CNN.com - Report: Dogs are smarter than people think - July 31, 2002
Some dogs are definitely stupid, others however are quite smart. For example, my aunt has a shitzu that recognizes the names of certain people and acts differently when you talk about them. God forbid the little suckers ever learn how to talk...
Maybe Mark would like to know about full text searching?
Ok. I've been looking into this searching thing for days now. I'm up to my neck in character sorting, fulltext indexing, trie's, and more. Here's what I found.
If you're using mysql, its pretty easy to have a pretty powerful and quick engine by using mysql's ability to generate indexes on text, such as the comment, the title, etc. However, if you're using an even newer version of mysql (of the 4.x alpha variety) you will have access to a complete set of boolean operators for searching. Even better.
That's with mysql. If your copy of MT uses DB_File instead, I'm still looking into it. DB_File doesn't store robust record sets, it only stores key/value associations, from what I've read.
Oh well. I might never end up doing anything with any of this, but its interesting to research at least.
Required reading: Advanced mysql Searching.
So, according to CNN's latest online poll, 79% of Americans believe that Bin Laden is not dead merely because we've captured his body gaurds. I'm prooud to say that I am one of the 96,790 people who voted as well as one of the majority. Until I see a body, our government better be scouring the planet for that piece of trash.
As of right this second, this page lists my blog as similar to Meg's at megnut.com.
Meg was co-founder of pyra, the company that created blogger. Her blog is in my list of blogs to read regularly, and I'm very psyched about being listed on the same page as her... All I have to say is this: I find this whole web thing to be utterly fascinating and exciting, and revel in it like a little kid in a candy store. Thanks Google, for making my day.
Object Oriented Programming in Perl
The top two links there are an excellent jumping in spot if you want to learn how to write object oriented code in Perl. I have some oop experience from C++ and Java, which I then improved upon by writing some object in PHP. As I said, I'm trying to create a radix sorter to create an index to create a search plugin for Movable Type. Since MT is written in Perl, I figured I should learn it. I bought the Llama book from O'Reilly, cruised through the first few chapters, made the switch to online, and busted through the quick primer listed above. Tomorrow I'll try to get to the UMass library to look for some more algorithm analysis stuff, and maybe by tomorrow night I'll have some workable code.
That is, after I finish some online testing modules I'm writing for a client, finsh stripping a bench I'm re-finishing, and check the ceiling fan in my aunts house to make sure the bracket's not loose. Ah, what a wonderful life.
In other news, as recommended by Asa, I'm in the process of cheking out Shareaza. So far, it seems pretty sweet.
And while I'm doing the "by the way thing", I'm still not sure what caused the outage this morning... I'm waiting to hear from my provider. It if bothered anyone, I'm sorry.
Well, There has been less posting lately because most of my surfing has been devoted to discovering how to create and index of keywords. I know. You're sitting there thinking one of two things. They are:
1. "You are the biggest geek I know."
2. "Why the hell would you do something like that to yourself?"
Well, here's the thing. I recently read some reviews of the search plugin for Movable Type. One of the things I heard was that it is slow. So I started to think: I wonder how they make the index that search engines use to find data?
This has taken me on a crazy ride so far. Basically, first you must find a way to sort all of the words you want to search for. In MT, that consists of taking the words, dates, links, alt text, etc, and sorting it piece by piece alphabetically. How you do this varies and is complex. I'm trying to wrap my mind aournd it all and once I do, I'll try to explain it here.
In other news, I burned Mozilla to a CD in preparation to teach my grandmother how to use it. Maybe I'll do that this week. We'll see.
Slashdot | Alicebot Creator Dr. Richard Wallace Expounds
Damn. The man is brilliant.
"Some observers claim that the lying man and the pretending computer tell us nothing about our own human consciousness. This author at least is prepared to accept the inescapable alternative conclusion, that we as humans are, for the most part, not 'really intelligent.'"
