usenet service for a while, but then dropped it altogether. That left me without Usenet access at home. Since CSU isn't a very large university, it has never provided Usenet access to its students (at least, not that I am aware). So I broke down and signed up for a Giganews account.
I must say, I'm impressed. Their servers are really fast, and the ten simultaneous connections is awesome. I quickly burned through my three day free trial and activated the actual account. I also like how the trial data limits don't affect the first month's service. However, I think that is going to be moot in my case. I'm currently signed up for the 25GB/month service; my next service period doesn't start until 9 May and I've already hit 11GB. I think I'm going to be upgrading my account to unlimited service soon. I haven't decided, though. The price may be too much for me right now; I'll have to see if I run out of bandwidth before the ninth and then make my decision.
Another thing that has me excited about newsgroup access again is a new file format — NZB. Instead of having to download days worth of headers, an NZB file can be used to tell your newsreader what files you wish to download. It is real ... (view rest)
Thursday, 25 January 2007, 10:40:44 EDT
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I've removed the "print this" feature for now. I'll have to revisit when I get some more free time. It worked well in Safari, Firefox, and Camino for Mac OS X. It even worked in Opera on Linux. Every other browser I tried didn't work, though. That means Firefox, on Linux and Windows, and Internet Explorer. I really didn't expect Internet Explorer to work, but I gave it a shot any way. I'm thoroughly confused about Firefox working on OS X but now Linux or Windows. It really doesn't make any sense. When I can spend some mor ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 19 December 2006, 12:37:56 EDT
The last time I rewrote this site, and implemented the theme I'm using now, I said that I would eventually get around to rewriting the print stylesheets. That was a long time ago. I've finally got around to it, though. Instead of just writing styles for printing, I also created a sort of print system. If you are using a browser with Javascript enabled, you should see a "Print This" item beside the comments link in each article. Clicking on "Print This" initiates a print of the single article with this it is associated. So if you wanted to print this article, but not the previous ones also visible on the page, you can do so without having to go to the comments page for the article. I think my solution is pretty swanky. There are no popup windows involved; everything is done with the content you have already downloaded. I've tested it with Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Opera. All of the browsers work except for Opera. I'm not entirely sure what Opera's issue is, but it does some craziness. I suppose I will write up a test case and file a bug report.
On a personal note. Final grades are in for fall semester 2006. I made a 3.00 for the semester. It brought my overall GPA up only three hundredths of a point, but that still an increase. I made a B in macroeconomics (I didn't really try in that class), an A in ordinary differential equations, and a C in combinatorics. I have no idea how I mad ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 04 October 2006, 20:20:00 EDT
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After posting the previous post I noticed something really wrong with the site. It seems that when there were fewer than five posts in a month my script decided to pull posts from August of 2003. That is not very useful. Turns out I made a mistake rewriting one of the SQL queries when I added in the categories support. I don't know what changed between then and now, ... (view rest)
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, 25 July 2006, 12:55:26 EDT
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After my last post, I decided that I should start categorizing my posts (or "tagging" as the kids are calling it nowadays). Some of the postings I make to this site are intended for a general audience; not necessarily a technical audience. I think there may have been some confusion about that in the past, and I hope the new categories will help.
There haven't been any posts this July because of the category feature. I didn't want to write any new posts until I finished implementing it. I had to go back and categorize every post I have written since August of 2003. There have been a lot of posts so it was no light task. I would say it took me at least a day's worth of time to complete; of course, that was stretched over a few weeks. Once I got all the previous posts "tagged" I had to write support for them in my scripts. A much lighter task.
You should now see a list of categories under each posting date. You can click on each category link to execute a search for all posts that are categorized as such. You will also find that the archives page has changed. I added what is known as a "tag cloud" to make browsing categories easier. If you look at the cloud you should clearly see that this site has no one subject. In fact, a majority of the posts are of a personal nature; ... (view rest)
Monday, 22 May 2006, 12:46:14 EDT
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My Transition to Higher Level Mathematics course was more fun than I thought it would be. It was tough, but there were a couple things we did that were really neat. Some of the proofs were were asked to write were neat as well. One such proof was on my final exam. The problem is to prove, using induction and the product rule, that if a function is differentiable then the derivative of the function is equal to its power times the function raised to its power minus one time the derivative of the function. It sounds complicated but you really don't even have to know calculus; all you need are some sharp algebra skills and an understanding of what the product rule is. I had so much fun with this one I have decided to post my proof: PDF or ... (view rest)
Friday, 05 May 2006, 11:49:21 EDT
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I don't know if anyone noticed, but I added a new button a couple months ago. It was a huge button that said "IP2Map." If you had clicked on it, you would have seen a world map with little red silhouettes on it. Each silhouette represented one visitor to this site out of the previous 100. I found it neat information to have and share. The problem with IP2Map is it is a commercial service. They will let you do as I was doing, generate a non-interactive map, but if you want more stats you have to pay them for more service. That is fair, since they do have to pay for their equipment and bandwidth; but it isn't that important to me. However, I stumbled upon a similar service today that uses Google Maps to generate the map — gVisit. That means more stats, and an interactive map, for free. The downside is that gVisit limits the history to twenty users unless you make a monetary donation, of any value, to the site. That is fine by me because I don't need the 100 that IP2Map offered. Maybe one day I will ... (view rest)
Monday, 01 May 2006, 19:30:39 EDT
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I suppose it was because the semester was so stressful, but it is almost surreal that my last classes of the semester were today. Now I have to complete a take home final and finish preparing for one on Thursday. I have a review sheet with seventeen, tough, questions; the final will be comprised of about eight of these questions. Just a couple more days...
