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Archive of September, 2006

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I Sang to a Noodle Because the Voices Told Me To

September 26, 2006:

Go ahead and play mad-libs with you birthday and clothes. I got this pupal meme via e-mail and figured that since I haven't written anything lately I'd pass it on:

Pick the month you were born

January: "I kicked"
February: "I loved"
March: "I smoked"
April: "I dry humped"
May: "I choked on"
June: "I murdered"
July: "I did the macarena with"
August: "I had lunch with"
September: "I danced with"
October: "I sang to"
November: "I yelled at"
December: "I ran over"

Pick the day (number) you were born on

"a birdbath"
"a monster"
"a phone"
"a fork"
"a Mexican"
"a gangster"
"my cell phone"
"my dog"
"my best friends' boyfriend"
"my neighbor"
"my science teacher"
"a banana"
"a fireman"
"a stuffed animal"
"a goat"
"a pickle"
"your mom"
"a spoon"
"myself"
"a baseball bat"
"a ninja"
"Chuck Norris"
"a noodle"
"a squirrel"
"a football player"
"my sister"
"an iPod"
"my brother"
"a permanent marker"
"a llama"
"a homeless guy"

Pick the color of the shirt you are wearing

White: "because i'm cool like that"
Black: "because that's how I roll"
Pink: "because I'm NOT a homosexual"
Red: "because the voices told me to"
Blue: "because I'm sexy and I do what I want"
Green: "because I hate myself"
Purple: "because I'm cool"
Gray: "because I was drunk"
Yellow: "because someone offered me 1,000,000 dollars"
Orange: "because I hate my family"
Brown: "because I was high"
Other: "because I'm a ninja"
None: "because I can't control myself"

Put the pieces together and enjoy.

Baby Steps

September 12, 2006:

Well, I'm pretty sure I've got the new layout all set to go. You may notice that this one looks good; that would be because someone else designed most of it. Aside from my BF calendar, the only element that's mine is the JF logo that I've been using since 2001. (I can't help it -- I like that logo.)

For those of you who want to see the evolution of the look, here's the changelog:

Version 1. The one I came up with, complete with broken implementations in every major browser.

Version 2. I used the navigation layout my friend came up with, and changed the gradient to a brushed-metal look. I also figured out what was making IE break: The vertical padding in the blockquote. That's right, folks. The vertical padding of one element adversely affected the horizontal placement of another element that had nothing to do with it.

Version 3. Changed the look of the header and rearranged the date and post title. The Verdana Bold header was kinda heavy on a lighter background; regular Arial looks a lot better. Oh, that was also one of my friend's suggestions.

Version 4. Added my friend's light-text on dark-background idea for the content area. Lightened the date (it was still bolded in version 3.)

Version 5. Implementing yet more of my friend's layout. (I was stubbornly hoping that something of mine would look better. I was wrong.) The flow from midnight blue to royal blue looks a lot better than the mix of pastels I had in version 1.

Version 6. The last of my friend's layout -- the lines behind the header. Looks a lot better in practice than I thought it would, honestly.

Version 7 is what you saw at the top of the page. The calendar is mine, based on the rest of the look I was provided.

Once I get all my back-end stuff taken care of I'll be adjust the look, increment the major version, and call it done. So... let's call it January then.

And All Was (Almost) Right With the World

September 11, 2006:

Football season has begun. Dampening my enthusiasm, the Browns lost to the Aints.

Frustrations

September 07, 2006:

I was feeling a little bored, so I took a stab at implementing my new design. It went... not well.

Firefox obeys its rounded-borders command for the border itself and for background colors. Background images just plow right on through. So, the rounded corners don't work.

In Firefox and Swift (which uses the same KHTML engine as Safari) the navigation has bullets even though I explicitly tell it not to. So much for doing the Right Thing and making my navigation a list.

Opera fails utterly on the upper navigation.

Internet Explorer actually does what I mean on the navigation, but chokes in the main body of the page. I threw in a blockquote element (used for longer quotes) as a test, and regular text after the blockquote bleeds out into the background by the same amount as it's supposed to be pushed into the content frame. And black on dark blue doesn't show very well.

Four browsers; four errors, three of which are fatal for the layout. I thought standards-compliant code was supposed to eliminate shit like this.

I should probably stop doing that...

September 05, 2006:

I'm in the habit of referring to my two web sites (I own jasonfleshman.net also, but it points to the .org site) by my initials, mostly because I'm too lazy to type my own name on a regular basis.

I know that the actual site jf.com is taken (all two- and three-letter .coms are taken if I remember right) and jf.org probably is too.

So I decided to look them up and see what I could find.

JF.com is a German company, JF Infosys GmbH. I have no idea what they do, since I don't speak German. Something to do with HP, by the looks of their site. Maybe a reseller?

(Just in case you're curious like I am, GmbH is apparently the German equivalent to LLC, while AG is the same as Inc. Anyone who knows more German than I do is welcome to correct me.)

JF.net is a cybersquatter. Boring.

JF.info and JF.name don't exist, and neither does JF.biz (hey, I do freelance, I could get a .biz if I wanted to).

JF.org, on the other hand, is home to the Jesus Fellowship. I'm surprised my monitor didn't catch fire when I pulled up the page :)

JasonFleshman.org 8.0

September 04, 2006:

The more I think about it, the more i want to redo this thing. Probably won't happen till next year, but at least this gets my plans out of my head and into a format that's more reliable than my short-term memory.