ANother great section is when he discusses the human brain, coming to the conclusion that the brain is a pretty "shitty" computer. He also makes the point that our sense of "logic" is very new (being non-existant in other species) and that it might not be very good, or be a good darwinian evolution. For example, what if we make ourselves extinct through nuclear warfare? Didn't work out all too well, did it? I think Dr. Wallace rules.
Warning: The interview is huge and he wanders occasionally, however, it is filled with great info. I thought it was worth the read.
So recently, a woman was murdered in a restroom on Route 24, just outside of Boston Massachusetts. The bastard who did it was found at the scene, bloody and undeniably guilty. The DA has decided that they will not pursue the death penalty, and instead will try for life in prison.
I'm sorry. If someone is undeniably guilty of murder, they don't need to be here anymore. Massachusetts is in the middle of a huge budget crunch. It makes sense to put this guy in jail for life instead of taking him out for the good of society? Seriously, we wouldn't let a rabid dog live out its life in a kennel because it killed someone, why let rabid person do the same? The criminal in question has a prior record to boot. In cases like this, and the one where the little girl was killed and the criminal was found based on DNA evidence, there should be no questions asked, no long trials, merely a verdict of guilty and a trip to the chair. Those poor families will never get their loved ones back.
I recently heard a quote from General Schwartzkopf. He was asked if we should offer forgiveness to those who planned the 9-11 attacks. His response that forgiveness was God's job. Our job was to arrange the meeting.
Read the refined print. Its funny. It really is.
Anyone watching American Idol? I've been paying attention, seeing who does well and who doesn't. There are a few really talented people there, but there are a few really awful ones too. And that right there sums up life.
I finally got a chance to play through the last level of WarCraft III today. Overall, I enjoyed the game, probably logging about 48 hours into it in total. Once again, Blizzard has done a phenomenal job. The rendering was great, the animation sequences incredible, and the movie scenes use the same engine as the game so everything is seamless. I enjoyed it a lot. However, I missed a portion of the credits section that I'll have to re-watch cause the parts I did see were rather humorous, and I haven't tried it in hard mode. I wonder how hard hard actually is? I can say that I beat everything in normal mode without having to tone down the difficulty (although I did have to play a few levels quite a few times). Oh well. I won't find out unless I try it.
I spoke with my grandmother today. She's interested in trying out Mozilla. If I can convert her, I'll be able to get some of my other family members to make the switch too. And even if I don't, like I said the other day: one more Mozilla user is one more Mozilla user, and on that note, if my grandma can do it, anyone can. Stay tuned for an article about the whole thing.
In other news, how 'bout those Red Sox? Damn, boys. They crushed the Devil Rays 22 to 4 today, Nomar's birthday. To celebrate, He got up to bat twice in one inning, both times hitting homers. The Yankees, on the other hand, lost today with Posada taking a bat to the head. Because the Sox had a double header today, and they're currently winning the second game, they have a chance to cut the Yanks lead and possibly take the AL East in the coming week. Go BoSox!
"Forget browsers. Think instead about the implications of Microsoft's announced plans, dubbed Hailstorm, to integrate into Windows its own network services for handling privacy, security, copyright, identity authentication, real-time communications, payments, scheduling, software delivery, and file storage. It's not hard to imagine the dystopic possibilities when a private monopoly exercises unfettered rights to define the architecture of such important zones of our common, global space."
That quote is from Breaking Windows: How Bill Gate Fumbled the Future of Microsoft, by David Bank. I think it sums things up nicely, and this whole Palladium thing is in the same basket as far as I'm concerned.
"In Christensen's schema, a disruptive technology starts as an untested product with an unknown business model or one that offers lower profit margins. Most significant, few customers even seem to want the new thing. Any rational manager would stick to the old approach and brush aside the threat from a product at best suited for marginal, niche markets. At the same time, constant improvements in the traditional technology make it all the more valuable and seemingly invincible -- giving rise to breathless accounts of a company at the peak of its power. By the time the disruptive technology makes the jump to mainstream and undercuts the incumbent with a "good enough" product at a markedly lower price, it's usually too late for the incumbent to recover."
