09.10.01
Posted in General
at 2 pm
I came across a code generator for RSS Feed Display via JavaScript that takes an RSS feed and displays it in line. So I pointed it towards my own RSS file and now I’m… syndicating my own content. (Over there on the left hand side of the page.)
That feels dirty, even a little wrong.
But really it’s just to try it out. I’m learning about my own journal here. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, right?
Eventually I’d like to add some real content oriented newsfeeds that are of interest to Portlanders and Oregonians. Might make a good addition to my Portal page, no?
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09.09.01
Posted in General
at 10 pm
I have finally brought my old journal archives into a more integrated form for Dwelling. You might notice the “This Week In History” links on the left hand side of the page. Those links point to the entries from previous years that correspond to this week. Those archives now have the proper header and footer HTML that the rest of Dwelling has, which is a step in the right direction.
As well, all of the non-entry articles that I usually called ‘Extras’ are now part of the still-in progress Articles section at OrderSomewhereChaos.com. The extras for 2000 are pretty light, but I’ve got three for 2001, and a couple others that I’m planning on adding once I’ve written them up.
I’m really working to get all of my personal web sites well situated. For my own purposes, here’s where I’m at:
**OrderSomewhereChaos**, (Formerly: For Placement Only, Formerly s.u.r.f.a.c.e): Moved to new domain, New header graphic in place. Need to re-title all of the pages (simple multi-file search and replace in BBEdit should handle it). I should do a more thorough check of the pages to make sure that each link works, but I can also watch the error logs closely to find that out. In the process I’ve begun moving my code towards XHTML, the first step of which is to make all my tags lower case.
Redirects: It looks like the re-directs from the old server at smartnetworks.net are working well. I’m also capturing the referral links that are coming in and once I get a good pack of them, I’ll notify the site keepers to update their links. It’s interesting. This is the first chance I’ve had to really see just how much traffic FPO actually generates, as I’ve never had access to any server stats.
Once the smoke clears, I’ll probably drop everything down to the root level, out of the /~rosso/ directory which is really unnecessary now that the whole domain is mine.
**Dwelling**: I’ve got the journal moved over to bad-seed.org pretty well and it looks like most of the links to my journal have been updated. I’ve got the proper redirects from Smartnetworks to OSC to B-S.org working pretty well. Check it out: http://www.smartnetworks.net/~rosso/notes/ If you get all the way through it, you should end up back here. Archives: All the archives are moved over and now have the proper navigation in place. All links to Extras //should// work.
**XSSI Library**: My redirect log from smartnetworks is showing me that the XSSI Library has quite a few fans. Perhaps I ought to get it in better shape, and add some more articles. It never really evolved quite the way I wanted it to, though it does have some good info, if you can find it. The Library has moved over to OSC and the redirects are working well.
**Regex Library**: Never finished. Moved but need *lots* of work. It’s much further along than the .htaccess Library, however.
**Bad-Seed.org**: The Nick Cave stuff have moved into the /cave/ directory pretty well. The Cave Inn stuff is still all there and the redirects from the old Zephyr site are still hanging in there as well. Pretty amazing how long that site has survived. I think I started that in …. 1994? Maybe ’95.
**Crime and the City Solution**: Incomplete, but it’s got a pretty good structure to work from.
**Absolutely Volkswagen**: Our Club web site is sitting pretty and is working quite well, though I haven’t had much to update of late.
Of course there are other minor site out there that I have a hand in, but this covers the bulk by far. I’ve tried to make sure that all of my old URLs point to the new sites and locations as well as possible. It’s tough, but some well placed XSSI and .htaccess files have done pretty well for me.
Lots of links to maintain, lots of pages to keep track of. I wouldn’t wish this sort of thing on any but the most anal of digital organizer types.
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09.05.01
Posted in General
at 9 am
Amy and I went to see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back on Monday night. Most of the time, I try to lower my expectations for a film so that when it’s mediocre, I still feel like I spent good money. I forgot to do that for this film.