Yesterday, my brother and I went to the Braves game. He wanted to see a game before he heads back to Montana (tomorrow). There was a threat of rain but it held off. It was unseasonably cold and overcast, but the sun broke through the clouds enough to keep it comfortable when not sitting under an overhang. We had awesome seats, too. About two weeks ago I found out that one of my class mates works at a bar at Turner Field. Last Monday I asked him about the price of drinks at the place where he works and what the name of it is. Turns out, he bar tends at the 755 Club. To my surprise he said he would bring me a couple passes to the club. I am glad he did (thank you again Stephen); the club is really nice and the seats outside were open (probably because of the weather). So, we got to sit right beside the left field foul pole for most of the game. Before the seventh inning we decided to go check out the seats for which Brad had purchased tickets. They were great too; they were down close to the field, over the Braves dugout. The only downside to those seats was having to look over people to see the game. I had a great time at the game and got a bit of sun. Thanks for the ticket, Brad :)
Unlike last year, I was smart enough to take my camera. I took a lot lot of pictures. This was the second weekend in a row where I have actually used my camera. I hadn't been using it for a while because I feel silly when I am taking pictures. But I do find it nice to be able to take them. After looking at my pictures from these past two weekends, I realized just how crappy my camera really is. I would like to get a Nikon D50, but they are really expensive. I like to think that if I had a good camera, like that D50, then I would be more eager to learn how to take good photographs and not be so anxious while taking them. Plus, even my crappy pictures would be a lot better than they are now. For example, I managed to take a picture of Jeff Francoeur making the winning, diving, catch yesterday, but the picture doesn't have the effect that it should because my camera can't take pictures that far away.
While we were in Atlanta I made a decision about this summer. I planning to take at least a couple days off for little vacations up to Atlanta. I think on one of them I will go up and check out the capital building and the surrounding area. Maybe go to the zoo on another. Just something to get out of Stockbridge/Morrow and relax. They should be cheap one day vacations. Park at the closest MARTA station, take the train into town, and then walk to the rest of my destinations. Should be fun and make for good pictures; though, not too good considering my horrible camera.
Speaking of pictures, I decided to go with ... (view rest)
Friday, 10 February 2006, 09:36:30 EDT
Looking through my server logs, I noticed that the way I was offering up my email address wasn't working too well. I tried to send a test mail with it and the send failed. That is unacceptable; so, I removed the hexadecimal encoded address and added a web page with my email address. I will add a web email form later so that you don't have to type the address yourself. I just didn't feel like writing it right now. I did take the time to update the "about me" page, though. I just added some "favorites" lists. Nothing special.
Also, thank you to the forty-one people who have do ... (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)
Monday, 19 December 2005, 13:43:29 EDT
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Lo! This site finally validates. I couldn't sleep last night so I decided to figure out why this site wouldn't validate. One typo prevented the validator from completely parsing these pages, so I couldn't find all the errors (and there were some stupid ones). It seems that I forgot a double quote in my doctype line and the validator really didn't like that. Of course, the typo was made in my main template and thus propagated throughout the whole site. Once that was fixed I found unescaped entities and a few other nasty bits. Here is a tip: Javascript's single quote does not behave like PHP's single quote and validator knows this. Thank you to the good folks in #web for pointing out my mistakes.
Other than that, I have had some ideas in relation to the gallery I talked about previously. I am still debating if I want to try and take the time to write it before next semester, though. I would really want to complete the project (well, mostly) before the next semester starts if I ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 12:51:58 EDT
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I have written before about SmartBodies. What I didn't write about is the music that is played in the facility. Most of the people that use the facility are older people; either people from the surrounding community or faculty/staff from the university. As such, the music they play in SmartBodies is horrible. They don't want to offend the older people by playing good music so it is mostly bad 80s music (and I like a lot of 80s music!) and other random stuff that isn't entertaining. They do have Sade's greatest hits album in the CD changer but it hardly ever gets played and it really isn't exercise music, to me, any way. I had to do something about this so I bought an iPod nano.
I have been using the iPod since the beginning of October. It has made a tremendous difference in my workout; basically, it has made the activity bearable. Even if there wasn't plenty of research available showing music to be influential in exercise intensity, I would still claim that music is necessary for me to work out. I need something with a good beat to keep my mind occupied and get me moving. That is not the point of this post, though.
The point of this post is to review the device. I have done this once already on a forum I run. I wrote the review after having the iPod for about a week. I am going to copy and paste that review here and then add a little to it at the end. So, here is the review:
I have been using mine for a week now so I figured it time to give some impressions.
Style
It is damn pretty and is a good size. It slips into a pocket very easily and doesn't get in the way. There is a problem with it though, the surface scratches very easily (which I am sure you have heard about by now). I ordered an Invisible Shield for it but didn't have a chance to put it on until this past weekend. Since I wasn't able to apply the shield (more about that in a minute), which I received in the mail on the same day as the iPod, I left the plastic cover on the front of the iPod. This prevented the front from getting any scratches but the back picked up a few. The scratching wasn't too bad but I would certainly be upset to get them on the screen.
Sound
Good. I believe the only sound degradation noticeable is because of the lossy file formats (MP3/AAC). If the MP3/AAC file sounds like shit on a PC then it will sound like shit on the iPod. If the file doesn't sound like shit on a PC then you will not notice any difference from the iPod.
The earbuds are decent. They have a typical frequency response for cheapo earbuds which matches the frequency response that the actual unit can produce. My problem with the earbuds is the styrofoam covers that come with them. The covers slip off very easily and they cover the 'L' and 'R' designations on the earbuds. Because of the slippage, the earbuds always feel like they are going to fall out of my ears; especially when I am working out. The fact that they cover the ear designations is mildly upsetting. I can still move the styrofoam to the side to see which bud is which, but I would rather be able to just glance at them and put them in. The plus to these earbuds is that they are much, much, more comfortable than the Sony earbuds I have had for a couple of years. I will still be looking for suitable replacements, though.
Management
This basically comes down to one of two questions: 1) Do you like the way iTunes manages music? or 2) Can you get used to the way iTunes manages music? Without getting into a longwinded discussion about my digital music organization history I will give a brief "yes" to the second question. I have never been a fan of "playlists" since I like to listen to albums, but I am coming to terms with the fact that no one else seems to listen to music this way any more and I will just have to live with it. iTunes revolves around the playlist mentality and if you are going to be using iTunes to manage your iPod (there aren't too many other choices) then you will encounter this full force. When you first connect your iPod you are asked if you would like to let iTunes manage the playlists on your iPod automatically or if you would prefer to do it manually.