Another quote from Breaking Windows: How Bill Gate Fumbled the Future of Microsoft. As I read this, I couldn't help think about Open Source projects like Linux and Mozilla. They seem to me to be better and better, and soon to make the jump to mainstream.
In case you couldn't tell, I just finished Bank's book. I enjoyed it. I've read a few books about Microsoft, some about the court proceedings, and some about them and Netscape. This one looks at Microsoft's internals throughout their trials and tribulations, and for someone who enjoys organizational behavior, the book had a lot of good insights and commentary. If you enjoy non-fiction about technological corporate America, check it out.
So I've been using the newest Mozilla release for a little while now, and so far I'm happy. There's a new icon to open a new tab right in the tab bar, which, wehn right clicked, gives a menu with all kinds of fun tag related things like reloading all of them, closing them, etc. The bog where links at the end of a line were displayed garbled and with text on top of itself seems to be fixed also. I haven't had it crash yet either, so the stability is still there. Another added fature is an icon in the bottom right to access the address book. All in all, so far an excellent release. Keep it up Mozilla developers!
I don't understand. Why are people so quick to dismiss Mozilla when it comes to gaining market share? Why are they so quick to call it a "techie broswer", and why is the implication that being a "techie browser" makes it unuseable for the rest of the planet?
My mom uses MSN and the MSN explorer. I've seen it crash many more times than I've seen Mozilla crash. As for it gaining market share, can't anyone understand that 1.0 was released not too long ago? That it takes time for people to change? That since Mozilla and Netscape use the same code base, use of one is practially equal to use of the other? That features like pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing are useful to everyone and that that alone can help it gain market share? Does anyone know what the hell that icon for history in IE is supposed to be? Isn't that icon just as cryptic as some of Mozilla's advanced fatures?
I'm kind of frustrated with all of the nonsense surrounding Mozilla. It's a great broswer with tons of neat features, many of which the average user won't touch, but that doesn't mean they won't use it, and it certainly doesn't deserve to be called a techie browser. Seriously: a lot of people's VCR's do way more than they can even comprehend, but there aren't models called "Techie VCR's" in comparison to the "VCR for idiots".
I think I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to see what broswer my grandma uses, and I'm going to try to make her use Mozilla. If she can do it, anyone can. And hey, as far as I'm concerned, one more Mozilla user is one more Mozilla user.
Slashdot | Ask Dr. Richard Wallace, Artificial Intelligence Researcher
I love the concept behind AIML, and with Dr. Wallace being the interviewee, I'm really looking forward to this slashdot interview. Make sure you go ask all of those burning questions you have about him, including why he's so paranoid, and what his favorite type of pot it (kidding, kidding... People with mental problems make the world go round. Personally, I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder [seriously:I literally stacked a bunch of tupperware things at a store today while I waited in line...]) I l o v e Dr. Wallace!
Slashdot | Open Source, Real Media Mega-player?
I've used Real Media a lot in the past, and its great to see them go Open Source. I'm interested in their business model, though. How do they plan on making money?
The Mozilla 1.1 beta is out the door... Maybe it will have some neato bug fixes. I'm downloading now. Try it out, and we can compare our opinions (hint: I'm probably going to like it no matter what).
The guy who runs this is somehow related to Eric Costello. The posts are not as frequent as the rest of us crackheads would like, but they're an interesting view into a profession that many of us (me included) take for granted. Good luck with your blog Andy.
Macromedia Flash Communication Server
I hadn't heard about this yet, but I found it today. Flash is kind of clunky for a communications medium, if you ask me. I think it makes an excellent presentation arena, and would make a nice improvement over Power Point. I think it has huge potential as an educational medium. However, to think that it could be a communication server, I don't know... I'll have to think about this some more.
So AOL has been messing with their numbers too. I stick by the quote I posted yesterday: it's rinse cycle time, and we're finding out how dirty the laundry is.
Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps
As I start to get into this whole blogging thing, I'm finding more and more people whose blogs have problems with this. They don't know its a problem, though, cause they don't look at their site with anything but IE. Oh well... Once AOL finishes the process of using gecko in their new AOL client, a whole lot of people will get a new education.
Adobe has released a new version of Premiere. This is one of the biggest things I miss about school: the lack of huge bandwidth and school purchased software. Booo to 56k modems, I say. And P.S.: The Adobe site still sucks in Moz. And I would by GoLive why?
So, a while back, Kottke mentioned that the folks at Macromedia were keeping weblogs. I took a trip over there to check them out. Some of them are really good, some of them need a little bit of work (My boy Bob needs someone to tell him that he doesn't need to sign every post to his own blog). Otherwise, they're pretty interesting and have a good amount of info about the numerous Macromedia products.
The links below lead to some of the blogs I found. They, in turn, have links to others.
Mike Chambers
Matt Brown
Vernon Viehe
Bob Tartar
John Dowdell
I also found the article here to be interesting.
Finally, I actually saw someone put a link to my site on their blog page. Thanks Jasmeet. Note: This doesn't mean someone else didn't also put a link to my site on their blog, I just noticed this one first. and yeah, maybe I am turning into a link whore.
O'Reilly Network: Amazon Web Services API [July 21, 2002]
As soon as I get a good idea, I'm going to try to do something with this (I know, I said that when google released theirs, but I mean it this time).
My mom owns a used bookstore, and she uses a program that tracks all the books a certain customer has read. I think it'd be really neat to include the Amazon recommendation functionality into that program. To do it, though, I'd have to get in touch with the guy who writes the software my mom uses, and my guess is he won't want me messing with his program. Based on what my mom paid, he's doing plenty ok all by himself.
I am absolutely convinced that the stock market is a psychological game. Think about it. The analysts say its going to crash, the people hear them, the people sell sell sell, the market crashes. The analysts say the market will go up, the people buy buy buy, the market goes up. Now, I'm convinced that its going to bottom out soon and people will say collectively "hey, it's done, lets buy before it goes up and we lose out on these great discounts" and it'll go back up. What pisses me off is that the stupid analysts caused the trouble in the first place.
Now don't get me wrong: a lot of the tanking we're seeing now is due to the big businesses and their problems. However, I heard a quote on the news the other day. I think it was Warren Buffet, but in any case the guy said " You don't know how dirty the laundry is until you hit the rinse cycle. We're in the rinse cycle now. When its done, we'll have laundry that's a lot cleaner than it was before". And it'll get dirty over time, and need to be cleaned again. So goes life.
Well, I have to learn about this trackbacking thing. People are starting to do it, and I'm not. Better get my but in gear.
As a sidenote, What if you were Ben or Mena? It's got to feel really neat being the ones who thought it up, and programmed it in. Having an idea, and then seeing it through to useage has got to be pretty neat, especially when it involves creating social networks. In his book, Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee talks about the web as a medium where people can post and edit, and trackback kind of allows that, as I understand it: I read your comment, I make my won, it shows up on your page and creates a dialog. Neat neato.
In other news, I have a really weird referrer showing up that ends with commands/script or something like that (I'm too lazy to look). When I try to visit it, I get a poopy authentication box. If anyone knows where its coming from, drop me a line. I'm kind of interested...
Update: Duh... I pinged my own site, and discovered that the IP involved was my own IP, so I stopped displaying those entries. I don't know what was causing it, because I don't recognize the cll, or the port it was against, but it's gone now.
Another bot based on AIML. Alice, the original AIML chat bot has one the last two Loebner contests (I think, but I might be wrong). I'm really interested in AIML and need to look at this Anna bot a little more carefully, but I thought I'd post it here.