Redesign

I've been running this look for just under two years now (since October of 2004). I like this look, but I think it's time for a fresh look. Here's what I've got so far:

(Warning, the full-size GIF is 153kB)

The navigation bar means the page will be at least 990 pixels wide, just enough to fit into a 1024-pixel-wide window. I'm debating whether to lock the content area into that same width, or to let it flow like it does now, or to let it flow within a minimum and a maximum (like, from 770px to 990px). It's easy to mimic CSS's min-width and max-width properties in IE, so I think I'll go with that option.

We're all pretty much stuck when it comes to the nav bar, though. I've used kind of an inverse-pyramid approach for it, so what I figure is the least-important item (search) will be the first to disappear off the right edge of the page.

Update the Back End

The admin section of the site hasn't really changed since I launched the site at Pair Networks back in spring of 2001. Like I said before, I'm still typing raw HTML into a <textarea> form element. I want to upgrade myself to a CMS like the one we provide our clients at work. Most of it is Javascript-based, so the little HTML validator add-on for Firefox will shit when it sees the CMS, but the actual HTML the CMS turns out is well-formed.

I also want to move the small batch of other pages into the database, to make searches easier. Right now, whenever I update a page I have to run an indexing script to copy the content of the pages into MySQL so I can search against it. Thankfully I don't pay for database disk space. (At least, I don't think I do.)

This also includes updating the Brain Farts database. It's old and creaky, and is a fine example of a table designed by someone who doesn't really understand databases. (Which, in 2001, I didn't.) There are lots of improvements I can make, which in addition to increasing speed will let me do things like categories for entries (LiveJournal calls them "tags"). So in the advanced search page, instead of just searching in BF, you could search for Brain Farts in the "whiny bitch" and "computer" categories.

Reprogram the Front End

I have to do this anyway to make the regular pages use the CMS, so most of the impetus is there already. Most of the display in this site is a collection of hacks on top of kludges, an it disappoints me to know that it's in that shape.

Mind you, this is because six years ago I knew PHP almost as well as I knew databases, but I still don't like it.

I plan on taking advantage of Apache's AllowPathInfo directive to let my URLs act like querystrings: When all is said and done, I'll only have index.php, other_pages.php, brain_farts.php, and photos.php running the show. (photos_list.php, which displays the actual galleries, will symlink to photos.php.) All old links will remain valid, if for no other reason than I am one stubborn mofo.

Basically, someone going to www.jasonfleshman.org/other_pages/me_apartment_2005 will go to other_pages.php which, through the magic of the ForceType directive, will answer to just other_pages. It will then take the /me_apartment_2005, which as I said will stay valid, and match it against the new format, which will be /me/apartment-2005 (a simple find-and-replace on the "URL" column contents) and pull the page from the database to display.

A tiny bit slower due to the DB access, sure, but I hope the programming improvements I make will balance that out.

Another improvement I want to make is adding some AJAX functionality to the BF calendar. Right now, clicking on a month or year will take you to the appropriate archive. They'll still behave that way, but in supported browsers there will also be a "twisty" that shows and hides individual calendars and month listings. In order to avoid loading unused data, the first time a twisty is used it will send a call to the server to get the data it needs. After that it will just be a matter of showing and hiding <div>s. The look of that bit is still up in the air, so it's not in the layout mockup.

Changing the front end also means doing away with the utils page. Over the years I've removed the color-picker (because the red and green versions looked like ass) and the font-size picker is basically useless. So ker-flush it goes. It was nifty in a look-what-I-can-do way, but that was about it.

In the biggest change, the search will get simpler and more complex at the same time. The search box will search all the content tables and do some sorting (it took me until just a few weeks ago to discover UNION ALL in SQL; I hope it works in MySQL's implementation), while clicking on the word "Search" will go to the advanced tool (which is also on any results page) that will let you break things down by blog category (new), and which sections of the site you're interested in (like the current tool). You'll also be able to sort your results based on relevance (number of occurrances / number of characters), title, or date modified (ascending and descending).

Finally, I'll add a second Atom feed that handles non-BF updates (which are much more rare) and a third feed that fuses the two. You'll be able to pick and choose whichever type of updates you want to know about.

Damn. That's a lot now that I typed it all up. I hope my loyal reader(s) appreciate all the trouble I'm going through for them :P

Notes For Myself

September 01, 2006:

Lately we've been having problems with computers "falling off" Active Directory. This is a pain in the ass, because it means I have to Remote Desktop into them to get any work done.

The most likely culprit is a NIC going bad and spewing junk packets across the network. In fact, one of the Google returns for the problem mentions our motherboards' onboard NICs by brand. So we bought a bunch of gigabit ethernet cards and started replacing things.

I'd like to say that solved the problem, but it didn't. Can't hurt though, and good network cards are dirt cheap anymore. I finally saw a problem with the Computer Browser service in one of the affected systems' event log.

Computer Browser basically provides a list of all the computers on the (Windows) network to anyone who asks. It's how you are able to go to a command line and type ping computername and have it work, or access a share by going to \\computername. An Active Directory server has to run Computer Browser.

Nothing else does. The service, however, is on by default, and it seems to have gotten a little confused by the Fedora box we installed not too long ago. (I probably ought to read up on Samba, Linux's SMB implementation that lets Linux boxen access the Windows network.)

Anyway, back to Computer Browser. Every machine, 2K3 server and XP Pro alike, were running it, which was probably clogging up the network something fierce. I cut it down to just the Active Directory server (since it's required) and the SQL and mail servers (since I'm afraid to fuck with them). Things seem to be running much more smoothly now.