There are plusses and minuses to both methods. Initially I decided to manage the music on my iPod manually and the podcasts automatically. I have since decided to let iTunes manage specific playlists on my iPod automatically. That is, I choose the playlists I want it to put on the iPod in the preferences and it will ignore all other playlists. I switched to this method because iTunes and the iPod keep track of certain data like number of times a song has been played and how you rate the song (out of five stars). If you manually manage the iPod then this data does not sync between the iPod and the PC. Since I am trying to get used to the "iTunes way" I want to use all the features. There are scripts to take care of this problem but that is a lot more work than it is worth. By selecting the playlists I want iTunes to put on the iPod all I have to do is connect the iPod and all of that data is synced without any other interaction on my part. Spiffy cool but there is a problem. If I want to add an album to the iPod I have to do it via iTunes' preferences; even though I have my iPod playlists in a specific iTunes "folder" I can't tell iTunes to use all playlists in that folder. The folder hierarchy does not carry over to the preferences pane.
A note about the podcasts. iTunes and the iPod will not mark a song as played until after the song has finished playing. Not so with podcasts. As soon as you press play on a podcast the file is marked as having been played. Since I have iTunes setup to automatically manage my podcasts on my iPod and to only keep the ones that I haven't listened to yet this poses a problem. I have to fully listen to a podcast on my iPod before I reconnect it to my PC, otherwise iTunes will remove it from the iPod and delete the file. This is can be a bit annoying. It should look at the last played position, which it remembers by default on podcasts, and if it has been completed at least once before performing this action. If the play position is still in somewhere between the beginning and the end of the file it should not delete it. This is one I absolutely must report to Apple as feedback.
Navigation
Sort of genius. I must say, the click wheel takes some getting used to. It is very sensitive and acts in an analog manner. The faster you move your finger (I highly recommend that be your thumb) around the wheel the faster the menu selector or jog shuttle moves. So, you can quickly skip past songs in a list, blast out your ear drums, and skip way past sections of a track. Overall I like the interface and the wheel. It is much different than any other MP3 player I have used. The interface is very polished and feels more like software than some archaic thing devised just so the thing will be usable. No complaints on this one other than the sensitivity.
The Invisible Shield
This is really a requirement in my opinion. The company claims it was devised by 3M or some such for use on helicopter blades. Whatever. It does, however, seem to stand up to their claims of being awesome. The material feels sturdy and, having applied it, I no longer feel that I have to gingerly lay the iPod on surfaces for fear of scratching. If you want to keep your ipod nice and shiny I highly recommend picking buying this product and applying it as soon as possible. They ship very quickly (day or so in the mail).
That being said, the product is a pain in the ass to put on the iPod. You can read through http://www.theinvisibleshield.com/application.html, and particularly the link at the top of that page, to see what I mean. I thought the product was going to be a single sleeve like thing that would snuggly fit over the iPod; possibly slipping on through the bottom. Instead, it comes in two pieces, front and back, that you must literally apply to the iPod. The problem is in lining up the front and back with the edges of the iPod. I didn't do a very good job (it might have had something to do with my hangover at the time) so now there are a couple of edges on my ... (view rest)
Friday, 18 November 2005, 10:10:36 EDT
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Oh you pitiful people who continue to use Internet Explorer. Maybe you can't help it. Maybe you can't install anything else on the computer you use because of access restrictions. That really sucks. I am sure you can see why if you are using IE. For those of you that aren't, let me fill you in. I am no longer sending a stylesheet at all to IE users. They only accounted for 16.9% of the traffic last month so it shouldn't be too bad.
I am no longer sending a stylesheet to Internet Explorer users for a couple of reasons. One of them I won't be talking about just yet; let's just say some people may be viewing this site soon whom I don't want to get the impression that I don't know what I am doing. This site looked wretched in IE. The second reason, though, I don't mind going into right now. Whenever someone viewed the site with IE they were supposed to get an error message at the top of every page that redirects them to a warning explaining why they get the error. It didn't impact the user from being able to view the site, it would just be an annoyance for the user. Well, it stopped working for some reason. I think an update to IE broke my check for the browser and thus disabled the message. I have now replaced my detection script with a better, more complete, detection script.
When I initially wrote this current design I wanted to do this very thing. I just never got around to doing it. I will probably write a stylesheet specifically for Internet Explorer that makes it a bit better, but not for some time. I just realized that what I have ... (view rest)
Thursday, 17 November 2005, 12:09:18 EDT
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First, a small update about this site. I have implemented gzip compression on the RSS/Atom feed. The feed, for the month of November thus far, accounts for 75% of the requests (510) for PHP files on this site. The requests for PHP files total (672) this month is 29.2% of all file types requested. Basically, that is about 4.9MB of traffic this month for the feed by itself. Sure, I have a lot of bandwidth to work with but I would prefer to squash this problem sooner rather than later. This change could be "bad," though. I have no way of knowing if all the aggregators that request the feed support gzip compression. So, if you are getting garbage in your aggregator let me know and I will implement the change a little more robustly (i.e. actually check to see if the client supports gzip compression before sending it compressed data). I will also be compressing all of the other pages on the site but you all shouldn't notice any difference (other than faster load times) there; all modern browsers support the feature.