Reuters | The World's Leading Provider of Financial Information and News
At the very end of this article, Jobs leaves the door open for porting OS X to the Intel architecture. I've been waiting to hear that since I was first exposed to OS X. With the built in features it has, such as voice commands along with the underlying unix heritage (can you say terminal window?) and the fact that it can run Adobe products and in the near future probably Macromedia products, It'd be an OS I'd pay for. Come on Apple, hook us up!
I got a Referrer script hooked up. The code is from LGF. However, I made a few modifications. They are as follows:
1: The referrers are numbered.
2: The User Agent string is stored. Currently, I have a crude mapping that decides if the user agent is either Mozilla, Netscape, IE, or Opera. It displays this information in a tool tip (since its in the title attribute) which you can see if you hover over a particular refferer. In the future, I hope to have a better browser mapping (ie what version and more browsers), but for now it works. If you have any issues, please email me.
In the process of getting this to work, I also discovered that my host has a really powerful server intereface, as I was able to configure Apache to do some things that I thought required editing the httpd.conf file and restarting the server.
And now, in all its glory: binarytoybox referrer list
Couple of things:
1. I'm a really big fan of Mozilla. I've been following it and using it as much as possible since I was a freshman in college (four years now). I love it a lot. Recently, I found a list of weblogs by some developers that work on Moz. As I read through them I realized that I'd really like to be a better programmer. I feel left out because I can't work on a lot of really neat projects. I also found myself really really really wanting to be employed again.
2. I'm currently looking for a search tool for Movable Type. There are a few things that I'm looking at, and I'm also thinking about working on something on my own.
3. I'd like to have a referrer script that shows where people who visit come from. I'm going to mix something up since it'll give me a reason to figure out how to get PHP to work in the MT system. I also found some other hacks for the MT system that I'd like to implement, I just have to do them. Oh well.
An excellent article by David Eisenberg discussing many uses of XML with some very clear explanations. Highly recommended.
As a side note, I've been reading ALA for years now, and I find many of the articles there to be very useful. If you have a chance, cruise through the archives for some wonderfully helpful info.
Improv Message Boards - True Porn Clerk Stories
Ok... So I know I have a pretty messed up sense of humor, but this is really funny.
I'm pretty torn abou it, though; on the one hand, the girl is an excellent writer, humorous and entertaining. I'm glad she works where she does because otherwise she wouldn't write about it. On the other hand, having paid for an education and not currently having a job, I can understand her pain at working in a porn rental store. I mean, damn. Read the one on the first page about the sanitizer gel. What a crappy job.
Courtesy of the Empty Bottle.
And by the way, should I have trackbacked that?
That's one way to list a bunch of car models so that you'll get more search engine hits...
Sweet. I've been working on a project that will benefit from this. My question is: Does this also work in IE, or is this a benefit of Moz that the "other browser" doesn't have?
Gilmore v. Ashcroft -- FAA ID Challenge
How far are we willing to go in order to protect our civil liberties? Our country is based on freedom. The same freedom that allows my neighbor to hang a Confederate flag outside his house in the middle of Massachusetts while our country is at war. As Americans, we need to distinguish between safety and letting "The Man" treat us unfairly.
I think the idea behind this is excellent. On par with Photoshop tennis at Coudal, I love these types of contests.
My vote for round three winner: Sippey.
So I've been cruising through the book Programming Spiders, Bots, and Aggregators in Java by Jeff Heaton, published by Sybex. I complained the other day about the author's writing style. Today, though, I come to tell you that the content is good.
So far, I've been learning about the http protocol, the way headers are sent and received, how to parse html, how to hadnle sockets, and more. I'm getting ready to bust into the section on building a high-volume spider using jdbc or odbc and threading. Maybe I'll even start running something relatively soon. The only problem is that I don't know what I'll do with the data yet.
As an aidse, all of this Java code means I need to brush up on my Java programming abilities... Better go get my Java book out...