But it didn’t matter.
I really liked the whole thing. Kevin Smith’s final NJ-based film was a great final episode, pulling together Dogma, Chasing Amy, and Clerks into a a swirling mass of cameos, inside jokes, and one liners. (I haven’t seen Mall Rats, so I can’t comment as to whether there were any major references to that film as well.)
The only part of the movie that lagged was the Diamond heist which took way too long. The credits, as usual, were great, and the final song of the film had the audience in stitches. Good fun movie for adults.
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09.04.01
Posted in General
at 11 am
I’m always collecting lists of things: the names of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, the seven deadly sins, the seven wonders of the ancient world, etc. Today’s list comes from the “Forgotten English” word-a-day calendar that Amy got me for Christmas:
The Five Wits:
- Common Wit
- Imagination
- Fantasy
- Estimation
- Memory
This is from Robert Nare’s Glossary of the Works of English Authors, 1859.
(Oh, the horsemen are Famine, Plague, War and Death.)
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09.02.01
Posted in General
at 9 pm
This game: http://www.bossmonster.com/games/antcity.html was floating around the office the other day. It’s quite fun. I haven’t explored the rest of the site, but the quality of this piece alone is pretty good. (The link will open in a new window.)
It seems that I’ve hit a bigger pocket of ‘comedy mail forwarding’. There are always little vortexes of it around, and PGE seems to get quite a few, plus I get a few from the Hot Pepper people as well.
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09.01.01
Posted in General
at 10 am
| Ross’ 2001 Wish List |
| $40 |
256MB RAM for G3 |
| $60 |
Remote Control Car |
| $99 |
AirPort for Ti |
| $150 |
WLAN for G3 |
| $150 |
30 GB hard drive |
| $170 |
512MB RAM for Ti |
| $200 |
New desk |
| $250 |
Archos MP3 jukebox |
| $250 |
New chair |
| $300 |
Stereo receiver |
| $400 |
CD/MP3 In-Dash Car Player |
| $400 |
LCD monitor |
| $400 |
Digital camera |
| $1000 |
Fix Viva’s top |
| $1100 |
Digital video camera |
| $1200 |
Fix Viva’s body |
| $1500 |
iBook? |
Well, it’s my turn again. I get to list out all the cool and neat things that would be fun to have. It’s pretty materialistic, but hey, when you’re going to get someone something, you might as well get something they want. Am I right? Last year’s list worked out pretty well. I ended up getting just about everything over the course of the past year.
Some of the wish list items are for Amy’s computer. Why, you might ask? Because having her machine work well for her makes me feel good. I brought her over to the Apple side a long time ago, and I feel a certain responsibility for making it a good choice.
As for the AirPort card, that’s far more selfish. You see, if she get’s an AirPort Card, I can move the Ethernet hub out from behind my desk and into the back room. Once that happens, I can move the printer back there as well, and we can hook up the scanner back to the 6400, which we can use as an MP3/File/Print server. The AirPort has a cascading effect for the whole network.
Looking back at last year’s entry, these lines are worth repeating:
“Though I’ve got to say, any of the above items would make great gifts. But they would be extras. All told, my life is pretty excellent as it is. I’ve got a beautiful woman who I’m deeply in love with, a couple of cats that adore me, a job where [this year this should say: I can grow my skills and abilities], and very few worries. All in all, it’s a very nice life.”
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08.29.01
Posted in General
at 10 pm
So I’m sitting at my machine at work, and software begins crashing left and right. I’ve got 6 or so windows open and by time I have to reboot entirely they’re all fozen and the machine won’t respond at all. I start the arduous reboot process when my phone rings.
“Hello, is this Ross?”
“Yes…”
“Did you just loose your network connectivity?”
“I think so. My apps started crashing and I just now rebooted.”
“Okay. This is Greg from DTS. We shut down your port. We’ll be coming upstairs to your machine.”