On to something a little more interesting. Last Saturday I went to Best Buy with my room mate because, well, we were bored. I managed to prevent myself from buying Guitar Hero (narrowly) but I didn't walk out of the store empty handed. I wandered into the music section, specifically the "Dance" section, and came across Tiësto's latest album — In Search Of Sunrise 4: Latin America. It was an acceptable $15.00 for two CDs worth of Tiësto goodness so I decided to get it to refresh my exercise music. I listened to the first CD Monday and the second on Wednesday during my workouts. The first one isn't very good exercise music. It is a good CD, but it can only be described as "pretty." At about twenty-eight minutes into the album, it picks up the tempo for a couple minutes but then relaxes back into pretty mode. The second disc is much better workout music; it starts off with a nice, upbeat, tempo and it continues on through the album. Actually, about fifty minutes into the mix it relaxes a little bit and finishes off the last twenty or so minutes in a peaceful groove. Perfect. It is around that time when I start my cool down and don't really need the up-tempo beats. As for the music, it isn't all latin beats and such as the n ... (view rest)
Saturday, 17 September 2005, 17:41:17 EDT
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Comment spam is a problem common to web sites that allow anonymous people to post comments. Until recently, I have never had a problem with comment spam. I believe the reason I never had any such spam is because I used to let search engines index the main page of this site, the one you are reading. This meant that only the articles that were showing on the front page at the time any search engine indexed my site would be the only, or at least the most prominent, results for this site returned by the search engines. When I moved to this host I decided to manage my bandwidth and search engine indexing a bit better. I set the index page to tell the search engines not to index the main page, only pages linked from the main page. So, individual posts now get prominent returns in search engine results thus making it easier to find the comment form which uses some standard comment form variables. One of the tricks that comment spammers use is to look for sites that allow anonymous posts by executing searches, with popular search engines, and look for sites with forms that are common for sites such as this one. All of this is, usually, done automatically for the spammers by software written specifically for their purpose. There are some low life scum that manually do the searching and spamming; there isn't any way to stop them short of disabling the comment feature all together.
Why am I telling you about all of this? As I said, I have been getting comment spam recently. It started around the first of this month and has slowly been increasing. After receiving a new bit of spam this afternoon, I decided to take some time out of preparing for my first Calculus III test to implement something that I hope will deter future spam on this site. I implemented what is known as a captcha on the comment form. Now, when you go to post a comment to one of my posts you must enter a six digit number which is provided as an image. I wanted to make this as unobtrusive as possible so I did it a littl ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 17 August 2005, 23:25:58 EDT
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A new button!
I decided that it wouldn't hurt to have a donation system in place for those of you that decide you want to give me money. Sure, there isn't much here worth donating for but some may feel there is. Maybe some people find some of my scripts or programs useful and want to give back a little. Or, maybe, some people like the music that I have made available (it sure seems that way from the server logs) and would like to show their appreciation via the green stuff. Whatever. I just don't want to miss out on the free money if I can get it :) Who knows, maybe if I had put the button up a long time ago I would have the cash to renew my truck registration before the deadline instead of having to wait until my student loan check arrives in September; more than likely long after the deadline for renewal has passed on the thirty-first of August.
I wanted to make more than PayPal available. Amazon has a similar thing they call their "honor system." I know that PayPal doesn't have the best reputation but Amazon's system requires a bit much. Basically, they have a terms of service agreement that stipulates websites using their honor system meet certain requirements. Read the "Enrollment" section of their participation agreement. Essentially, they retain the right to do random credit checks on the people, and their spouses, that use their service for donations. That just isn't going to cut it with me. PayPal, for all its bad reputation, is not that sneaky. At least not in my dealings with them. I have had a PayPal account since before I mo ... (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)
Thursday, 28 July 2005, 14:35:22 EDT
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It has been a banner month for this web site. I have almost broken 100MB of traffic; sitting at a little over 97MB transferred as of today. The second highest was in May at 77.96MB for the whole month. Is it coincidental that the traffic has gone up in the two months since I posted winfo on freshmeat.net? I don't think so. It is, of course, a direct result of the listing. The winfo archive is only 680KB — that is a lot of downloads. It isn't all winfo downloads, though. People do have a tendency to browse around the site once they get here. Which brings me to the point of this post: It seems that the second most used browser to view this site is Safari (24.4%), right after Firefox (48.3%). This is a small problem. Safari's CSS support isn't quite as good as Firefox's. When I wrote the CSS for the current "theme," I didn't have access to Safari to test with and just assumed that everything would work out fine. Well, Safari doesn't show the navigation bar at the bottom. It will show the page numbers but not the archives link. So, Safari users, I apologize that the site isn't working quite as well as it should. When I found out that it is broken I started thinking of new designs for the site but never started work on one because I was about the only one using the browser to v ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 03 May 2005, 13:06:51 EDT
I intended to never add support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to my site. I believe that RSS gives people a reason not to visit the actual site because they can, usually, get all the information they want from the RSS feed. Well, I decided today to go against that intention and add and RSS feed. I realize that most of the people who read this site read only the front page. I don't think I should put you all through the trouble of constantly visting a site to see if there are any updates when such a thing can be done passively.
For those of you that don't know what I am talking about, an RSS feed is sort of like one of those news reels at the bottom of the television screen on the evening news. The feed is plain text formatted in such a way that an RSS reader (program) can parse the information and present it in various ways. An RSS feed can contain all sorts of information such as the article post date, a summary of the article or the full text of the article, the author of the article, and a whole bunch more. Some web browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, have started supporting these RSS feeds. When you visit a page with these RSS enabled browsers they detect if the site offers a feed and present you with a way to subscribe to and read it.
Personally, I think the RSS support in Firefox is horrible. I have also never found an RSS reader that really worked in such a fashion that I would want to use it all the time. They just added yet another application to my list that I always have open. The RSS support in Safari, however, is quite good. It is partly to blame for me finally deciding to add an RSS feed to this web site.
Any way, without getting in to a buch of technical details, there are two primary formats for RSS feeds: RSS 2.0 and Atom. RSS 2.0 is the final specification in the "RSS" line and will probably die off in a year or two. Atom is essentially RSS 2.0 from the ground up and will be extended in to the future. I support both formats on this site but only for c ... (view rest)
Thursday, 31 March 2005, 13:08:11 EDT
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A week or so ago I mentioned that I would be adding a "favorite icon" to the site. It took a while because I can't draw and I am not talented enough with photo editors to do what I wanted. So, I asked Jason to draw one for me. He managed to find time to scan it in and send it to me last night so today there is an icon. Thank you, Jason, for the icon; it is perfect.
Speaking of video games, I have to rant a bit more on violence in video games, parents' lack of responsibility, and the government. On the fourteenth of this month Senator Hillary Clinton gave a speech concerning the media and its affect on children. Near the beginning of her speech she says, "And probably one of the biggest complaints I've heard is about some of the video games, particularly Grand Theft Auto, which has so many demeaning messages about women and so encourages violent imagination and activities and it scares parents." Of course, she has never played the game so her assesment of it is woefully inaccurate. Yes, the game is predicated on violence; but, the game is also satire which makes fun of the media! The very thing she wants to regulate is the very thing the game, which she doesn't seem to care for, ridicules.