With a bold move, Amazon has taken another step towards the future. They released an Amazon API, which will allow people to write programs that can obtain and manipulate data from the Amazon product database. Google recently did the same thing. Having recently come from academia, I think this is great. These are two huge groups of information that we all have access to. My mom runs a used bookstore. She could use an application that combines the two to find author information for customers, find out what the latest paperback books are and search google for used copies, etc etc.
One of the things I'm dying to try is to combine the power of AIML with the Google API. AIML is the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language developed by Dr. Richard Wallace. You can speak to an Alice bot at alicefoundation.org to test her out. AIML is based on XML and basically breaks language down into a series of words. These words are then matched against known words in Alice's database and then appropriate answers are spit out. Now, don't get the wrong impression: Alice can't learn from conversation (per se), she can only spit out what has been stored for her. However, Dr. Wallace based her speech patterns on a principle that claims that all of human speech is comprised of a small amount of words used repeatedly. Based on this, Alice can have some decently intelligent conversations and has done well in numerous AI contests.
My thoughts go like this: What if an Alice interpretter was written i such a way so as to use the google index as her knowledge base? I.E., what if she could take your question, break it down, and then search google, grab the most relevant info, and spit it back at you? What about the same with Amazon? All of a suddent, Alice knows what the top selling books are. Alice can find the wishlist for your computer wiz nephew. Alice becomes a rather intelligent agent.
This line of thought interests me a lot. Easire navigation of quality information pools. I'm down with that.
As mentioned in my last post, I've been viewing my logs a lot recently. not surprisingly, the more I post, the more people view my site. The more places I submit my site or leave my address, the more people visit my site. However logical it is, the kid in me is extremely excited.
I've always felt empowered by the web. With a few keystrokes, you can leave your mark. Over the last few years, I've read a lot of things, learned a lot of things, and expanded my skills. Until recently, I haven't brought them to bear on anything in particular, until I started this web log. Finally, I feel like I'm using some of the thngs I've learned, and, the great part is, I can see it paying off by the way my site visits are increasing.
I'm extremely interested by the communities that form on the web. Whether it be the warbloggers, the people who hang out in comp.lang.php, or the groups of people who post comments on any given website, its awesome to see people with such different backgrounds and locations coming together. Like I said before, I'm in love with the web.
New Zealand News - Technology - Weta spends big for better effects
Weta, the company that is responsible for all of the digital effects in the Lord of the Rings movies has placed a huge order for computers. I'm a big LOTR fan. Loved the first movie, can't wait for the second. Go Weta!
So, in reviewing the traffic logs (in case you noticed, I'm doing that almost obsessively) I noticed a new bot hitting the site: Psbot. It belongs to a site called picsearch.com, which indexes images and allows users to search through them. Personally, I'm not a fan of having my photography ending up in a database for save to desktop thieves. Needless to say I learned how to use my robots.txt file to block the bot. I just created a file called robots.txt and added an entry that looks like this:
User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /
psbot is the name of the bot to block, and by using the / (or root) I have blocked the bot from my entire site. You can also specify certain directories, however, there needs to be a separate disallow line for each directory you wish to block. You can also use the wild card, *, to block all bots.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
Zeldman has a mini-review of Mark's post about font sizing on the web. He also adds some commentary based on his business site, Happy Cog.
At Kottke's site, you'll find a post a running discussion about styling links so they don't end up breaking up sites designed to be read.
At the bottom of both these discussions are points about doing what is necessary to appeal to your audience. Kottke makes a comment about user oriented design being "design with the user in mind (as opposed to design by committee or design by whatever the vice president's favorite color is)". He justifies his design decisions based on the theory that he is doing what is necessary to provide the best user experience for his readers.
On some level I agree with this, since each site serves a unique audience that must be satisfied. However, having family members with disabilities, I firmly believe that accessibility must be built in. Now if you're designing a site and you watch your logs and you never see a user agent string from a voice or text based browser, I can understand how you would automatically discount those users as not part of your user base. However, what if they're not visiting because they've given up on the idea; they have heard there are no accessible sites, so what's the use?