“Can I ask why you why you shut down my network connection?”
“Well… We think you’ve got the Code Red virus.”
The internal networks here had gotten hit, twice with the Code Red virus. Once on the outside machines, and the second time on the inside. The whole IT department is pretty skittish these days about this stuff. But there’s just one problem. The Code Red virus attacks the Index Server component of Microsoft’s IIS web server, running on WinNT.
Item the first: I’m not running the Index Server.
Item the second: I’m not running IIS or any other web server.
Item the third: I’m not even running WinNT, my laptop has Win98!
Apparently some piece of software somewhere had decided that it found a Code Red packet coming from my machine and started setting off bells and alarms in …Houston! (AKA location of the parent company) Houston told the Portland people to shut me down quicker than you can say ASAP.
They did, and the techs came up to my cube. One said, “Huh. That’s weird.”
That last line, by the way, is a direct quote.
They said, if they could figure out what was going on, they’d let me know. Otherwise they’d just turn the port back on.
Gave me a good reason to take a lunch break.
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08.26.01
Posted in Transport
at 2 am
I attended the NEDRA Woodburn Electric Drags on Saturday. I got a lot of pictures and a *lot* of sun. I wrote everything up in an article that’s got lot of pictures.
I stole Amy’s Cannon digital camera and took it with me. I’m glad I did, because it made this write up a lot more interesting. Of course an event that’s all about the silence of an electric motor that is moving over a period of time would be far more interesting with a digital video camera… Hmmmm.
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08.23.01
Posted in General
at 11 pm
From Private Eye’s (http://www.private-eye.co.uk/) current Funny Old World column …
“It all started with an enquiry from a nurse,” Dr Karl Kruszelnicki told listeners to his science phone-in show on the Triple J radio station in Brisbane. “She wanted to know whether she was contaminating the operating theatre she worked in by quietly farting in the sterile environment during operations, and I realised that I didn’t know. But I was determined to find out.”
Dr Kruszelnicki then described the method by which he had established whether human flatus was germ-laden, or merely malodorous. “I contacted Luke Tennent, a microbiologist in Canberra, and together we devised an experiment. He asked a colleague to break wind directly onto two Petri dishes from a distance of five centimetres, first fully clothed, then with his trousers down. Then he observed what happened. Overnight, the second Petri dish sprouted visible lumps of two types of bacteria that are usually only found in the gut and on the skin. But the flatus which had passed through clothing caused no bacteria to sprout, which suggests that clothing acts as a filter.
“Our deduction is that the enteric zone in the second Petri dish was caused by the flatus itself, and the splatter ring around that was caused by the sheer velocity of the fart, which blew skin bacteria from the cheeks and blasted it onto the dish. It seems, therefore, that flatus can cause infection if the emitter is naked, but not if he or she is clothed. But the results of the experiment should not be considered alarming, because neither type of bacterium is harmful. In fact, they’re similar to the ‘friendly’ bacteria found in yoghurt.
“Our final conclusion? Don’t fart naked near food. Alright, it’s not rocket science. But then again, maybe it is?”
(Canberra Times, 17/7/01. Spotter: Michael Doyle)
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Posted in General
at 11 am
I’ve decided that I’m going to start collecting Development Process outlines. I certainly have my own, and have seen others. I think it would be great to have a collection of them to look at.
Here’s the first one, which I’ll call FP Delivery:
Requirements Deliverables
- Success Definition
- Process Definition
- Data Definition
- System Definition
- Requirements Plan
Implementation Deliverables
- Functions Definition
- Services Definition
- Interface Definition
- Overall Application Definition
- Authentication Definition
- Implementation Plan
Delivery
- Component Build-out
- Service Build-out
- Interface Build-out
- Application Build-out
- Delivery
I’ll add more later as I come across them. Once I have three or four, I’ll start a Gallery over at my WebDev Articles section.
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