Later in her speech she talks about how advitisers target young children with flash commercials about junk food and toys. She says, "And so it's a kind of real whammy. You get the child hooked, you know, into these ads and then the child, if you've ever been in a supermarket with a young child, becomes a very effective advocate just to be quieted in the cart. Go ahead and buy it so we can go ahead with the rest of our shopping." Am I the only one that recognizes the problem here? The child she is speaking of evidently has not been diciplined. The parent is probably the same parent that would buy their child a mature rated video game.
Senator Clinton advocates a cross media rating system that is "clear" so parents can judge what their ... (view rest)
Thursday, 17 March 2005, 19:34:59 EDT
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The other evening I couldn't get to sleep so I read through my web server log reports. I learned a few things: Firefox is the most used browser on this site, which is a good thing; I get a lot of 404 errors (missing file) from user agents looking for a "favorite icon," not a good thing; and that I really needed to get off my lazy bum and de-reference the alternate stylesheets. Well, I was sitting here listening to The Box before starting in on my homework and ended up coming across some interesting links which prompted me to do some work to this site. No, there is still not a favorite icon, but that is coming soon. I did, however, remove the references to the alternate stylesheets (like you care), add some better rules for web robots like Google, fix the references to my email address, and update my links.
The most interesting update to you would probably be the links page update. Sure, I added a few more links, and if you are observant you would have seen them a couple of days ago, but they are not the interesting part. The interesting part is the link to del.icio.us. del.icio.us is in essence an online bookmark manager. That doesn't quite cover what it really is though. While del.icio.us allows you to easily keep your bookmarks on the web so that they are accessible from any computer, it is also a "social bookmarks manager." What that means is your bookmarks ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 01 February 2005, 11:50:43 EDT
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I touched up my friends links and my general links. Instead of the friends links pulling from the database and tracking clicks, they are now just standard links. For some reason the old page would randomly decide to not send you to the link but instead send you right back to itself. I have no idea why and don't really care to figure it out. As for the general links, I never really read two of the three "Daily Web Journal" links so I replaced that section with something a bit more interesting — mathematics links! I hope to add more links to the list as I come across more sites that impart mathmatical information in a way that is either intriguing or easy to understand. When I get stuck on a math problem I turn to Google and usually find something to point me in the right direction.
This past weekend I learned why I am not very excited about publicly available wireless access. It is a lovely dream, take your laptop to some location other than your house or work and actually be able to browse the internet and do other online things. What is my problem with it? If you don't live a major city, and I mean really live in it and not just say you do like everyone who lives "in Atlanta," then your possibilities of getting wireless access outside of the home or office are very slim. Sunday, I came to the conclusion that my apartment might be without electricity until some time during the week. So, I dragged my roommate around two towns looking for internet access so that I could do something other than walk around stores. We first tried Barnes & Noble in Morrow; I knew that wasn't going to work but I figured we would at least give it a shot since it would have been a comfortable environment. After sniffing out the SSID I connected to the network and proceeded to try and browse the web. What happened? I was greeted with a page asking for my username and password to Freedomlink with every web page I tried to visit. So now I have another reason to hate the yuppie bookstore — they charge for a service that other people provide for free to attract business. Good job BN!
There is no way I am going to pay $3.95 for internet access for two hours so we went over to the Dunkin' Donuts in Morrow. I got a donut and some juice and sat down to use the wireless. After I figured out the SSID I fired up GAIM to test out the connection. One of the instant message protocols connected and the rest hung up. After determining that I could ping the wireless router but all traffic was stopping there I talked with the people behind the counter. It seems they had just got on the phone with their tech people about a problem with their computer. Great. That was two down.
After Dunkin' Donuts we drove by campus to see if it was open. Sadly, public safety still had all the entrances blocked off. So, I continued on my quest to find internet access "in the wild" so to speak. There was one ... (view rest)
Sunday, 30 January 2005, 21:11:36 EDT
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Why did I move the site? Well, the weekend in Atlanta was not a fun one. We went from mild walk-around-without-a-jacket winter weather to cars being encased, that\'s right — encased, in a half inch of solid ice. The result of this sudden turn in the weather was power outtages both planned and unplanned. As I expected to happen, the network that hosts the machine this site used to be hosted on dropped the route to the machine (put simply). Such a thing happens every time there is a major event that could affect the network that the old host sits on. While I can live with it for some other services the machine provides I was getting tired of it dropping my personal site. However, that is not the reason I aquired the third party hosting where this site is now. That reason is ever more infuriating.
As I mentioned already, the weather we had here in the metro Atlanta area this past weekend caused power outtages. My apartment was without power for over thirty hours this weekend. The power went out at about 2:00PM Saturday, came on for about an hour at 3:15PM Sunday, and finally came back on fully sometime after 6:00PM (I was at a movie when it came back on). The power being out in my apartment meant that email going to either the sumners.ath.cx or itcouldbe9.com domains would not be delivered and would be hung up in the \"will try to deliver for the next five days\" loop. This sort of thing has been happening entirely too much recently and this weekend of no electricity finally drove me over the edge to do something about it. So, I am in the process of deciding what to do with my email address and moving all itcouldbe9.com e ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 12 January 2005, 20:50:19 EDT
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I didn't really care for the Gray Flame design as much as I thought I would when I initially created the flame. The design was intriguing but there was just too much wrong with it. The scrolling was particularly horrid; one, it was not possible to use a scroll wheel and two, the page was choppy when scrolling. I just didn't like it. For the past week or so I had been trying to come up with a new design to replace the Gray Flame. Well, today it hit me. What you see now (clear your browser cache) is not quite what I envisioned but it is certainly pretty damn good if I do say so myself. It seems that every time I sit down to create a design that is in my head I end up changing it while working on it. I suppose that i ... (view rest)
Monday, 06 December 2004, 10:55:18 EDT
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I just touched up a couple more things around here. No longer will you have to scroll to the bottom of long posts when you want either read the comments or post a comment. I have tried once again to get the comment form to remember the stuff you fill in but web cookies suck so it probably still doesn't work.