As I sat in a dinky little pizza parlor today, I heard a family talking about visiting sprite's web site to see if they had won a prize. The web has become an integral part of our lives, in an extremely fast amount of time (a topic unto itself). Here's my point: unless we create an environment where everyone can assume that the web will be easily available to them, how can we expect to see their traces in our logs? It seems like a catch 22.
It's a little cliché, but gees... What a twisted web we weave.
Did you know that Wal-Mart is now selling computers with Lindows or Mandrake pre-installed? Really, they are! I think its great. My mom thinks no one will buy them, but I say even if every Wal-Mart sells one computer with an open source OS, that's what? Seven billion users? More choices = a good thing.
Open Directory - Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Technology
In other news, my site has finally been indexed by google, as well as added to Dmoz, who's link is above. I now understand where my new visitors are coming from. Hello!
As for dmoz, it has me listed as a personal blog about the internet, technology, and media. I guess I better start talking about some of that.
I purchased a book today called "Programming Spiders, Bots, and Aggregators in Java". So far, I'm learning, but I'm not enjoying the book. At the end of every section (even really small ones consisting of a sigle page) the author tells what will be discussed next. Now, if I'm trying to write a spider, don't you think I'm smart enough to read the heading half an inch down the page to figure out what the next section is about? I'm not even done with the first chapter, and I'm already annoyed. However, the code is well-commented and easy to understand. Maybe I'll have something written soon.
So it's come to my attention that some people have tried to view pages that don't exist and that some people are using Netscape 4.x to try and view this site. I wanted to point out a few things:
1. Not all of the 'within' links to the left are working yet.
2. This site isn't designed to work in Netscape 4.x. I'm working on at least making it readable. However, Netscape 4.x is a ragged old browser. Please, please upgrade to a newer browser such as Mozilla, Netscape 6.x (or better yet, help them test the 7 preview release), or Opera. I don't reccommend IE 6 due to its security issues, however, it will display this site correctly.
And now, back to our regular programming.
In checking out where the latest visitors came from, I found a reference from a bot called BumbleBee from a company called Relavare. So, since I'm a curious kind of guy, I went to their website to see what they're all about. Turns out they have a pretty neat navigation interface; it's an excellent example of why vector graphics rule. Definitely have to file that away for future reference.
That is an absolutely excellent job. The attention to detail, innovation ,and imagination are incredible. I wish I had the talent, time, and knowledge needed to make something like that.
For those of you who want to skip right to the end, here's the final pics:
Anemone
Orange Today - News - US - Quirkies - Gaffes - Fires - Hospitals - Newspapers - Mental health
Ok. So I thought it was funny... My mother keeps telling me I have a warped sense of humor...
Well, as you might have noticed, I've done some re-designing. I began by using the 3 column layout from BlueRobot. I then modified as necessary to add my banner at the top. I realize that the banner image may be a little heavy, and I plan on working on that. On the flip-side, this page is xhtml transitional compliant, section 508 compliant, and has a stylesheet that validates. It is also W3C section A compliant, but until I can get AAA I'm not going to brag about that. If you'd like to ccheck up on me, use the validation links at the bottom of this page.
One note: I discovered that for links to validate properly, they can't have any ampersands in them. You must use the ampersand entity instead. You can get more info here: W3C XHTML Recommendation.
Google Search: blogchalk United States
Ok, so that's way cool. I seriously have goose bumps. Hey, Tim Berners-Lee? Are you out there? After reading your book Weaving the Web, I'm pretty sure this is right up your alley.
Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Massachusetts, Jason, Male, 21-25!
What is that all about you ask? Check it out at http://danpadua.kit.net/.
So I don't really watch many movies at home. I don't even own a DVD player yet (the reason for that is more money related vs. not actually wanting one). However, I really enjoy going to see movies at the theater. The loud surround sound systems, the big screen, the dark and the lack of conversation are all reasons why. That's not the point though. The point is that I went to see Road to Perdition last night.