I have been playing entirely too much World of Warcraft lately. It is a good thing that I waited until classes were basically over for the semester because that game is too addictive. Hopefully I will get all of the fresh addictive gameplay over with during the winter break. If you haven't played it I suggest you head over to the website and download the gameplay video to see what you are missing. At Jason's party, more on that in a second, I was able to see Everquest 2 being played and I am very happy with my choice. From what I remember, lots of beers, I did not like the graphics in the game. I think they tried to make it look too pretty. WoW is pretty but it is cartoony and I like the cartoony look of the game. EQ2 tried to be too real in some aspects while looking too fake in others. I don't know, I should probably look at the game again when sober to make ... (view rest)
Monday, 08 November 2004, 14:30:51 EDT
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I have been getting some feedback about the new site design. Everything I have been hearing is good and that pleases me. It has been said that the site imparts a sense of seriousness, looks like a site you actually read instead of navigate, and just plain "well done." Personally, I think it is the best design I have done yet even if I do think it needs a couple tweaks here and there. I am happy that you all seem to think the same. I intend to keep redesigning it every few months to keep the site fresh.
Also, this site will be changing addresses soon. I have not decided if I am going to give it a subdomain of the domain I choose for the top level site or if I will give this site its own domain. Regardless, the address will be changing within a fort night. After the change has happened I intend to put up a site redirection; this means you will not have to know the new address until it has changed. Once the address has changed ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 03 November 2004, 15:12:54 EDT
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Yep, Internet Explorer is stupid. If you are using IE to view this page do not complain to me. Once again, I will not do special things to make IE behave properly. I am, however, thinking of implementing a "theme" switcher so that you can choose between the old theme, the current one, and any future themes. I am unsure how I want to implement it though so it may be a couple days before it is available. I also want to tweak this stylesheet if it needs to be tweaked before I work on that.
Any way, you may need to clean out your browser cache for this page to look like it should now. If you are using Firefox then just hold the "control" key and press 'F5'.
Please, feel free to leave ... (view rest)
Monday, 01 November 2004, 11:04:06 EDT
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I have made some more changes to this this site. Foremost, I finally fixed it so new months don't start with a blank page until I have a chance to post. The last time I tried to do this my solution broke the archives in strange ways that I still don't understand. This time, however, it works just fine. The solution was extremely simple and I have no idea why I didn't think of it before. Basically, if a month has less than five posts the front page is built so that it has a maximum of five posts. The older posts disappear from the front page one by one until the current month has reached at least five posts.
The other change is in how the archives are navigated. I removed the cumbersome drop-down box and replaced the "Search Archives" link with an "Archives" link. This is a better way to do it for several reasons. It is easier for all clients to navigate. It integrates the archive searching with the list of available archives in a more cohesive manner. It allows me to more easily create spiffy layouts for the ... (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)
Tuesday, 14 September 2004, 21:51:01 EDT
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It seems some of you that read these words are confused about what this web site is. The part that gets the most attention does indeed fit the bill for a private weblog which people are want to call a "blog." The word "blog" sounds like what one does after drinking a bottle of cheap vodka. I loathe that word and I ask that you do not call this web site a "blog." If you wish, you can call it a "weblog" even though that is not what this is. Yes, the portion of the site that is most often read is the journal portion. That does not mean, however, that the whole site is the journal. This web site has many parts and all the parts make up the whole. I did not arbitrarily pick the title Room Full of Mirrors just because it is one of my favorite Jimi Hendrix songs. No, the title accurately describes the intent and content of this web site. The journal portion allows me to communicate in ways that I am unable to vocally (Joel just wrote a piece on this very thing). It allows me to voice my opinions and feelings in an impersonal manner. It allows people, such as my Grandfather, to keep up with me or even learn who is behind the stoic exterior. Please, calling this web site a "blog" is an insult to the time and emotion I put in to it.
That said, you all seem to think it strange that I would want to copyright my words. I have written at length about many things here that are not necessarily unique to me or my point of view. If someone were to stumble upon it and think that it would be easier to just copy and paste my words to whatever they wish then I want to be credited for it. If someone downloads some of the scripts or code I make available and then modify and distribute them I want them to give me credit for the original work. If someone downloads the music I have ava ... (view rest)
Monday, 13 September 2004, 11:01:34 EDT
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You may have noticed that I added a small graphic under the menu to the left. It is a link to a content license; all content on this site, unless otherwise noted, is now licensed under this license. I decided to do this because I have now made it easier to print the content on this web site. The menus, other navigational items, and other non print related items will no long ... (view rest)
Friday, 16 July 2004, 19:05:39 EDT
I have made some various updates to the site. I realized, after talking with an old friend last night, that it is difficult to find my email address, and then use it, on this site. So, I have added and email link in the menu and used a transparent method of encoding it. It should be much easier to find and use now. I also added a new album to the site; it is a collection of photos from the new University Life Center on the CCSU campus. As I have been walking around in there doing various things I decided that I would take some pictures and share them with you all before the building is officially open. I hope to get some pictures of each classroom model and the auditorium before that date but it is hard to do because all the doors are locked. It seems some vandals decided to cut up the walls and such at some point so they started locking every door in the building. It makes working very difficult because no one has keys. But, I digress. I also added a couple new pictures to the miscellaneous album. Aside from adding picutres I also touched up the way the gallery actually works. Instead of showing the picture description under the picture there is now a tooltip. This allows me to display the albums in a more uniform, and better looking, manner. And lastly, I added a new download to the code section. It is a simple little script to run an Unreal Tournament 2004 dedicated server on Linux, particularly Debian Woody with a 2.6.x kernel.
Enough site news, time for some random babbling. Every Friday I go to the local Steak n' Shake for lunch. I walk in, sit down, and relax. Cortnea, the waitress running the counter and cash register, asks me if I want a platter, usually the answer is yes, and brings me exactly what I want — chili with Tabasco, rootbeer, fries, and a hamburger. It is really nice to be able to go in and just take a break from everything. Today, som ... (view rest)
Saturday, 22 May 2004, 14:27:13 EDT
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After reading an article on the past, present, and future of a standards based web, and reading through some of the comments associated with it, I decided to add something to this site. If you are using Internet Explorer you should see a small graphic at the bottom of the left-hand menu that says "Get Firefox." I could have put it there a long time ago but I didn't really want to make this site an advertisement. After reading the article I came to the conclusion that the only way to get people to demand more from their web browser is to suggest a better one to them if they are using a sub-par browser. I came to this conclusion because one of the comments said something to the effect of, "the only way to get people to use standards compliant browsers is to get the word out about them." I then started thinking about some of the phone calls I receive at work where I ask the person what web browser they are using and they don't have the first clue what I am talking about. I then have to ask them a series of questions to determine what web browser they are using. For most of the stuff they need to do Internet Explorer is the only one that will work "properly" as that is the browser targeted by the people that wrote the software they have to use; so, if they are using the AOL or MSN browser (or whatever) then I need to get them to use IE if possible. I also need to figure out which version of IE they are using, if they are even using it, from time to time. Enough digressing, the point is is that people will blindly use whatever until they are told to use until something else is recommended to them. If they try out whatever else and find they don't like it as much then they can always just not use it. When I talk to people I recommend they use FireFox, unless I am at work and then I recommend standard Mozilla, just to see if they like it; I just haven't ever done so with my web site.
So, if you are using Internet Exp ... (view rest)
Monday, 10 May 2004, 16:34:49 EDT
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Do you remember me mentioning adding a search feature to this site? Well, I finally got around to finishing it up. I wanted to integrate it a little differently than I ended up doing but to do as I originally intended would have required much more than I wanted to fool with. But, all is good; the searching actually works like I intend it to and should work fairly well for anyone who wants to search ... (view rest)
Monday, 05 April 2004, 22:32:31 EDT
Dejected \De*ject"ed\, a.
Cast down; afflicted; low-spirited; sad; as, a dejected look or countenance.
-- {De*ject"ed*ly}, adv.
-- {De*ject"ed*ness}, n.
That is a fairly accurate description for my mood lately. It was only compounded by the fact that, after getting the correct parts, I am still unable to fix my car and get it out of my grandparent's way. I hate that pile of junk.
I will fix the layout of the picture alb ... (view rest)
Friday, 02 April 2004, 15:50:26 EDT
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Well, the day of stupid is over. I just don't get why everyone has to put out false information on April 01. I read news sites to get news not made up stories that have absolutely no significance. Bah. I am glad it is over.
Since I put up the gallery I can actually link you all to a picture that I took last time I went to a lan party out in Conyers. I was just driving along wishing traffic didn't suck and that I could get to the gaming quicker when I saw this truck. I was so bored that I started thinking about the object in his rear window and how, if things keep ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 31 March 2004, 19:49:32 EDT
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Okay, I have populated the gallery with some images. It seems that the two pictures I uploded to my test site were not enough to actually lay out the individual albums. I will have to ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 31 March 2004, 18:38:35 EDT
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Well, today I just didn't feel up to actually working. I was going to go home but we were short staffed today at work so I stayed at work and worked on a gallery for this site. I really should have been finishing up a schedule manager that I am supposed to be working on but I intend to have that done by the end of next week any way and I just didn't feel like looking at it today.
There isn't anything in the gallery as of yet because I need to get all the pictures I have taken from my home machine so that I can look through them and see which ones I had up last time to put them back. I have evidently taken about forty-eight megabytes of pictures since I got my camera so downloading them all from my home machine is taking a while. The third party gallery software I was using stored the information in such a way that I don't want to mess with it. I could write a script to import all the old data but it just isn't worth it. I will actually probably cut out the old "Idiots" se ... (view rest)
Tuesday, 23 March 2004, 00:42:55 EDT
I am considering purchasing a domain in my family's name and moving this site there. The problem is, there are evidently more people out there that want a sumners.[tld] than I figured there would be. There is one that the lease is running out on on April 11 but the owner will, more than likely, have at least a fifteen day grace period to renew. When I started thinking about really wanting a separate domain for this site, and anyone else in my family that might want one, I sent the guy an email asking if he would mind transferring the domain to me since he didn't even have a web page up on it. Well, the email bounced back because the address he had listed with the registrar is dead. I then sent an email to the root account on the domain and have yet to receive a response from him. The funny thing about it? He lives in Scottdale, Georgia which is about thirty minutes from my apartment. I suppose I could just drive over and ask him but now he has a web page up (after about two ... (view rest)
Monday, 01 March 2004, 15:49:07 EDT
I just added a new link to the links section. It is a site for the New York public library system detailing the way each libraries web site should be written. Evidently someone in the New York library administration has heard of standards and understands why they are useful. I like this page so much I thought I should bring it to your attention on the front page. I believe I will include it in t ... (view rest)
Monday, 01 March 2004, 11:18:54 EDT
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It seems that I had a small bug in the pages/archives box on this page so I fixed that. While I was at it I went ahead and made the site show some articles from the previous month when there are not any for the current month. So, until the current month surpases five posts you will see the last few from the previous month. I also changed the current desktop picture from ... (view rest)
Thursday, 26 February 2004, 20:21:32 EDT
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Last night we had a "winter storm." What that means is there are patches, patches, of snow on the ground in random places. Because of this, CCSU closed down for the day and I in effect got an unwanted unpaid day off. Yay! But I did make the most of it by finishing up the new site design and casting an early primary vote (don't ask because I won't tell you).
If you are in the mood to laugh your ass off then read this guy's "Top Ten Worst Things I've Ever Jacked Off To". It is some hilarious stuff.
Also, if you like machinima you need to check out this ... (view rest)
Thursday, 26 February 2004, 19:11:50 EDT
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Well, I know that I said I was going to implement a new gallery at the same time I implemented the new site design. I decided that since I have everything else done I would go ahead and put it up and work on the gallery seperately because it is going to take a great deal more time to do and do it correctly.