Now I admit. Before I went to see it, I didn't know what the word perdition meant. Today though, I looked it up and it means utter destruction. Fitting, no? (that question will make sense once you've seen the movie)
I liked it a lot. Hanks was excellent. I enjoyed Changing Lanes a lot, and I think this movie is in the same vein. What vein is that you ask? Well, both movies are psychological dramas. They're about people who you can relate to in situations you can relate to doing things you might consider doing were you in that situation. They're about relationships and people. They're not action flicks unless you count the action in your head as you think about what they must be going through. They're movies about people for people who enjoy thinking about people.
In Perdition, Hanks plays a man who works for the mob. His son, curious as to what his father does, follows his dad and sees him murder two men. This sets up a whole series of nasty events forcing Hanks to protect his son.
The directorial style was excellent, as was the camera work. There were some really nice focus effects. Hanks had a stellar performance, even though it was difficult at first to see him in the role of a killer. On the flip-side, I could easily associate with him as a dad trying to figure out his relationship with his son. The story was tight, moved at a good pace, and kept me interested. The score was good; I'm actually considering purchasing the soundtrack. I enjoyed the movie greatly and highly recommend it.
I give Road to Perdition an A.
Daypop - a current events/weblog/news search engine
I added my site to daypop in an attempt to actually have people read this site. However, for that to happen I need to do more than just ramble on about the actual act of blogging and actually write about something that's not "dry and boring". Umm yeah... I'm thinking movie reviews and such... Stay tuned.
Well, all my old posts (few in number) have been imported into the system. Wasn't too much work. Now that almost everything is back to normal, its back to regular programming.
When it comes to video games, it seems like thats all I do: wait for the new ones to come out. I recently picked up Warcraft III (yes, I put down a deposit to reserve my copy) after waiting for it for years. Its excellent. I've wasted many hours playing it already, and I'm three fourths of the way through, meaning I have a lot of time to go.
I also learned that Nintendo will be releasing a new Mario game in August, a new metroid game in a first person shooter style shortly after that, and now much later they'll be releasing Zelda. Three stellar games in a half years time. I can't wait. Zelda rules.
A note on CSS: Just let me point out that because the layout of this site is done with CSS, I was able to "re-design" it by merely changing the contents of the stylesheet. Now that's the way the web is supposed to work.
A note on PHP: A new news group has been created: comp.lang.php. I've been hanging around there and doing my best to help out. I'm a firm believer in the power of open source projects, hence my support of Mozilla. I can program, but I'm not a *really* good programmer so the best thing I can do to help is give support to other people. Do what you can, right?
Finally, a note on XUL. I'm working through the tutorial on XUL editing at xulplanet.com. Very helpful as well as a good way to improve one's knowledge of XML, RDF, etc.
Well, the template is back to the one I had been using before; things are starting to look like they did. I found a folder today that I had downloaded from my site that contained the archive with all of my posts in it from before things got screwed up so I'll be working at putting all of those back in. I'll also be trying to remember everything I saw between when my site went down and when it came back that would have been interesting so I can put it back up. Stay tuned.
And so begins my quest to learn and conquer XUL, the language used to deign the interface of Mozilla. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute to the community while at the same time learning something. Yeah right.
I added some links to the links section of the template. They aren't an exhaustive list of sites I frequent, but it's a start. I also noticed that the template that this version of movabletype uses as its default is different from the one that the old version I had installed uses as its default. Therefore, the site does look a little different. I'll try to move it back to the way it was tonight. In the meantime, check out the links I've posted, or try catching up on Mark's month of accessibility.
Well, if you've been checking back regularly (and I know there are a few of you), you know there hasn't been much changing. That was due to some changes on my hosts side that I couldn't do anything about. In any case, its fixed now, and I'm back. I lost some of the posts from before, so everything that was here won't come back (at least there wasn't a lot of it). Some of it will, though. Please disregard the changes that will be ocurring as I put everything back to the way it was.
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