I hope you all like the new design (leave a comment with your opinion please). I think it is a helluva lot better than the old one. It is a great deal smaller than the old one and should load up pretty quickly no matter what kind of connection you have. While working on this design I realized I had at some point unlinked my music archive so I relinked that. I also fixed up a couple of o ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 25 February 2004, 10:59:18 EDT
At least I am not the only person on the web that thinks the whole constitutional amendment thing is ridiculous.
I will be working on implementing my new layout over the next few days. I think you all will really like it. I have decided that it just isn't worth the time and effort to write functionality to use the current theme or the new theme so there will just be the "new hotness."
Also, you may have noticed that the gallery is not working. I upgraded the web server a week or so ago and that evidently broke the software I am using for that gallery. I will be writing my own gallery software at the same time I am working on the new the ... (view rest)
Monday, 23 February 2004, 22:27:06 EDT
Ermmm, nevermind about the font search. I think I have decided on a new design. Some people say it is too calm for my personality but I think it will work out really really well. We shall see.
Oh, someone please get me one of these keyboards: ... (view rest)
Monday, 23 February 2004, 19:30:17 EDT
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I am really bored with the design of this site (yeah I know, it is only seven months old) so I am working on a new design. I plan on doing it in such a fasion that you can continue to use the current one if you wish or use the new one. What I want from you folks is to find me some sort of cartoonish font for me to consider using in the graphics. There is one stipulation, the font must be free and not pirated. You can look thr ... (view rest)
Saturday, 14 February 2004, 20:38:29 EDT
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Well, I added two new sections today: "links" and "about me". If you don't see the buttons at the top you should probably think about adjusting the cache settings on your web browser. The "about me" section is really just one long ramble with a picture of me on it. The "links" section is a short list of friends sites and a description of them.
I also added in the option to save your info on the comments page. Now you won't have to type it in every single ... (view rest)
Friday, 13 February 2004, 20:01:03 EDT
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I just fixed up a couple of issues with the comments system. The actual "article" now supports multiple paragraphs like it should as does user comments, made the comment form a little larger, added a check on the url box to prevent you folks from not putting 'http://', and added text to the comment form and made it red (since you folks didn't read it in the first place).
I will be adding a couple new pages to this site hopefully this weekend and adding support to save your comme ... (view rest)
Sunday, 01 February 2004, 22:19:54 EDT
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So, after reading HandCoding.com, a concept that is strikingly familiar, for a few days I decided that I like the option of people being able to add comments to journal entries. In my infinite boredom I implemented the feature here. I didn't test it very well so it will probably blow up and you all will probably send me nasty emails about it but, *shrug*, it is there.
Also, while updating this site with a new feat ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 24 December 2003, 23:07:30 EDT
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Yes, that is indeed festive decorations on the header graphic. Surprised? I thought you would be. I decided to follow Google's lead f ... (view rest)
Sunday, 21 December 2003, 23:28:37 EDT
I decided to start posting more of the "software development" that I do to this site so I removed the old "Scripts" section and added a new "Miscellaneous" section (I couldn't think of a better title - suggest one if you can). At the moment it contains the one, horribly outdated, script that was in the scripts section and a patch for the kick ass pr0n leeching application Enqueue.
While on the subject of development; you may recall that I started itcouldbe9.com to develop a better forum application. Well, tonight I sat down and basically rewrote everything I had done on it thus far. I decided to standardize on MySQL as the storage mechanism instead of abstracting the database access. I decided to do this because it would have been a severe pain in the ass to do it the other way and continue on in the direction I am heading - using classes. That's right boys and girls, I am stepping away from non-object oriented programming for this project. I think that this project really calls for an object oriented approach to make it as modular as possible. I really do want to make it easy for any developer to go in and rip out sections that do not work for their system and implement custom methods.
Anyway, I just thought you might be interested to know that I have not let that project fall to the way side.
In other news, I ... (view rest)
Sunday, 02 November 2003, 22:15:41 EDT
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I finally got around to implementing an "archive" system on this site. Instead of the posts section (the section you are currently reading) being generated from all the posts I have made it is now generated based on the current month. This should be a cleaner arrangement. In the process I had to tweak the CSS file a bit so, even though IE likes to make the page "taller" than it should be, the site should look better on all browsers.
In case you all didn't know, the new Indiana Jones DVDs rock. They didn't add new stuff to the movies or take anything out. The movies are just touched up to look and sound their best. And the bonus disc is really cool. It points out all kinds of stuff that I never noticed before. For example, in the heiroglyphics on the column next to Indy when he and Sullah are recovering the Ark there is a scene with C3P0 reaching out to R2D2.
If you haven't seen the new Alien re-rel ... (view rest)
Sunday, 19 October 2003, 19:47:15 EDT
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I added a new section to this site today. I decided that, since I got a digital camera, I would make so ... (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)
Wednesday, 03 September 2003, 16:50:39 EDT
Ok, I am now a believer in the awesomeness of Turk MMCache. All of the PHP based sections of this server are now hauling the proverbial ass.
If you run a site that m ... (view rest)
Friday, 29 August 2003, 16:29:29 EDT
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I have added another section to this site. If you dig Gran Turismo 3 for the Playstation 2 you should check it out.
I woke up this morning and decided that since I will be spending money from my next pay check to buy Soul Calibur 2 for my Gamecube I might as well go ahead and charge it and just pay it off with the money from the pay check. So, that is what I did.
THIS GAME ROCKS!
Link is one bad muthafucker. He has bombs, arrows, and his boomerang. I have unlocked an alternate weapon for him; it is called the "Megaton Hammer" and ... (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)
Saturday, 16 August 2003, 19:36:34 EDT
Well, it seems that I am joining some sort of new fangled wave in that I am now turning this page into some kind of "blog". I really hate that damn word - who the fuck came up with such a shitty word for a web based journal. Anyway, I wrote this system myself and I think I will like it. I have it set up to show only five postings on a single page (like the jokes section) and show the newest post first. When it comes time to have an archive section I will implement that.
So, on with the first post...
I decided to give KDE a shot. So far I am still undecided about it; it is definitely better than GNOME in many respects but I do have some issues with it. For one, I can not seem to bind random hotkeys. I absolutely love being able to press "alt + t" for a new xterm or "alt + F1" to play/pause ... (view rest)